It will have been observed that this acquisition of the Colony of Louisiana and the contemporaneous inventions of the cotton-gin, improved cotton-spinning machinery, and the application to it of steam power, had already completely neutralized the wisdom of the Fathers in securing, as they thought, the gradual but certain extinction of Slavery in the United States, by that provision in the Constitution which enabled Congress, after an interval of twenty years, to prohibit the African Slave Trade; and which led the Congress, on March 22, 1794, to pass an Act prohibiting it; to supplement it in 1800 with another Act in the same direction; and on March 2, 1807, to pass another supplemental Act --to take effect January 1, 1808--still more stringent, and covering any such illicit traffic, whether to the United States or with other countries. Never was the adage that, "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley," more painfully apparent. Slaves increased and multiplied within the land, and enriched their white owners to such a degree that, as the years rolled by, instead of compunctions of conscience on the subject of African Slavery in America, the Southern leaders ultimately persuaded themselves to the belief that it was not only moral, and sanctioned by Divine Law, but that to perpetuate it was a philanthropic duty, beneficial to both races! In fact one of them declared it to be "the highest type of civilization." In 1812, the State of Louisiana, organized from the purchased Colony of the same name, was admitted to the Union, and the balance of the Louisiana purchase was thereafter known as the Territory of Missouri. In 1818 commenced the heated and protracted struggle in Congress over the admission of the State of Missouri--created from the Territory of that name--as a Slave State, which finally culminated in 1820 in the settlement known thereafter as the "Missouri Compromise."