for admission as the slave State of Missouri, the inevitable consequences of the act of 1804 became evident for the first time, and all the Northern States united to resist the admission.  The North controlled the House of Representatives, and the South the Senate; and, after a severe parliamentary struggle, the two bodies united in the compromise of 1820.  By its terms Missouri was admitted as a slave State, and slavery was forever forbidden in the rest of Louisiana Territory, north of latitude 36 deg. 30’ (the line of the southerly boundary of Missouri).  The instinct of this first struggle against slavery extension seems to have been much the same as that of 1846-60 the realization that a permission to introduce slavery by custom into the Territories meant the formation of slave States exclusively, the restriction of the free States to the district between the Mississippi and the Atlantic, and the final conversion of the mass of the United States to a policy of enslavement of labor.  But, on the surface, it was so entirely a struggle for the balance of power between the two sections, that it has not seemed worth while to introduce any of the few reported speeches of the time.  The topic is more fully and fairly discussed in the subsequent debates on the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

In 1830 William Lloyd Garrison, a Boston printer, opened the real anti-slavery struggle.  Up to this time the anti-slavery sentiment, North and South, had been content with the notion of “gradual abolition,” with the hope that the South would, in some yet unsuspected manner, be brought to the Northern policy.  This had been supplemented, to some extent, by the colonization society for colonizing negroes on the west coast of Africa; which had two aspects:  at the South it was the means of ridding the country of the free negro population; at the North it was a means of mitigating, perhaps of gradually abolishing, slavery.  Garrison, through his newspaper, the Liberator, called for “immediate abolition” of slavery, for the conversion of anti-slavery sentiment into anti-slavery purpose.  This was followed by the organization of his adherents into the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, and the active dissemination of the immediate abolition principle by tracts, newspapers, and lecturers.

The anti-slavery struggle thus begun, never ceased until, in 1865, the Liberator ceased to be published, with the final abolition of slavery.  In its inception and in all its development the movement was a distinct product of the democratic spirit.  It would not have been possible in 1790, or in 1810, or in 1820.  The man came with the hour; and every new mile of railroad or telegraph, every new district open to population, every new influence toward the growth of democracy, broadened the power as well as the field of the abolition movement.  It was but the deepening, the application to an enslaved race of laborers, of the work which Jeffersonian democracy had done, to remove the infinitely