which undertook to form of them the Mississippi Territory and to pay
any damages involved. In 1802 Georgia threw the whole burden upon the
central government by transferring to it _all_ of her land beyond her
present boundaries, though for this she exacted an article favorable
to slavery. All was now made into the Mississippi Territory, to which
Congress held out the promise that it would be admitted as a state as
soon as its population numbered 60,000; but Alabama was separated from
Mississippi in 1816. The old matter of claims was not finally disposed
of until an act of 1814 appropriated $5,000,000 for the purpose. In
the same year Andrew Jackson's decisive victories over the Creeks at
Talladega and Horseshoe Bend--of which more must be said--resulted in
the cession of a vast tract of the land of that unhappy nation and thus
finally opened for settlement three-fourths of the present state of
Alabama.

[Footnote 1: Phillips in _The South in the Building of the Nation_, II,
154.]

It was in line with the advance that slavery was making in new territory
that there was passed the first Fugitive Slave Act (1793). This grew out
of the discussion incident to the seizure in 1791 at Washington, Penn.,
of a Negro named John, who was taken to Virginia, and the correspondence
between the Governor of Pennsylvania and the Governor of Virginia with
reference to the case. The important third section of the act read as
follows:

_And be it also enacted_, That when a person held to labor in any of
the United States, or in either of the territories on the northwest
or south of the river Ohio, under the laws thereof, shall escape
into any other of the said states or territory, the person to whom