Come down again to our State of Illinois.  The great Northwest Territory, including Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, was acquired first, I believe, by the British Government, in part at least, from the French.  Before the establishment of our independence it became a part of Virginia, enabling Virginia afterward to transfer it to the General Government.  There were French settlements in what is now Illinois, and at the same time there were French settlements in what is now Missouri, in the tract of country that was not purchased till about 1803.  In these French settlements negro slavery had existed for many years, perhaps more than a hundred; if not as much as two hundred years,—­at Kaskaskia, in Illinois, and at St. Genevieve, or Cape Girardeau, perhaps, in Missouri.  The number of slaves was not very great, but there was about the same number in each place.  They were there when we acquired the Territory.  There was no effort made to break up the relation of master and slave, and even the Ordinance of 1787 was not so enforced as to destroy that slavery in Illinois; nor did the Ordinance apply to Missouri at all.

What I want to ask your attention to; at this point, is that Illinois and Missouri came into the Union about the same time, Illinois in the latter part of 1818, and Missouri, after a struggle, I believe sometime in 1820.  They had been filling up with American people about the same period of time; their progress enabling them to come into the Union about the same time.  At the end of that ten years, in which they had been so preparing (for it was about that period of time), the number of slaves in Illinois had actually decreased; while in Missouri, beginning with very few, at the end of that ten years there were about ten thousand.  This being so, and it being remembered that Missouri and Illinois are, to a certain extent, in the same parallel of latitude, that the northern half of Missouri and the southern half of Illinois are in the same parallel of latitude, so that climate would have the same effect upon one as upon the other, and that in the soil there is no material difference so far as bears upon the question of slavery being settled upon one or the other,—­there being none of those natural causes to produce a difference in filling them, and yet there being a broad difference to their filling up, we are led again to inquire what was the cause of that difference.

It is most natural to say that in Missouri there was no law to keep that country from filling up with slaves, while in Illinois there was the Ordinance of The Ordinance being there, slavery decreased during that ten years; the Ordinance not being in the other, it increased from a few to ten thousand.  Can anybody doubt the reason of the difference?

I think all these facts most abundantly prove that my friend Judge Douglas’s proposition, that the Ordinance of ’87, or the national restriction of slavery, never had a tendency to make a free State, is a fallacy,—­a proposition without the shadow or substance of truth about it.