ent Jefferson "will find means to
overreach the evil attempts of the pro-slavery party." Early in the
year 1806 the Vincennes memorial was introduced into Congress for the
third time and again favorably reported from committee, but to no
avail. It was about this time, as we learn from his diary, that Mr.
Lemen "sent a messenger to Indiana to ask the churches and people
there to get up and sign a counter petition, to uphold freedom in the
Territory," circulating a similar petition in Illinois himself.[15]

A fourth attempt to bring the proposal before Congress was made in
January, 1807, in a formal communication from the Governor and
Territorial Legislature. The proposal was a third time favorably
reported by the committee of reference, but still without action by
the House. Finally, in November of the same year, President Jefferson
transmitted to Congress similar communications from the Indiana
government. This time the committee reported that "the citizens of
Clark county [in which was located the first Baptist church organized
in Indiana], in their remonstrance, express their sense of the
impropriety of the measure"; and that they also requested Congress not
to act upon the subject until the people had an opportunity to
formulate a State Constitution[16]. Commenting upon the whole
proceedings, Dr. Peck quotes Gov. Harrison to the effect that, though
he and Lemen were firm friends, the latter "had set his iron will
against slavery, and indirectly made his influence felt so strongly at
Washington and before Congress, that all the efforts to suspend the
anti-slavery clause in the Ordinance of 1787 failed."[17] Peck adds
that President Jefferson "quietly directed his leading confidential
friends in Congress steadily to defeat Gen. Harrison's petitions for
the repeal."[17]

It was about this time, September 10, 1807, that President Jefferson
thus expressed his estimate of James Lemen's services, in his letter
to Robert Lemen: "His record in the new country has fully justified my
course in inducing him to settle there with the view of properly
shaping events in the best interest of the people."[18] It was during
this period of the Indiana agitation for the introduction of slavery,
{p.16} as we learn from an entry in his diary dated September 10,
1806, that Mr. Lemen received a call from an agent of Aaron Burr to
solicit his aid and sympathy in Burr's scheme for a southwestern
empire, with Illinois as a Province, and an of