_Free_ negroes were not of the excepted class. Nor were criminals, unless they became fugitives from justice. For ten years the new Republic existed under these Articles by the tolerance of a people bound together by the spirit of liberty and the cohesion of patriotism. The Articles created no status for slavery, nor did they interfere with it in the States. They made no provision for a fugitive-slave law, if, indeed, such a law was dreamed of until after the Constitution went into effect. The Articles of Confederation provided no executive head, no supreme judiciary, and they provided for no perfect legislative body, organized on the principle of checks and restraints, possessed of true republican representation. Congress--the sole governing power --was composed of one body, each State sending not less than two or more than seven representatives. The voting in this body was done by States, each State having one vote. It therefore soon became necessary to frame and adopt a new organic act, supplementing the many deficiencies of these Articles. V ORDINANCE OF 1787 The memorable Congress of 1776 was willing to do much to the end that slavery might be restricted, hence, as we have seen, it resolved "_that no slaves be imported into any of the thirteen United Colonies_." Had it been possible thus early to stop effectually the slave trade, and to prevent the extension of slavery to new territory, slavery would have died out. Jefferson sought, shortly after the treaty of peace, to prohibit slavery extension, and to this end he prepared and reported an Ordinance (1784) prohibiting slavery _after the year 1800_ in all the territory then belonging to the United States above the parallel of 31 deg. North latitude, which included what became the principal parts of the slave States of Alabama and Mississippi, all of Tennessee and Kentucky, as well as the whole Northwest Territory. In 1784 the United States owned no territory south of 31 deg. North latitude. This Ordinance of freedom was lost by a single vote. Had that one vote been reversed, what a "hell of agony" would have been closed, and what a sea of blood would have been saved! Slavery would have died in the hands of its friends and the new Republic would have soon been free in _fact_ as well as name. Jefferson, though himself a slaveholder, was desperately in earnest in advocacy of this Ordinance, and, speaking of its prohibitory slave-clause two years later, he wrote: "The voice of a single individual would have prevented that abominable crime. Heaven will not always be silent; the friends to the rights of human nature will in the end prevail."(14) The most important victory for freedom in the civil history of the United States (until the Rebellion of 1861) was the Ordinance of 1787, reported by Nathan Dane,(15) of Massachusetts, as a substitute for the defeated one just referred to, but differing from it in two important respects: