of Illinois into the Union, passed by Congress in 1818, required that the Constitution and State government to be formed, "shall be republican and not repugnant to the Ordinance of 1787."

The Ordinance of 1787, the Act of Congress of 1809, establishing the Territory of Illinois, and this Enabling Act of 1818, saved our own State of Illinois from becoming a slave state; for slavery, without such barrier, had already taken possession of the Territory directly west of us.

In 1803 we purchased from France the Province of Louisiana, which extended from the Gulf of Mexico to the British possessions and from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. In March, 1818, the inhabitants of the Territory of Missouri, a portion of the Louisiana Purchase, applied for admission into the Union. Nearly all of this Territory lay directly west of the free State of Illinois, the Southern boundary being but a short distance farther south than Cairo, and the Northern boundary being as far north as Bloomington.

For two years the halls of Congress were the scenes of angry debates as to whether Missouri should be admitted as a free or a slave State. The bitter struggle was ended for a time by an Act of Congress, passed March 6, 1820, which enabled Missouri to be admitted as a slave State, and provided: "That in all that territory ceded by France to the United States, under the name of Louisiana, which lies north of thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes north latitude, not included within the limits of the State contemplated by this Act, slavery and involuntary servitude, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes, whereof the parties shall have been duly convicted, shall be and is hereby forever prohibited.”

This Act of Congress was known as the Missouri Compromise. It was confined to the territory purchased from France. It prohibited slavery in that portion of the Louisiana Purchase which was west and north of Missouri, and allowed it to go into the portion which was south of Missouri.

This Compromise was proposed by one of the Senators

from Illinois and voted for by both of them. The two Senators were Jesse B. Thomas (who proposed it) and Ninian Edwards.

In January, 1854, the Chairman of the Committee on Territories introduced in the Senate of the United States a Bill for the organization, out of that territory from which slavery had been excluded by the Missouri Compromise, of two new Territories to be named Kansas and Nebraska. The Bill as finally amended, declared that the Missouri Compromise was "inoperative and void." The Bill was discussed in Congress for four months. It was passed by the House, May 22, and by the Senate, May 25, 1854.

The repeal of the Missouri Compromise the removal of a barrier against slavery, which had stood from 1820 to 1854was attempted to be justified on two inconsistent grounds.

The Southern advocates of the repeal claimed that the slavery restriction in the Compromise of 1820 was unconstitutional-that the Constitution of the United States gave to the citizens of a slave State the right to take their slaves into any part of the common territory of the United States, and hold them there as property-that their right to do this was equal to the right of the citizens of a free State to take and hold there their horses or any other kind of property. Said Senator Toombs, of Georgia:

"The Bill leaves with the people of the Territories all the power over their domestic institutions which the Constitution permits them to exercise. The Bill repeals an Act which excluded the people of the slave-holding States from the equal enjoyment of the common territory of the Republic."

The Northern advocates of the repeal based their arguments on what they called "The principle of popular sovereignty." Said Senator Cass, of Michigan:

"I have made the doctrine of non-intervention, or, in other words, the right of self-government of American citizens, so far as it is not controlled by the Constitution, one of the principal reasons for the adoption of this measure."

He said that by the term, "popular sovereignty" he meant,

"the right of the people to regulate their local and domestic affairs in their own way."

From the day of its introduction in the Senate, the KansasNebraska Bill had been debated almost continuously for over four months, and then on the day of its final passage, the leading Senators who had, throughout that long debate, fought against the advancement of slavery into the territory consecrated to freedom by the Missouri Compromise-the Senator from Ohio, Salmon P. Chase; the Senator from New York, William H. Seward, and the Senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner during the closing hours of that fateful day, spoke unavailing, solemn, almost prophetic words, expressive of their intense solicitude for the great and precious interests imperilled by that Bill-intense solicitude for the peace and even existence of the Union.

Lincoln, in his brief Autobiography, written at the request of Jesse Fell, here in Bloomington, "at a desk in the old court room," says:

"In 1846 I was once elected to the Lower House of Congress-was not a candidate for reëlection. From 1849 to 1854, both inclusive, practised law more assiduously than ever before. Always a Whig in politics; and generally on the Whig electoral tickets, making active canvasses. I was losing interest in politics when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again."

We are now prepared to understand fully what was the cause that aroused and brought together, in Major's Hall on the twenty-ninth day of May, 1856, so many of the great men of the free State of Illinois.

The cause can be stated in one word-freedom-the preservation of free soil for free men in all that territory which stretches from the west line of the State of Missouri to the Rocky Mountains, and extends northward to the Dominion of Canada. It was declared in the Resolution of the Convention, which resolved:

"That the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was unwise, unjust, and injurious .. and that we will strive by all constitutional means, to secure to Kansas and Nebraska the legal guarantee against

slavery, of which they were deprived at the cost of the violation of the plighted faith of the nation."

This Resolution was drawn by Lincoln. It was the text of his great speech in Major's Hall-it was the text of all his political speeches. No one has been able to reproduce from memory the line of his argument, still less his forceful eloquence, on that occasion. This is not strange.

Some of you, now here, have heard in this city, as I have, able political speeches made by James G. Blaine, Benjamin Harrison, Lyman Trumbull, John A. Logan, Richard J. Oglesby, John M. Palmer, Owen Lovejoy, Robert G. Ingersoll, Leonard Swett, and Lawrence Weldon, yet I venture to say that none of you can, to-day, state the line of any one of those speeches.

But from Lincoln's other speeches-always on the same text-can be formed some idea of the clear statements of facts and principles, the convincing logic, the impressive manner, the power and eloquence of his Major's Hall speech.

Some of you, as I did, heard Lincoln speak in the Court House Square on the afternoon of September 4, 1858. The proceedings on that day were reported in the Weekly Pantagraph of September 8. Let me recall to your memory the long procession, formed under the direction of William McCullough, Chief Marshal, and Ward H. Lamon, Charles Schneider, James O'Donald, and Henry J. Eager, Assistant Marshals. You saw that procession march to the residence of Judge Davis, there receive Lincoln, and then counter-march down Washington Street to the public square.

You saw the banners bearing these mottoes, "Our country, our whole country and nothing but our country"; "The Union-it must be preserved"; "Freedom is national—slavery is sectional"; "Honor to the honest. God defend the right."

You then saw above the north door of the old brick Court House the representation of a ship in a storm and underneath the words, "Don't give up the ship—give her a new pilot."

The ship came safely into port, and now-this moment

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Facsimile of Manuscript Tribute from Hon. Clark E. Carr, of Galesburg, Illinois. (First two pages)