that the final boundary on slavery had been set; that it could go no further and that it was in course of ultimate extermination.

Population was almost equally divided between the free States in 1790 (1,968,453), and the slave States (1,961,374); also in 1800 (free States, 2,684,616, slave States, 2,621,316); and again in 1810 (free States, 3,758,910, slave States, 3,480,902); but in 1820, the year of the Missouri Compromise, the free States contained a larger proportion than ever before (5,152,372, slave States, 4,485,819). It was the preponderance of the North, in 1820, together with the limitation of slave territory under the terms of the Compromise which now alarmed the South. For the first time the institution of slavery seemed in danger, not alone because of lack of population at the South as compared with that at the North, but rather because of the limitation of the area open to slavery: the acquisition of the Louisiana country had strengthened anti-slavery and the free States more than it had strengthened pro-slavery and the slave States, because of the Compromise of 1820. The only possible counterbalance was the acquisition of an area as great as the free soil area of the Louisiana Purchase and the extension of slavery over it. Partly to secure this result, though also for other and equally persuasive reasons, the two Floridas, comprising 59,268 square miles of land, were purchased from Spain in 1819; Florida was admitted a State in 1845, with slavery, and West Florida became slave soil as part of Mississippi. But the relatively late date of the admission of Florida, more than a quarter of a century after the purchase of the peninsula from Spain, intimates that other causes than the willingness to create a new slave State were operating in the country: population was moving westward from the older States, not eastward. Immigrants from the free States were demanding in 1845 the admission of Iowa and Wisconsin. Immigrants from the slave States had removed into Texas and to obtain more slave territory the Mexican War was precipitated. Texas

by joint resolution of Congress was admitted into the Union, December 29, 1845, with the understanding that it might in time be subdivided into five slave States to counterbalance an equal number of free States. That the authority of the United States must ultimately extend to the Pacific Coast became clear to thoughtful men after the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory. The region between Texas, the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Coast, comprising what was called in 1848 "Upper California," was purchased from Mexico, February second of that year, adding 522,568 square miles to the public domain. Prior to this and in the same year as the purchase of the Floridas, the United States perfected its title to the Oregon country, claiming it by right of Captain Gray's discovery of the Columbia River in 1792; by right of the exploration of the country by Lewis and Clark, in 1805; by actual settlement of the country in 1811, and by treaty with Spain, in 1819.

Thus at the conclusion of the Mexican War, in 1848, the United States extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from British America to Mexico and the Gulf. In 1853, the United States purchased the Mesilla Valley from Mexico, thus adding 45,535 square miles to its domain. The acquisition was not made for the sole purpose of gaining more land for slavery, but for the purpose of relieving the United States of an onerous duty imposed by the treaty with Mexico, of 1848, by which the United States agreed to protect Mexico from Indian incursions. There were also other reasons, one of which was the prospect of using the valley as a route of the then projected Southern Pacific railroad. Yet if it should prove inhabitable—and there was a common belief among the few who knew much about the country that it would not-it would lie in the line of migration from the slave States and it lay below the line of the Missouri Compromise. Hence, by the middle of the nineteenth century the people of the United States owned a continental domain. Gold had been discovered in California before the excitement over the Mexican War had

subsided. By the middle of the year 1849 nearly two hundred thousand men had arrived in California from various States and countries and straightway they organized a State government and petitioned Congress for admission into the Union. At this time the population of the free States, fifteen in number, was 13,599,488; that of the slave States, also fifteen in number, 9,663,997. The majority of the settlers in California were not from the slave States. Iowa and Wisconsin had recently been admitted, the first in 1846; the second two years later. According to the economics of slavery California should come in as a slave State but it rejected slavery and petitioned to enter as a free State. There were former slaveholders and supporters of slavery in the Monterey convention which framed the constitution under which California asked admission, but that constitution forbade slavery. It was not forbidden because the Californians pitied or loved the negro, or because they wished to attack slavery at the South, or to interfere with slavery in any way; slavery was forbidden in California because the men who lived there and who were laboring in the mines or elsewhere refused to put themselves in competition with slave labor. The gold miner refused to allow slave labor for the benefit of the master; labor should be free, fair, open and on equal terms. Every man should have an equal chance to gain wealth, and no man should have the advantage of the profits of slave labor. California prohibited slavery solely and strictly on economic grounds and with no thought of the negro: the new State government should be of white men, by white men and for white men, and though the attempt to exclude negroes, bond or free, failed in the convention, public opinion operated practically to exclude the negro from the State.

But the petition of California to be admitted as a free State and its admission on the ninth of September, 1850, revealed to the South and to the supporters of slavery everywhere in the United States that though there was a vast area into which slavery might lawfully be introduced, the

population of the South was not equal to the task of founding new slave States and that the population of the North was sufficient for the founding of new free States. Slavery, in 1850, suddenly discovered that it was in peril of ultimate extinction because of lack of men. The North, in 1850, outnumbered the South by nearly four million inhabitants, a resource sufficient, with the aid of foreign immigration, to found an indefinite number of free States west of the older free States. In 1820, at the time of the Missouri Compromise, the South was alarmed because it lacked land; thirty years later it was more alarmed for the institution of slavery because it lacked people. Supporters of slavery throughout the country, therefore, in 1850, made demands for its further protection and security. These demands raised and involved many issues, for in one way or another slavery was entangled with all the great issues before the country: industrial, political, social and moral.

Congressional control over slavery was not a new idea in 1850. Such control had been exercised by the enactment of the Ordinance of 1787 excluding slavery from the territory north of the Ohio; in 1820, in the Missouri Compromise; and in 1838, when Iowa territory was organized. Again, on the eighth of August, 1846, while negotiations were pending with Mexico, David Wilmot, a representative from Pennsylvania, submitted a proposition to exclude slavery forever from all soil acquired from Mexico, and his proposition was carried in committee of the whole by a vote of eighty-three to sixty-four. The measure failed in the Senate but its spirit was a sign of the times. No political party fathered the proposition. In the next Congress Calhoun demanded legislation that should declare that the Constitution and laws of the United States applicable to a Territory should be extended over the Mexican purchase, which should make that purchase slave soil. Here was a distinct issue: slavery limitation or slavery extension. The South speaking through Calhoun was demanding that the new acquisition should be opened to slavery; as yet no defined