With slavery forever prohibited in such a large territory, with the Ordinance beyond repeal, and secession condemned, the Ordinance of 1787 stands out as one of the most remarkable and most important enactments in American history. What the Declaration of Independence and the War had obtained, and the Constitution was to make more perfect--the Union --the development of the country under the Ordinance of 1787 was to preserve. The South yielded to the strong anti-slavery clause in this ordinance because a fugitive slave clause was added to it, and because she had a plan of making the territory west of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia slave territory. This was done shortly afterwards, when two years later South Carolina and North Carolina, and Georgia in 1802, ceded their western claims to Congress on the express condition that it should be slave soil, and Congress accepted the territory on that condition; Kentucky being admitted as a slave State in 1792. While the national greatness and safety were being worked out in the West, affairs were in a miserable condition in the East, owing to the radical defects in the Articles of Confederation which had been in operation since 1781. The cup of bitter national humiliation was being drained to the dregs, but fortunately the best men of the country finally succeeded in calling a Convention to revise the Articles. The Convention met at Philadelphia in May, 1787, and by September had adopted a new Constitution. The great struggle between the North and the South began in the Constitutional Convention. Slavery and the conflicting commercial interests were the difficult questions which divided the country and resulted in the first of the Compromises that held off the Civil War for so many years. It was decided to have an equal representation of States in the Senate and an unequal representation in the House, based upon population; but should slaves be counted as population? This and the other slavery questions which came up in the Convention threatened to disrupt the proceedings entirely. There were at this time about 675,000 slaves in the country, of which number fully 625,000 were in the South. South Carolina, henceforth to be so active for the interests of the South, immediately claimed that these slaves should be considered as population to be counted in fixing the representation in the House. The North argued that the slaves were chattels and should not be counted, for it was seen at a glance that if this enormous number of slaves were to be counted on any basis, the political power of the South would be greatly increased. South Carolina made open and repeated threats to withdraw from the Confederacy, and the situation was serious, because, without her and the other Southern Colonies, who would unquestionably be influenced by her, the work of the Convention would not be ratified, and there would be no Union. The inexorable necessity of the hour demanded a