en we established our independence, we did not own or claim the
country to which this compromise applies. Indeed, strictly speaking, the
Confederacy then owned no country at all; the States respectively owned
the country within their limits, and some of them owned territory
beyond their strict State limits. Virginia thus owned the Northwestern
Territory--the country out of which the principal part of Ohio, all
Indiana, all Illinois, all Michigan, and all Wisconsin have since been
formed. She also owned (perhaps within her then limits) what has since
been formed into the State of Kentucky. North Carolina thus owned what
is now the State of Tennessee; and South Carolina and Georgia owned,
in separate parts, what are now Mississippi and Alabama. Connecticut, I
think, owned the little remaining part of Ohio, being the same where they
now send Giddings to Congress and beat all creation in making cheese.

These territories, together with the States themselves, constitute all the
country over which the Confederacy then claimed any sort of jurisdiction.
We were then living under the Articles of Confederation, which were
superseded by the Constitution several years afterward. The question of
ceding the territories to the General Government was set on foot. Mr.
Jefferson,--the author of the Declaration of Independence, and otherwise
a chief actor in the Revolution; then a delegate in Congress; afterward,
twice President; who was, is, and perhaps will continue to be, the
most distinguished politician of our history; a Virginian by birth and
continued residence, and withal a slaveholder,--conceived the idea of
taking that occasion to prevent slavery ever going into the Northwestern
Territory. He prevailed on the Virginia Legislature to adopt his views,
and to cede the Territory, making the prohibition of slavery therein
a condition of the deed. (Jefferson got only an understanding, not a
condition of the deed to this wish.) Congress accepted the cession with
the condition; and the first ordinance (which the acts of Congress were
then called) for the government of the Territory provided that slavery
should never be permitted therein. This is the famed "Ordinance of '87,"
so often spoken of.

Thenceforward for sixty-one years, and until, in 1848, the last scrap of
this Territory came into the Union as the State of Wisconsin, all parties
acted in quiet obedience to this ordinance. It is now what Jefferson
foresaw and intended--the hap