" [Laughter.] Well, now, that argument must be answered, for
it has a little grain of truth at the bottom. I do not mean that it is
true in essence, as he would have us believe. It could not be essentially
true if the Ordinance of '87 was valid. But, in point of fact, there were
some degraded beings called slaves in Kaskaskia and the other French
settlements when our first State constitution was adopted; that is a
fact, and I don't deny it. Slaves were brought here as early as 1720, and
were kept here in spite of the Ordinance of 1787 against it. But slavery
did not thrive here. On the contrary, under the influence of the
ordinance the number decreased fifty-one from 1810 to 1820; while under
the influence of squatter sovereignty, right across the river in
Missouri, they increased seven thousand two hundred and eleven in the
same time; and slavery finally faded out in Illinois, under the influence
of the law of freedom, while it grew stronger and stronger in Missouri,
under the law or practice of "popular sovereignty." In point of fact
there were but one hundred and seventeen slaves in Illinois one year
after its admission, or one to every four hundred and seventy of its
population; or, to state it in another way, if Illinois was a slave State
in 1820, so were New York and New Jersey much greater slave States from
having had greater numbers, slavery having been established there in very
early times.
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