es was opening. The South--more diffusely settled, with less
social activity, with a debased labor class--caught less of the spirit
of advance. But on one line it gained. Following the English inventions
in spinning and weaving, and the utilization of the stationary
steam-engine, a Connecticut man, Eli Whitney, had invented a cotton-gin,
for separating the seed from the fibre, and the cotton plant came to the
front of the scene. The crop rose in value in twenty years from
$6,000,000 to $20,000,000. The value of slaves was trebled, and the
border States began to do a thriving trade in exporting them to the
cotton States--it was said a little later the yearly export reached
50,000.

As new States were organized and admitted, those from the Northwest came
in without slavery, which had been kept out by the ordinance of 1787,
and those from the Southwest, where slaves had been carried by the
emigrants from the seaboard, were allowed without question to retain the
institution. Of the old thirteen, New Hampshire, Massachusetts,
Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York New Jersey, Pennsylvania (spite of a
few slaves lingering in the last three) were counted as free
States--seven in all; Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, the two Carolinas,
Georgia, were claimed as slave States--six. Speedily were added Vermont
to the one column, and Kentucky and Tennessee to the other, making the
numbers equal. The following acquisitions were free and slave States
alternately: Ohio and Louisiana, Indiana and Mississippi, Illinois and
Alabama, a total, so far, of eleven free and eleven slave. Of the new
Southwestern domain, Arkansas had been organized as a territory, early
in 1819, and a motion that slavery be excluded had been defeated in the
House by the casting vote of the speaker, Henry Clay.

But in all these thirty years the subject of slavery had little
prominence in public discussion. Now it suddenly came to the front. A
bill was brought into Congress to permit Missouri to organize as a
State. It was part of the Louisiana purchase, of which the Southern
portion had inherited and retained slavery; but Missouri was
geographically an extension of the region of the Ohio States, in which
free labor had made an established and congenial home. It was moved in
Congress that slavery should be excluded from the new State, and on this
instantly sprang up a fiery debate. On one side it was urged that
slavery was a wrong and an evil, and that Congress had ful