Two years later, the pioneers of Illinois, also settled upward from the Ohio, like Indiana, elected their delegates to draft a constitution.  Leadership in the convention, quite properly, was taken by a man born in New York and reared in Tennessee; and the constitution as finally drafted “was in its principal provisions a copy of the then existing constitutions of Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana....  Many of the articles are exact copies in wording although differently arranged and numbered.”

=Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.=—­Across the Mississippi to the far south, clearing and planting had gone on with much bustle and enterprise.  The cotton and sugar lands of Louisiana, opened by French and Spanish settlers, were widened in every direction by planters with their armies of slaves from the older states.  New Orleans, a good market and a center of culture not despised even by the pioneer, grew apace.  In 1810 the population of lower Louisiana was over 75,000.  The time had come, said the leaders of the people, to fulfill the promise made to France in the treaty of cession; namely, to grant to the inhabitants of the territory statehood and the rights of American citizens.  Federalists from New England still having a voice in Congress, if somewhat weaker, still protested in tones of horror.  “I am compelled to declare it as my deliberate opinion,” pronounced Josiah Quincy in the House of Representatives, “that if this bill [to admit Louisiana] passes, the bonds of this Union are virtually dissolved ... that as it will be the right of all, so it will be the duty of some [states] to prepare definitely for a separation; amicably if they can, violently if they must....  It is a death blow to the Constitution.  It may afterwards linger; but lingering, its fate will, at no very distant period, be consummated.”  Federalists from New York like those from New England had their doubts about the wisdom of admitting Western states; but the party of Jefferson and Madison, having the necessary majority, granted the coveted statehood to Louisiana in 1812.

When, a few years later, Mississippi and Alabama knocked at the doors of the union, the Federalists had so little influence, on account of their conduct during the second war with England, that spokesmen from the Southwest met a kindlier reception at Washington.  Mississippi, in 1817, and Alabama, in 1819, took their places among the United States of America.  Both of them, while granting white manhood suffrage, gave their constitutions the tone of the old East by providing landed qualifications for the governor and members of the legislature.