Excerpt from Two Lectures on the Rebellion: Subjects: How We Got In; How to Get Out; Delivered at Temperance Hall, Trenton, N. J

Let us look at a few of these collisions. The first was in 1819 - 20, it was the one usually called the great Missouri contest, arising out of the' admission of Missouri to membership in the Union as a states At the session of 1818 - 19, the house of Congress passed a bill admitting Missouri into the Union, on the condition that all children born in Mis souri after the passage of that act should be free when they reached the age of twenty-five, and no other means should be made use of for the introduction of slavery in the State of Missouri. The bill thus passed in the House, went up to the Senate, and was returned without the con dition. The House refused to concede this point, and of course the bill providing for the admission of Missouri into the Union was laid on the table.

Congress adjourned, and the excitement that had already been awak ened by the discussions in Congress, went out among the people. The first great contest now more than forty years ago, arose on this question, the same that agitates us to-day. Flaming orators went through the North and the South discussing the slavery question, and the admission of Missouri into the Union. Conventions were called and agitated by this question. Legislative bodies acted upon it-the South taking the' ground that Missouri should be admitted with slavery, and most of the northern conventions opposing the admission of a new state burdened with this institution. Thus matters stood in 1819 and 1820. It came up again before Congress. The House still stood upon its previous bill, ' that Missouri should be admitted on the condition that the children of her slaves should be liberated as they reached the age of twenty-five.' The South took its ground broadly on what it termed the Constitution; that we, -the government, had nothing to do with the status of slavery in Missouri, that it belonged to Missouri alone to settle that question.

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