[Footnote: For previous questions of slavery, see Channing,
Jeffersonian System (Am. Nation, XII.), chap. viii.] By 1819 the
various states of the north, under favorable conditions of climate
and industrial life, had either completely extinguished slavery or
were in the process of emancipation [Footnote: See map, p. 6.] and
by the Ordinance of 1787 the old Congress had excluded the
institution in the territory north of the Ohio River. Thus Mason and
Dixon's line and the Ohio made a boundary between the slave-holding
and the free streams of population that flowed into the Mississippi
Valley. Not that this line was a complete barrier: the Ordinance of
1787 was not construed to free the slaves already in the old French
towns of the territory; and many southern masters brought their
slaves into Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois by virtue of laws which
provided for them under the fiction of indented servants. [Footnote:
Harris, Negro Servitude in Ill., 10; Durm, Indiana, chaps. ix., x.]
Indeed, several efforts were made in the territory of Indiana at the
beginning of the nineteenth century to rescind the prohibition of
1787; but to this petition Congress, under the strange leadership of
John Randolph, gave a negative; [Footnote: Ibid.
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