Louisiana came in by treaty as slave territory, and with a stipulation for the protection of the people in their property. Out of that territory, three slave states had been formed, and they were the last there was any prospect of forming; while the free states of Iowa, Oregon and Minnesota had already been admitted from the same territory with the prospect of the speedy admission of Kansas and Nebraska and the not remote prospect of an indefinite number of other free states from the same territory. Texas had come in as a state from the condition of an independent republic and the measures leading to her admission had resulted in the acquisition and admission of California as a free state with a prospect of more free states from the territory acquired. So that in every case of the introduction of new slave territory into the Union, there had been largely more than equivalent in territory for the formation of free states except in the case of the slave territory of Florida; and when that was acquired the vastly larger and more important slave territory of Texas had been surrendered. It is not a fact, then, in any sense of the term, that the government had been used for the protection and growth of the slave power. That power, if it might be called such, was relatively stronger the day the Constitution was formed than it was ever afterwards. CHAPTER VII =Injurious Effect of Misinformation= In connection with this claim of the slave power were the most shocking misrepresentations of the condition of the slaves themselves and of the social relations of the Southern people, in order to array the prejudices of the world against their cause. This course of misrepresentation had long been pursued before the war, and was not confined to American writers, but many works appeared from the British press containing libels upon the society of the Southern states and false views of slavery as established there. Such works in both countries were evidently written by persons with prejudiced minds or who knew little practically of slavery as it existed in the South. Such was the intolerance of the public sentiment which had been fostered in both countries upon the subject, that no candid and impartial account of the workings of domestic slavery as it existed in the Southern states would be received with the slightest favor, whilst the exaggerated accounts of cruelty practiced by the slave-owners, and consequent sufferings of the slaves were eagerly accepted as the truth.