Taylor had carried Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Maryland, and Delaware. The last two States had permitted some Free Soil votes to be cast; this was also the case in Virginia; and anti-slavery meetings had been held publicly in St. Louis. The pro-slavery defeat in 1848 encouraged Southerners who knew the advantage of free labour to agitate for emancipation. The convention held for this purpose in Kentucky, in 1849, was attended by delegates from twenty-four counties; and its declaration that slavery was "injurious to the prosperity of the Commonwealth," was endorsed by Southern newspapers. Clay himself proposed a plan of gradual emancipation; and such a measure was called for, according to the _Richmond Southerner_ (quoted in Hoist's _Constitutional History_, vol. iii., p. 433), by "two-thirds of the people of Virginia." Admissions that "Kentucky must be free," that "Delaware and Maryland are now in a transition, preparatory to becoming free States," and that "Emancipation is inevitable in all the farming States, where free labour can be advantageously used," were published in 1853, at New Orleans, in De Bow's _Industrial Resources of the Southern and Western States_ (vols. i., p. 407; ii., p. 310; Hi., p. 60). A book which was written soon after by a North Carolinian named Helper, and denounced violently in Congress, shows how much those Southerners who did not hold slaves would have gained by emancipation; and what was so plainly for the interest of the majority of the voters would have been established by them, sooner or later, if it had not been for the breaking out of civil war. How much danger there was, even in 1849, to slave-holders is shown by their threats to secede. They wished to increase the hostility between North and South in order to check the spread southwards of Northern views. It was in this spirit that Senators and Representatives from the cotton States demanded a more efficient law for returning fugitives. Most of the thirty thousand then at the North had come from Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri; and these States were invited to act with their southern neighbours against abolitionism.