=327. The Slavery Question.=—Turning now to domestic matters, we find that during Monroe’s two terms, Chief Justice Marshall delivered many of his most celebrated opinions restraining the powers of the states in favor of the general government. But there was one subject which not even a Marshall could have handled effectively—this was slavery. Slavery had occupied the attention of the first Congress, which had been petitioned by anti-slavery societies to abate the evils of the system. In 1793 an act for restoring slaves who had fled from one state to another was passed. The slave trade had been prohibited in 1808, as soon as the Constitution allowed, and a great effort had been made by the American Colonization Society in 1816, to begin the work of exporting the negroes to Africa; but the invention of the cotton gin, in 1793, had rendered slavery too profitable to the far Southern states to make it probable that they would peaceably consent to the abolishment of the institution. On the other hand, the number of people who thought slavery morally wrong had increased in the North and Northwest, and the way in which new slaveholding and non-slaveholding states had been admitted into the Union by pairs, so as not to disturb the balance of power in the Senate, showed that many Southerners were alive to the dangers of the situation. Yet, after all, so great was the general desire for internal harmony that most persons were startled when the debates concerning the admission of Missouri revealed the fact that the existence of slavery was a menace to the Union. =328. The Missouri Controversy.=—The inevitable struggle between slavery and freedom was precipitated by the endeavor to bring in Arkansas as a territory and Missouri as a state. Both were to be carved out of that part of the Louisiana Cession in which slavery had already gained a footing. Northern members of Congress objected to the spread of the institution into the vast territory still to be occupied, while Southern members felt that any limitation of slavery was an infringement on their property rights. If a man could carry his other chattels when he removed to the new region, why, they asked, could he not carry those human chattels known as slaves. Finally Arkansas was organized without mention of slavery, but a stand was made on Missouri. James Tallmadge, a New York representative, offered an amendment to the act admitting Missouri, to the effect that further introduction of slaves into the proposed state should be prohibited, and that the children of slaves born after the state’s admission to the Union should be considered free at the age of twenty-five. The Senate refusing to concur, the matter went over.