nts, packs of
hunting-dogs, and trains of slaves, their nightly camp-fires lighting
up the wilderness where so recently the Indian hunter had held
possession--occasionally settled in southern Indiana or Illinois and
with the connivance of the authorities kept some of their dependents in
slavery, or quasi-slavery, for decades.

Of actual slaveholders there were not enough to influence public
sentiment greatly. But the people of Southern extraction, although
neither slave holders nor desiring to become such, had no strong moral
convictions on the subject. Indeed, they were likely to feel that the
anti-slavery restriction imposed an unfortunate impediment in the way of
immigration from the South. Hence the persistent demand of citizens
of Indiana and Illinois for a relaxation of the drastic prohibition of
slavery in the Ordinance of 1787. In 1796 Congress was petitioned from
Kaskaskia to extend relief; in 1799 the territorial Legislature was
urged to bring about a repeal; in 1802 an Indiana territorial convention
at Vincennes memorialized Congress in behalf of a suspension of the
proviso for a period of ten years. Not only were violations of the law
winked at, but both Indiana and Illinois deliberately built up a system
of indenture which partook strongly of the characteristics of slavery.
After much controversy, Indiana, in 1816, framed a state constitution
which reiterated the language of the Northwest Ordinance, but without
invalidating titles to existing slave property; while Illinois was
admitted to the Union in 1818 with seven or eight hundred slaves upon
her soil, and with a constitution which continued the old system of
indenture with slight modification.

In a heated contest in Illinois in 1824 over the question of calling a
state convention to draft a constitution legalizing slavery the people
of Northern antecedents made their votes tell and defeated the project.
But, like other parts of the Northwest, this State never became a unit
on the slavery issue. Certainly it never became abolitionist. By
an almost unanimous vote the Legislature, in 1837, adopted joint
resolutions which condemned abolitionism as "more productive of evil
than of moral and political good"; and in Congress in the preceding
year the delegation of the State had given solid support to the "gag
resolutions," which were intended to deny a hearing to all petitions on
the slavery question.

Throughout the great era of slavery controversy the No