the full rights of the original States.  Within all the Territories, while they remained under its jurisdiction it lay with Congress to determine whether slavery should be lawful or not, and, when any portion of them was ripe for admission to the Union as a State, Congress could insist that the new State’s Constitution should or should not prohibit slavery.  When the Constitution of the Union was being settled, slavery was the subject of most careful compromise; but in any union formed between slave States and free, a bitter root of controversy must have remained, and the opening through which controversy actually returned was provided by the Territories.

On all other matters the makers of the Constitution had in the highest temper of statesmanship found a way round seemingly insuperable difficulties.  The whole attitude of “the fathers” towards slavery is a question of some consequence to a biographer of Lincoln, and we shall return to it in a little while.

2. Territorial Expansion.

A machine of government had been created, and we are shortly to consider how it was got to work.  But the large dominion to be governed had to be settled, and its area was about to undergo an enormous expansion.  It will be convenient at this point to mark the stages of this development.

The thirteen Colonies had, when they first revolted, definite western boundaries, the westernmost of them reaching back from the sea-board to a frontier in the Alleghany Mountains.  But at the close of the war Great Britain ceded to the United States the whole of the inland country up to the Mississippi River.  Virginia had in the meantime effectively colonised Kentucky to the west of her, and for a time this was treated as within her borders.  In a similar way Tennessee had been settled from North and South Carolina and was treated as part of the former.  Virginia had also established claims by conquest north of the Ohio River in what was called the North-West Territory, but these claims and all similar claims of particular States in unsettled or half-settled territory were shortly before or shortly after the adoption of the Constitution ceded to the Union Government.  But the dominions of that Government soon received a vast accession.  In 1803, by a brave exercise of the Constitutional powers which he was otherwise disposed to restrict jealously, President Jefferson bought from Napoleon I. the great expanse of country west of the Mississippi called Louisiana.  This region in the extreme south was no wider than the present State of Louisiana, but further north it widened out so as to take in the whole watershed of the Missouri and its tributaries, including in the extreme north nearly all the present State of Montana.  In 1819 Florida was purchased from Spain, and that country at the same time abandoned its claims to a strip of coastland which now forms the sea-board of Alabama and Mississippi.