KANSAS. 43 precedent of Michigan and other States, and acting in accordance with the constitutional exposition of General Jackson and other eminent cotemporaneous statesmen, as to their rights, met in convention, formed a State constitution, and now present their action for the approval of Congress. Does the constitution presented meet the approval and sense of the people to be affected by it ? If so, is it expedient, under all the circumstances, to grant their application at this time? A proper solution of these questions requires a brief review of the history of Kansas. An act of Congress for the organization of the Territorial government of Kansas was passed May 30, 1854. The passage of this bill inaugurated a new policy in the settlement of our unoccupied territories. For the first time in the history of the government a restriction on the extension of slavery was stricken from the statute-book. The policy in reference to the Territories introduced by the fathers of the republic, and continued by the uniform action of the government for more than sixty years, was to exclude slavery from all territory where it had not an actual existence, and to regulate and even restrict it where it had. On the 13th of July, 1787, the Congress of the confederation declared, in the language of the proviso offered by Jefferson in 1784, that in all the territory northwest of the river Ohio, “there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, otherwise than in punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” At the first session of Congress after the adoption of the constitution, this ordinance, which covered every foot of territory then owned by the federal government, was, by a unanimous vote, recognised and continued in force by act of Congress approved by Washington. On the 7th of April, 1798, Mississippi was organized into a temporary government out of territory ceded by South Carolina and Georgia, both slaveholding States. Yet the importation of slaves therein, from any place without the limits of the United States, was prohibited under penalty of three hundred dollars, and the freedom of the slave. This restriction on slavery in a slaveholding territory, ten years before Congress was permitted by the constitution to prevent the importation of slaves into the States, passed without a division in either house, and was approved by John Adams. During his administration Indiana was organized into a Territory, and slavery prohibited therein. On the 26th of March, 1804, the Territory of Orleans, now the State of Louisiana, was organized out of a part of the Louisiana purchase, over the whole of which the French law of slavery extended. Yet Congress prohibited the introduction of any slaves into the Territory from any place without the limits of the United States, or that had been imported since the first of May, 1798 ; and provided, in addi tion, that no slaves should be taken into the Territory from any place except by a citizen of the United States removing into said Territory for actual settlement, and being at the time of such removal bona-jiae owner of such slaves. The penalty for a violation of either one of
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