Forebodings of the Struggle for Secession

Similar civil changes had meanwhile gone on in the Northwest. In 1818 the people of Illinois were authorized to form a constitution. A landgrant was made like that to Indiana. The portion of the Territory north of the present boundary was attached to Michigan. On the 3d of December the State was admitted. Thus the four new States came into the Union in pairs-Indiana and Mississippi, Illinois and Alabama.

Within five years from the organization of the Territory of Orleans its people asked for admission, and Congress acceded by passing an enabling act in 1811. The conditions imposed on Mississippi and Alabama were renewed and complied with, and the State of Louisiana admitted on the eighth day of April following. It was the first State in the recent acquisition, and its admission precipitated an ominous debate, in which there were strong assertions of State sovereignty and some mutterings of secession. A few days later all territory north of the new State was organized as Missouri. Its Territorial government was more liberal than that given to the Northwest twentyfive years before. Members of the House were required to be freeholders-a qualification which, in practice, though not by law, was exacted of the Territorial officials generally. After 1816 the sessions of the Legislature were made biennial—an innovation in Territorial matters.

The people of the nine counties of Massachusetts constituting the District of Maine had been agitating separation for several years, when, in 1816, de

sire took the form of a convention, which assembled on September 29th, at Brunswick. Most of the Federalists were opposed to separation. Three years of political agitation followed; Massachusetts assented to separation; a convention assembled at Portland and submitted a constitution to the electors of Maine. It was ratified, was approved by Massachusetts, and on the 3d of March, 1820, the State was admitted.

While the people in the Northwest were making these changes, those in the Southwest were similarly engaged. Congress organized the Territory of Arkansas in 1819, with a government like that of Missouri. To induce immigration, bounty lands for military service during the war of 1812 which were still held by the original patentees or their heirs, were exempted from taxation for three years from date of issue. The laws of Missouri were extended over Arkansas.

Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana had long been complaining of the escape of runaway slaves into the Floridas. Partly because of the weakness of Spain, but principally in compliance with the wishes of the pro-slavery element in the Union, Congress early in 1811 passed a resolution that the United States could not, without serious disquietude, see any part of the Floridas pass into the hands of a foreign power, and on the same day authorized the President to take possession of East Florida. A month later it authorized him to take possession of West Florida. Though the peninsula was thus converted into a military

Spain Sells Florida

possession of the United States, Congress declared that it should be subject to future negotiation. No act of Congress was ever more popular along the Southern frontier than this one. Remonstrance by Spain was useless. It could do no more than sell a possession already practically in permanent military possession of the United States. On the twenty-second day of February, 1819, a treaty was made by which Spain relinquished all claim to the Floridas and to the Louisiana country. The consideration was five millions of dollars and the assumption of certain claims, which proved eventually to amount to a million and a half more. was this treaty that defined the western boundaries of the Louisiana country; but influences were already at work which, in a quarter of a century, left the sea-coast of Florida the only part of our national boundary fixed by this treaty. Portions of it now constitute the boundaries, in part, of thirteen commonwealths.

It

St. Louis, the principal city on the Mississippi, lay at the confluence of streams of population from the East. Before the Territory of Missouri was in its eighth year its people were seeking admission. On the 6th of March, 1820, Congress passed an enabling act, with a more generous grant of lands for school purposes than that made to Indiana. Four sections were granted as a site for the seat of government—the first grant of the kind. A condition found in later enabling acts was for the first time imposed-that the constitution of the State be republican in form, “and not

repugnant to the Constitution of the United States." It was with the latter part of this condition that the Missouri constitution conflicted and for a time delayed the admission of the State. For the first time the question was raised whether slavery should be permitted west of the Mississippi and north of Louisiana. It was settled by applying the sixth article of the Ordinance of 1787 to the portion north of 36° 30', and admitting Missouri with a pro-slavery constitution.* As originally defined, the western boundary of the State was a meridian line, and did not include the triangle in the northwest, about equal in area to Delaware. This was annexed to Missouri in 1836, in defiance of the compromise of 1820.

With the organization of the Territory of Florida, in 1822, the public domain passed wholly into the hands of civil authority. In less than forty years from the day when the independence of the United States was recognized, population had overspread more than a thousand miles of the Western country. Nine commonwealths had arisen in a region which, in 1781, was in the possession of hostile tribes. The West was now greater than the East. New issues had arisen in the nation. New States and old were confronted by new social and economic problems, in the settlement

* On the 26th of June, 1821, by a "solemn public act," the Missouri Legislature complied with the conditions of the enabling act, that the objectionable clauses in the State constitution should never be construed so as to violate rights guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States.

The Domination of Western Ideas

of which the constitutions of the eighteenth century gave little help. Consequently the constitutions of the new commonwealths contained innovations, chief of which were changes in the basis of representation, in the franchise, in the method of securing public officials, in provisions for public schools, colleges, and universities, and in the distribution of the functions of government among the departments. The constitutions, like the people of the new States, were more democratic in character than those of the East. The new organic laws of the West were a wave of constitutions. Those of the eighteenth century comprised the first, these the second, on the great sea of American democracy. The influence of ideas dominant in the West was reflected and felt in New York and Massachusetts, in Connecticut and New Jersey, in Maryland and Georgia. These older States were discussing, if not adopting, reforms in the basis and the apportionment of representation, reforms in the franchise, and, to a less extent, in the organization of the administrative, or, as it may now be called, the civil service. Government by property was giving place to government by persons.