Mass-meetings in
the northern states took up the agitation, and various state
legislatures, including Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Ohio,
and even the slave state of Delaware, passed resolutions with
substantial unanimity against the further introduction of slaves
into the territories of the United States, and against the admission
of new slave states. Pennsylvania, so long the trusted ally of the
south, invoked her sister states "to refuse to covenant with crime"
by spreading the "cruelties of slavery, from the banks of the
Mississippi to the shores of the Pacific." From the south came
equally insistent protests against restriction. [Footnote: Niles'
Register, XVII., 296, 307, 334, 342-344, 395. 399. 400, 416; Ames,
State Docs. on Federal Relations, No. 5, p. 4.]
No argument in the debate in 1819 was more effective than the speech
of Rufus King in the Senate, which was widely circulated as a
campaign document expressing the northern view. King's antislavery
attitude, shown as early as 1785, when he made an earnest fight to
secure the exclusion of slavery from the territories, [Footnote:
McLaughlin, Confederation and Constitution (Am.
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