the Illinois country was to be for a large part of its history "half slave and half free"--both in sentiment and in practice. Two attempts against the integrity of the "Sixth Article" were made during Gov. St. Clair's administration. The trouble began with the appeals of the French slave-holders against the loss of their slaves.[10] As civil administration under the Territorial government was not established among the Illinois settlements until 1790, both the old French inhabitants and the new American colonists suffered all manner of disabilities and distresses in the interval between 1784 and 1790, while just across the Mississippi there was a settled and prosperous community under the Spanish government of Louisiana. When, therefore, the French masters appealed to Gen. St. Clair, in 1787, to protect them against the loss of the principal part of their wealth, represented by their slaves, he had to face the alternative of the loss of these substantial citizens by migration with their slaves to the Spanish side of the river. And, in order to pacify these petitioners, St. Clair gave it as his opinion that the prohibition of slavery in the Ordinance was not retroactive, and hence did not affect the rights of the French masters in their previously acquired slave property. As this view accorded with the "compact" contained in the Virginia deed of cession, it was sanctioned by the old Congress, and was later upheld by the new Federal Government; and this construction of the Ordinance of 1787 continued to prevail in Illinois until 1845, when the State Supreme Court decreed that the prohibition was absolute, and that, consequently, slavery in any form had never had any legal sanction in Illinois since 1787.[11]