During the territorial period in Illinois (1809-1818), the slavery question was not much agitated. The Constitution of 1818 provided that slaves could not be thereafter brought into the State, except such as should be brought under contract to labor at the Saline Creek salt works, said contract to be limited to one year, although renewable, and the proviso to be void after 1825, but existing slavery was not abolished, and existing indentures—and some were for ninety-nine years(501)—should be carried out. Male children of slaves or indentured servants should be free at the age of twenty-one and females at eighteen.(502) In Congress, as has been seen, Tallmadge, of New York, objected to admitting Illinois before she abolished slavery, but his objection was ineffectual. In March, 1819, a slave code was enacted. Any black or mulatto coming into the State was required to file with the clerk of a circuit court a certificate of freedom. Slaves should not be brought into the state for the purpose of emancipation. Resident negroes, other than slaves and indentured servants, must file certificates of freedom. Slaves were to be whipped instead of fined, thirty-nine stripes being the maximum number that might be inflicted. Contracts with slaves were void. Not more than two slaves should meet together without written permission from their masters. Any master emancipating his slaves must give a bond of $1000 per head that such emancipated slaves should not become public charges, failure to give such a bond being punishable by a fine of $200 per head. Colored people must present passes when traveling.(503) Stringent as was the code of 1819, it was of a type that was common in the slave states. Its passage may have kept some negroes, both free and slave, from coming into the state upon their own initiative without certificates of freedom. From 1810 to 1820 the number of slaves in Illinois increased from 168 to 917, Illinois being the only state north of Mason and Dixon’s line having an increase in the number of slaves during the decade, although in the Territory of Missouri, during this time, the number increased from about 3000 to over 10,200. At the same time the number of free blacks in Illinois decreased from about 600 to some 450, while they increased in Indiana from nearly 400 to over 1200. Of the slaves in Illinois in 1820 precisely 500 were in the counties of Gallatin and Randolph, the former being the center of the salt-making industry, and the latter the seat of the early French settlement at Kaskaskia.(504)