e other. It was not climate or soil that mused one side of
the line to be entirely covered with slavery, and the other side free of
it. What was it? Study over it. Tell us, if you can, in all the range
of conjecture, if there be anything you can conceive of that made that
difference, other than that there was no law of any sort keeping it out of
Kentucky, while the Ordinance of '87 kept it out of Ohio. If there is any
other reason than this, I confess that it is wholly beyond my power to
conceive of it. This, then, I offer to combat the idea that that Ordinance
has never made any State free.

I don't stop at this illustration. I come to the State of Indiana; and
what I have said as between Kentucky and Ohio, I repeat as between
Indiana and Kentucky: it is equally applicable. One additional argument
is applicable also to Indiana. In her Territorial condition she more than
once petitioned Congress to abrogate the Ordinance entirely, or at least
so far as to suspend its operation for a time, in order that they should
exercise the "popular sovereignty" of having slaves if they wanted them.
The men then controlling the General Government, imitating the men of the
Revolution, refused Indiana that privilege. And so we have the evidence
that Indiana supposed she could have slaves, if it were not for that
Ordinance; that she besought Congress to put that barrier out of the way;
that Congress refused to do so; and it all ended at last in Indiana being
a free State. Tell me not then that the Ordinance of '87 had nothing to do
with making Indiana a free State, when we find some men chafing against,
and only restrained by, that barrier.

Come down again to our State of Illinois. The great Northwest Territory,
including Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, was acquired
first, I believe, by the British Government, in part at least, from the
French. Before the establishment of our independence it became a part
of Virginia, enabling Virginia afterward to transfer it to the General
Government. There were French settlements in what is now Illinois, and at
the same time there were French settlements in what is now Missouri, in
the tract of country that was not purchased till about 1803. In these
French settlements negro slavery had existed for many years, perhaps more
than a hundred; if not as much as two hundred years,--at Kaskaskia, in
Illinois, and at St. Genevieve, or Cape Girardeau, perhaps, in Missouri.
The number of sla