ing the charter of the college against the will of the trustees. The principle involved here was the inviolability of contracts (Art. I, sect. 10, par. 1), the court holding that the charter of the college was a contract between the state and the trustees. The majority of the court was won to this decision by the impassioned plea of Daniel Webster in behalf of the injured dignity of his Alma Mater. Since the state legislatures were the source of innumerable charters to corporations of every kind, whose general regulation was under the police power of the state, this decision seemed to subject the various industrial, financial, educational, and public-service coporations of the country to the authority of the national judiciary. The sweeping effect of the decision was later modified by the insertion in the charters themselves of clauses giving the states the right to control corporations by legislation for the safeguarding of their moral and material interests.

Most important of all the decisions of the court in those years was that handed down in the case of McCulloch vs. Maryland in 1819 (4 Wheat. 316 ff.). The National Bank was unpopular in many quarters. The old Democratic prejudice against the Bank as a privileged corporation and an engine of plutocracy was still strong, especially in the Western states. Furthermore, the Bank had been carelessly managed during the first two years of Madison's presidency, and its disordered condition was made responsible in the minds of many for the financial panic which overtook the country in 1819, although the panic was really due to a too rapid extension of enterprise and credit in the enthusiastic years which followed the War of 1812. When the branches of the United States Bank began to demand specie for the notes of the state banks which they held, the legislatures of various states (North Carolina, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee) started a war against the National Bank by taxing the issues of its branches within their borders. In Ohio an officer of the state actually drove up to the door of the United States branch bank at Chillicothe, entered the vaults, and seized the amount of money necessary to cover the tax. In Maryland the cashier of the United States branch bank at Baltimore,

James W. McCulloch, refused to pay the tax on its notes levied by the legislature and carried his case against the state to the Supreme Court. The court unanimously agreed in the decision written by Chief Justice Marshall, which affirmed the right of Congress to incorporate a bank under the "implied" power of adopting "necessary and proper" means to carry out a legitimate end (Art. I, sect. 8, pars. 1, 2, 5, 12, 13, 18) and to establish in the states branches which should be immune from taxation except for the regular property tax on their buildings and land. "The power to tax," said Marshall, “is the power to destroy." If the states could levy a small tax on the Bank issues, they could also levy a large one and so drive the Bank out of business.

These famous decisions, maintaining the competence of the national court to interpret the extent of the powers of the national government, were alarming to the old-school Republicans, who insisted on the strict limitation of Congress to the powers explicitly granted to it by the Constitution. Jefferson, who, since his retirement from the presidency, had tended to revert to his earlier championship of states' rights and distrust of the "general government," led the attack on these "usurping" doctrines of his political enemy John Marshall. "The great object of my fear," he wrote to Thomas Rich in the year 1820, "is the federal judiciary. That body, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains, is ingulphing insidiously the special [state] governments into the jaws of that which feeds them." But the process of centralization, so obvious in the acts of Congress and the conduct of the executive, could not be stopped at the portals of the Supreme Court chamber. It was all a part of the process of expansion and nationalism traced in this section. It was the expression of the spirit of the new nation.

There were numerous other signs in our political and economic life, and even in our literary and religious life, that bore witness to the new spirit: the remodeling of state constitutions along more democratic lines, the reduction in the price of public lands, the completion of the first section of the national

Cumberland Road, the breaking down of the political and social power of the old Calvinistic orthodoxy, the beginnings of a distinctly American school of literature, the rise of a group of nationally minded statesmen and orators like Webster, Benton, Clay, Calhoun, and Everett. On April 13, 1818 (Jefferson's birthday!) our new national flag, with its thirteen alternate stripes of white and red and its twenty white stars in an azure field, was raised over the Capitol.' It was a happy symbol of the new America.

THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE AND THE MONROE DOCTRINE

The same wave of westward migration which filled the land between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi with a solid block of states in the four years succeeding the Treaty of Ghent did not stop at the banks of the great river. Timothy Flint, a trading preacher from New England, tells in his delightful "Recollections" how he stood on the heights of St. Charles on the lower Missouri in 1818 and watched the immigrants cross the ferry of the Mississippi with their "4 and 6 horse waggons," their cattle "with a hundred bells," their expectant families and excited negroes-headed for the land of boundless promise. The territory of Missouri had been organized when Louisiana was admitted to the Union in 1812. Its population of some 20,000, scattered among a score of river settlements, was a medley of French hunters and trappers, shrewd Yankee peddlers, and solid German farmers dwelling in solid stone houses. When the peace of Ghent removed the Indian danger from the frontier, the territory began to fill up rapidly. Before the close of the decade the population of 20,000 had grown to 66,500, including about 10,000 slaves brought by the farmers of Ken

1 By act of April 4, 1818, the flag designed by Betsy Ross for the thirteen states in 1777, and slightly modified in 1794, was altered to fit our growth. The act provided that a new star be added to the blue field on the Fourth of July succeeding the admission of each new state to the Union. At first the cluster of white stars was arranged in the form of a large star, but later the stars were arranged in horizontal lines.

tucky and Tennessee. Over 50 steamboats were running on the Mississippi and doing a business of $2,500,000 a year. The settlements had spread 60 miles and more up the Missouri valley to Boone's Lick, whose name celebrated the pioneer of trans-Allegheny migration. The climate was wholesome as contrasted with the malarial regions to the south. All the cereals grew in abundance, the corn yielding 90 bushels to the acre. The southern part of the territory was suitable for cotton culture. Deposits of lead and salt were worked with profit.

In March, 1818, the enterprising people of the Missouri territory presented to Congress through their delegate, John Scott, a petition praying for admission to the Union as a state. The matter went over to the next session of Congress, where a similar petition was read on December 18, 1818. The following February the House began the debate on the petition, and James Tallmadge of New York precipitated the famous Missouri controversy by offering an amendment "that the further introduction of slavery or involuntary servitude be prohibited, except for the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, and that all children born within the said state after the admission thereof into the Union shall be free, but may be held to service until the age of twenty-five years." The House, "after an interesting and pretty wide debate," adopted the Tallmadge amendment by a vote of 87 to 76, but the Senate rejected it. The House refused to recede from its position, and the Fifteenth Congress expired, March 3, 1819, with the two Houses in deadlock on the question of slavery in the proposed new state of Missouri, but with little surmise that they had exchanged the first shots in a conflict which was to plunge the country into civil war.

Negro slavery had been introduced into the colony of Jamestown in 1619. The few thousand slaves brought over in the seventeenth century to work in the tobacco and rice fields of Virginia and the Carolinas, or to serve as coachmen and butlers in the families of the rich merchants of the North, seem to have been no cause of offense except to the little group of Quakers or to a sensitive philanthropist here and there. But the eight

eenth century saw a great change in the attitude of the colonists toward slavery. A clause in the Treaty of Utrecht (the "Asiento") gave to England the monopoly of the slave trade from the shores of Africa to the Spanish colonies of the New World (1713). There was an unlimited market on the Guinea coast for the rum distilled in New England, and there was an unlimited supply of sugar and molasses in the West Indies for the manufacture of more rum. The unoffending African served as the medium of exchange in the profitable transaction. Sold by their captor chiefs for rum, they were packed into the stifling holds of wooden vessels and brought through the equatorial seas to the West Indies, with all the horrors of the "middle passage." Rich merchants, high nobles, and even members of the royal family were interested in this nefarious traffic. The stimulus of greed, added to the natural development of our plantations, forced the rate of slave importation higher and higher. Several times during the eighteenth century the legislatures of the Southern colonies, notably of Virginia, under the double impetus of humanitarian sentiment and concern for the increasing growth of an unassimilable element in their population, passed laws restricting the importation of African negroes, but the crown of England vetoed these laws. "We cannot allow the colonies," said Lord Dartmouth in 1774, "to check or discourage in any degree a traffic so beneficial to the nation." On the eve of the American Revolution there were more than half a million slaves in the colonies;1 and how seriously the colonies then regarded the traffic is shown by the resolution of the first Continental Congress in October, 1774, to the effect that no more slaves should be imported after December, and that whoever broke this resolution should be "universally condemned as an enemy of American liberty." It is well known, too, that Thomas Jefferson, in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, included among the grievances against King George a scathing indictment of his

1Our first census. of 1790, gives the number of slaves as 697,897, of whom 40,370 were north of Mason and Dixon's line "Of the 657,527 in the South the states of Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas held 604,129.