All of these
events, as we are soon to learn, had a direct bearing on slavery, and that
was the great question of the day.
Up to the Revolution there was slavery in all the thirteen colonies. Some
of them wished to get rid of it; but England, the mother country, would
not allow them to do so, because she profited by the trade in slaves.
After the Revolution, however, when the States were free to do as they
pleased about slavery, some put an end to it on their own soil, and in
time Pennsylvania and the States to the north and east of it became free
States.
Many people then believed that slavery would by degrees die out of the
land, and perhaps this would have happened if the growing of cotton had
not been made profitable by Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton-gin.
After that invention came into use, instead of slavery's dying out, it
took a much stronger hold upon the planters of the South than it had ever
done before.
This fact became very evident when Missouri applied for admission into the
Union. The South, of course, wished it to come into the Union as a slave
State; the North, fearing the extension of slavery into the Louisiana
Purchase, was equally set upon its coming in as a free State.
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