The stiller and deeper current of industrial progress had moved on apace in the United States. A new New England was being swiftly built in the Northwest. The Southwest, too, was growing fast. The acquisition of the Louisiana territory,--through an exigency of Napoleon's politics, and the wise inconsistency of Jefferson--had opened another vast domain. At the North, commerce, set free again, spread rapidly, and a new era of manufactures was opening. The South--more diffusely settled, with less social activity, with a debased labor class--caught less of the spirit of advance. But on one line it gained. Following the English inventions in spinning and weaving, and the utilization of the stationary steam-engine, a Connecticut man, Eli Whitney, had invented a cotton-gin, for separating the seed from the fibre, and the cotton plant came to the front of the scene. The crop rose in value in twenty years from $6,000,000 to $20,000,000. The value of slaves was trebled, and the border States began to do a thriving trade in exporting them to the cotton States--it was said a little later the yearly export reached 50,000. As new States were organized and admitted, those from the Northwest came in without slavery, which had been kept out by the ordinance of 1787, and those from the Southwest, where slaves had been carried by the emigrants from the seaboard, were allowed without question to retain the institution. Of the old thirteen, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York New Jersey, Pennsylvania (spite of a few slaves lingering in the last three) were counted as free States--seven in all; Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, the two Carolinas, Georgia, were claimed as slave States--six. Speedily were added Vermont to the one column, and Kentucky and Tennessee to the other, making the numbers equal. The following acquisitions were free and slave States alternately: Ohio and Louisiana, Indiana and Mississippi, Illinois and Alabama, a total, so far, of eleven free and eleven slave. Of the new Southwestern domain, Arkansas had been organized as a territory, early in 1819, and a motion that slavery be excluded had been defeated in the House by the casting vote of the speaker, Henry Clay.