thirty-first degree of latitude. Within five years the inhabitants applied for admission. On the 1st of March, 1817, Congress passed the act necessary for admission, and the electors in the thirteen counties chose forty-eight delegates, who assembled at Washington, and, after six weeks' labor, completed a constitution. Under this the State was admitted, on the 10th of December. A condition of the enabling act required the constitution to be republican in form, and in conformity with as much of the Ordinance of 1787 as was applicable to the Southwest. The establishment of slavery was, therefore, a condition of admission. An enabling act for Illinois passed Congress on the 18th of April, 1818; a constitutional convention met at Kaskaskia on the 26th of August, and its work was approved by the electors and by Congress. By resolution, the State was admitted on the 3d of December.

Alabama had long been a land of promise when, in 1817, it was created a Territory. It was a fair and fertile country, in which the United States had guaranteed to extinguish the Indian title. A tide of immigration poured in from the adjoining States, especially from Tennessee and Kentucky. In two years its people sought admission to the Union, and Congress responded by the act of the 2d of March, 1819, authorizing them to form a constitution and State government subject to the condition imposed on Mississippi with respect to the Ordinance of 1787. The constitutional convention completed its work on the 2d

Extension of the Ordinance of 1787

of August. On the 14th of December, Alabama became the twenty-second State in the Union, with the suggestive distinction of having been a Territory for a briefer period than any other American commonwealth.

Arkansas was given a Territorial organization in 1819, after the form of that of Missouri. As an inducement to immigration, and in response to public sentiment in the South, bounty lands granted within the Territory for military services during the war of 1812, and still held by the original patentees or their heirs, were exempted from taxation for three years from date of the patent. In 1820 the changes in the form of the Missouri government were declared by Congress to apply equally to Arkansas.

The enabling act for Missouri passed on the 6th of March, 1820, and a constitutional convention was elected early in May. Congress imposed the usual conditions-that the new constitution be republican in form and not repugnant to the Constitution of the United States, but the last section of the enabling act prescribed a new condition, destined to become epoch-making in the history of the country. In all that Territory ceded by France lying north of 36° 30', not included within the limits of the proposed State of Missouri, slavery, or involuntary servitude, other than as a punishment for crime, was forever prohibited, but fugitive slaves found there might be lawfully reclaimed. Thus the Ordinance of 1787, as applied north of the Ohio River, was extended

over the Louisiana purchase, north and west of the State of Missouri, and the greater part of the republic was thereby made free soil.

From the 12th of June till the 19th of July the convention was busy at St. Louis in forming a constitution for the new State. Among other ordinances it passed one formally declaring the assent of the people of the State of Missouri to the conditions of the enabling act. The new constitution was approved by the people, who, at the time of voting approval, had elected a State ticket and practically established a State government. The enabling act had provoked the first exhaustive discussion of slavery in Congress. The act was itself a compromise. As first submitted to Congress, the constitution of the new State directed its Legislature, as soon as possible, to exclude free persons of color from the State. The clause at once, and for the first time, raised the question whether such a provision conflicted with the national Constitution. Were these citizens of the United States? The controversy threatened to prevent the admission of the State. New York, and other States in which these persons might become electors, saw in the exclusion a direct violation of the rights of their citizens under the Constitution. By a "solemn act" the Missouri Legislature promised that the objectionable clause should never be applied to citizens from another State, and, on the 10th of August, 1821, President Monroe, who had been authorized to to admit the State upon receipt