"Resolved, That all petitions, memorials, and papers, touching the abolition of slavery, or the buying, selling, or transferring of slaves, in any State, District, or Territory, of the United States, be laid on the table, without being debated, printed, read, or referred; and that no further action whatever shall be had thereon." In Illinois, at the time we speak of (March, 1837), an Abolitionist was rarely seen, and scarcely ever heard of. In many parts of the State such a person would have been treated as a criminal. It is true, there were a few Covenanters, with whom hatred of slavery in any form and wherever found was an essential part of their religion. Up to 1824 they had steadily refused to vote, or in any other way to acknowledge the State government, regarding it as "an heathen and unbaptized institution," because the Constitution failed to recognize "Jesus Christ as the head of the government, and the Holy Scriptures as the only rule of faith and practice." It was only when it was proposed to introduce slavery into Illinois by an alteration of that "heathen" Constitution, that the Covenanters consented to take part in public affairs. The movement which drew them out proved to be a long and unusually bitter campaign, lasting full eighteen months, and ending in the fall of 1824, with a popular majority of several thousand against calling a convention for the purpose of making Illinois a Slave State. Many of the antislavery leaders in _this_ contest--conspicuous among whom was Gov. Coles--were gentlemen from Slave States, who had emancipated their slaves before removal, and were opposed to slavery, not upon religious or moral grounds, but because they believed it would be a material injury to the new country. Practically no other view of the question was discussed; and a person who should have undertaken to discuss it from the "man and brother" stand-point of more modern times would have been set down as a lunatic. A clear majority of the people were against the introduction of slavery into their own State; but that majority were fully agreed with their brethren of the minority, that those who went about to interfere with slavery in the most distant manner in the places where it already existed were deserving of the severest punishment, as the common enemies of society. It was in those days a mortal offence to call a man an Abolitionist, for Abolitionist was synonymous with thief. Between a band of men who stole horses and a band of men who stole negroes, the popular mind made small distinctions in the degrees of guilt. They were regarded as robbers, disturbers of the peace, the instigators of arson, murder, poisoning, rape; and, in addition to all this, traitors to the government under which they lived, and enemies to the Union which gave us as a people liberty and strength. In testimony of these sentiments, Illinois enacted a "black code" of most preposterous and cruel