made into the Mississippi Territory, to which Congress held out the promise that it would be admitted as a state as soon as its population numbered 60,000; but Alabama was separated from Mississippi in 1816.  The old matter of claims was not finally disposed of until an act of 1814 appropriated $5,000,000 for the purpose.  In the same year Andrew Jackson’s decisive victories over the Creeks at Talladega and Horseshoe Bend—­of which more must be said—­resulted in the cession of a vast tract of the land of that unhappy nation and thus finally opened for settlement three-fourths of the present state of Alabama.

[Footnote 1:  Phillips in The South in the Building of the Nation, II, 154.]

It was in line with the advance that slavery was making in new territory that there was passed the first Fugitive Slave Act (1793).  This grew out of the discussion incident to the seizure in 1791 at Washington, Penn., of a Negro named John, who was taken to Virginia, and the correspondence between the Governor of Pennsylvania and the Governor of Virginia with reference to the case.  The important third section of the act read as follows: 

And be it also enacted, That when a person held to labor in any of the United States, or in either of the territories on the northwest or south of the river Ohio, under the laws thereof, shall escape into any other of the said states or territory, the person to whom such labor or service may be due, his agent or attorney, is hereby empowered to seize or arrest such fugitive from labor, and to take him or her before any judge of the circuit or district courts of the United States, residing or being within the state, or before any magistrate of a county, city or town corporate, wherein such seizure or arrest shall be made, and upon proof to the satisfaction of such judge or magistrate, either by oral testimony or affidavit taken before and certified by a magistrate of any such state or territory, that the person so seized or arrested, doth, under the laws of the state or territory from which he or she fled, owe service or labor to the person claiming him or her, it shall be the duty of such judge or magistrate to give a certificate thereof to such claimant, his agent or attorney, which shall be sufficient warrant for removing the said fugitive from labor, to the state or territory from which he or she fled.

It will be observed that by the terms of this enactment a master had the right to recover a fugitive slave by proving his ownership before a magistrate without a jury or any other of the ordinary forms of law.  A human being was thus placed at the disposal of the lowest of courts and subjected to such procedure as was not allowed even in petty property suits.  A great field for the bribery of magistrates was opened up, and opportunity was given for committing to slavery Negro men about whose freedom there should have been no question.