promise made to
France in the treaty of cession; namely, to grant to the inhabitants of
the territory statehood and the rights of American citizens. Federalists
from New England still having a voice in Congress, if somewhat weaker,
still protested in tones of horror. "I am compelled to declare it as my
deliberate opinion," pronounced Josiah Quincy in the House of
Representatives, "that if this bill [to admit Louisiana] passes, the
bonds of this Union are virtually dissolved ... that as it will be the
right of all, so it will be the duty of some [states] to prepare
definitely for a separation; amicably if they can, violently if they
must.... It is a death blow to the Constitution. It may afterwards
linger; but lingering, its fate will, at no very distant period, be
consummated." Federalists from New York like those from New England had
their doubts about the wisdom of admitting Western states; but the party
of Jefferson and Madison, having the necessary majority, granted the
coveted statehood to Louisiana in 1812.

When, a few years later, Mississippi and Alabama knocked at the doors of
the union, the Federalists had so little influence, on account of their
conduct during the second war with England, that spokesmen from the
Southwest met a kindlier reception at Washington. Mississippi, in 1817,
and Alabama, in 1819, took their places among the United States of
America. Both of them, while granting white manhood suffrage, gave their
constitutions the tone of the old East by providing landed
qualifications for the governor and members of the legislature.

=Missouri.=--Far to the north in the Louisiana purchase, a new
commonwealth was rising to power. It was peopled by immigrants who came
down the Ohio in fleets of boats or crossed the Mississippi from
Kentucky and Tennessee. Thrifty Germans from Pennsylvania, hardy farmers
from Virginia ready to work with their own hands, freemen seeking
freemen's homes, planters with their slaves moving on from worn-out
fields on the seaboard, came together in the widening settlements of the
Missouri country. Peoples from the North and South flowed together,
small farmers and big planters mingling in one community. When their
numbers had reached sixty thousand or more, they precipitated a contest
over their admission to the union, "ringing an alarm bell in the night,"
as Jefferson phrased it. The favorite expedient of compromise with
slavery was brought forth in Congress once more. Main