the community. The Methodist or Baptist frontier minister had perhaps half a dozen little churches on his hands, and "rode circuit" from hamlet to hamlet, preaching, baptizing, burying, organizing churches, and, if necessary, threatening rowdies who undertook to disturb the meeting. One of the favorite occupations of the time was to go to camp meeting, which was a combination of picnic, summer resort, and religious exercise, where people took household furniture, children, dogs, and psalm books. If the ministers roared and the converts shrieked, foamed at the mouth, and fell in convulsions, we must remember that such exaggerated experience often aroused and turned to better ways rough but powerful natures that could not be reached by milder means.

For education in the Northwest early provision was made. Each settlement soon had its common school, and out of land reserved by the Northwest Ordinance, and private contributions, arose in a few years half a dozen little colleges. In 1830 two western magazines were started: Hall's Illinois Magazine and Flint's Western Monthly Review.

248. New communi

ties

Next to religion, politics was the most interesting topic in the West. Local parties very quickly were merged in the general national parties; elections were lively, and about 1800 was introduced the practice of "stump speaking," or open-air addresses to a series of popular meetings. The western states led in a movement for the suffrage of all adult white men and for elective judges. In politics and in social life the most influential man in a village was the storekeeper, who was often also distiller, country banker, real estate dealer, and justice of the peace, and hence called "Squire."

Local government in the West was imported from eastern communities. The northwestern states set up a system of school districts on the New England model. In Ohio, where the New England element was strongest, the people adopted a kind of modified town meeting. In Indiana and Illinois, where

249. Henry Clay, the man of the

there were many southern people, and also in the southwestern
states, the county of the southern type became more important.
No man more distinctly represents the West than Henry
Clay. Born a poor boy in Virginia, he emigrated to Kentucky,
and at twenty-nine he sat as Senator from Kentucky in
Washington (1806). From that time to his death in
1852 Clay was most of the time in the service of the
federal government as senator, representative, or Secretary of
State. In four terms he showed himself the greatest Speaker
in the history of Congress,
managing the House of
Representatives as a skill-
ful coachman handles a
four-horse team.

What made Clay so distinctively a western man was his political optimism. He believed in all good things, in the future of his country, the growth of the West, the good judgment of the average voter. He was the inventor and the strongest

advocate of what he called
"the American System,"
by which he meant the commercial development of the country
by protective tariffs and other public aids. Above all, through-
out his life he worked steadily and wisely for the establishment
of better means of transit. His personal qualities gave strength
to his political views; he was courteous, quick, had a natural
power of attracting friends to him, and was ingenious in devis-
ing compromises when party spirit ran high.

For some time after the Slave Trade Act of 1807, slavery
HART'S AMER. HIST.-18

West

250. Slav

seemed hardly to be a sectional question; antislavery societies were active in the border slave states and in the neighborery ques- ing middle states. About once every two years met "The (1808-1819) American Convention for promoting the Abolition of

tions

Slavery and improving the Condition of the African Race." This convention and the local societies discussed political questions affecting slavery, petitioned the state legislatures and Congress, and tried to stir people up to form abolition societies. One western man, Benjamin Lundy of Kentucky, was a kind of antislavery apostle, and in 1821 established an abolition paper, the Genius of Universal Emancipation.

These efforts were rather checked than aided by the National Colonization Society (founded in 1816), which aimed (1) to encourage emancipation by carrying the free negroes to Africa; and (2) to relieve slaveholders by taking away the free negroes who made their slave brethren discontented. In 1819 Congress appropriated $100,000 to carry back slaves that might be captured on the high seas; a negro colony was founded in Liberia, on the west coast of Africa (1821), and first and last several thousand negroes were sent out.

Gradually the West came into the slavery discussion, at first because used as a kind of balance between North and South. From the admission of Louisiana (1812) the number of slave states was kept equal to that of free states, so that neither section might have a majority in the Senate; Indiana in 1816 was balanced by Mississippi in 1817; Illinois in 1818 was followed by Alabama in 1819. The North, including the Northwest, grew so much faster than the South, that in 1820 (under the application of the three-fifths rule) there were 105 freestate members in the House to 81 slave-state members.

In 1818 the people of Missouri petitioned for admission into 251. Mis- the Union. Though in situation, population, and prod promise ucts a western rather than a southern community, they (1819-1821) had slaves and wanted to keep them. When in February,

souri Com

1819, a bill for admission came up, an antislavery amendment, introduced by James Tallmadge of New York, passed the House by the close vote of 87 to 86; but the Senate refused to accept it, and the bill went over.

During 1819 many northern legislatures and public meetings. declared that Missouri must never be a slave state. When Congress reassembled in December, 1819, a bill passed the House to admit Maine (at that time a "district" of Massachusetts) as a new state; and another bill for the admission of Missouri. To the latter the House, by a test vote of 94 to 86, added an amendment prohibiting slavery in Missouri. The Senate united the two measures into one bill, but instead of the House prohibition accepted the amendment of Senator Thomas of Illinois, forever prohibiting slavery in the Louisiana Purchase north of 36° 30' north latitude, except in Missouri. After a few days of great excitement, the House accepted the Thomas amendment as a compromise; Maine was admitted at once, and the people of Missouri were allowed to form a slaveholding constitution.

The Missouri constitution was found to make it the duty of the legislature to prevent the coming in of free negroes. This provision produced a second uproar and led to a second compromise, engineered by Henry Clay in 1821, by which the legislature of Missouri agreed to make no law infringing on the rights of citizens of other states; and Missouri was at last admitted to the Union.

The essence of the Missouri Compromise was the drawing of a geographical line across the Louisiana Purchase, north of which there were to be no slaveholding territories, and no slaveholding states except Missouri; that is, the act continued as far as the western boundary, the old geographical separation of slaveholding and free territory along Mason and Dixon's line and the line of the Ohio River. The compromise thus excluded slavery from the larger part of the Louisiana