Miss Wright's Testimony

public officers and defray the expenses of its government until its population

amounts to 60,000 souls; when it is entitled to summon a convention, establish its

own constitution, enter upon the administration and expenses of its own government

and take its placee in the confederacy as an independent republic.

* In 1787, the congress passed an act, establishing a temporary government for the

infant population settled on the lands of Ohio; and the government then established

has served as the model of that of all the territories that have since been formed in

the vacant wilderness. The act then passed contained a clause which operated upon the

whole nation territory to the north west of Ohio. By this "slavery and involuntary

servitude" was positively excluded from this region, by a law of the general

government. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan, have already sprung up in the

bosum of this desert; the three first independent states, and the latter about to

pass from her days of tutelage to assume the same character.

It is deserving of observation, that for the passing of this law a unanimous vote of

the states was necessary, according to the old articles of confederatioon then in

force. By a unanimous vote it was passed; not a dissentient

voice being raised by Virginia, who had ceded the territory in question, nor by the

othewr states of the south, who thus voluntarily deprived their slave-holding

citizens of the right of migrating into it.

* * Several territories have passed to the condition of states

before they comprised the population demanded by law. Illinois for instance having

preferred a request to congress that she might be permitted to assume the reins of

her own government was allowed to join the confederacy with a population of less than

40,000.

* In observing upon the policy of the southern states generally,

it would be ungenerous to pass without notice, that their representatives in congress

have been among the most strenuous enforcers of the last penalties of the law against

those convicted of the surreptitious introduction of slaves into the southern ports.

The close neighbourhood of Cuba and the Spanish Floridas affords great facilities for

this atrocious smuggling. The navy of the United States is actively employed in

intercepting this stolen trafic, not only on the American but the African coasts; and

agents are stationed in Africa to receive the stolen negros, returned in the safe

keeping of the Republic to their native country. In all these measures, the Members

from the south have not only invariably concurred, but some of the most important

have originated with them.