self-government and admission into the Union. When the United States
took possession of the province of Louisiana in 1804, it was estimated
to contain 50,000 white inhabitants, 40,000 slaves, and 2,000 free
persons of color.

More than four-fifths of the whites, and all the slaves, except about
thirteen hundred, inhabited New Orleans and the adjacent territory; the
residue, consisting of less than ten thousand whites, and about thirteen
hundred slaves, were dispersed throughout the country now included in
the Arkansas and Missouri territories. The greater part of the thirteen
hundred slaves were in the Missouri territory, some of them having been
removed thither from the old French settlements on the east side of
the Mississippi, after the passing of the ordinance of 1787, by which
slavery in those settlements was abolished.

In 1812, the territory of New Orleans, to which the ordinance of
1787, with the exception of certain parts thereof, had been previously
extended, was permitted by Congress to form a Constitution and State
Government, and admitted as a new State into the Union, by the name
of Louisiana. The acts of Congress for these purposes, in addition to
sundry important provisions respecting rivers and public lands, which
are declared to be irrevocable unless by common consent, annex other
terms and conditions, whereby it is established, not only that the
Constitution of Louisiana should be republican, but that it should
contain the fundamental principles of civil and religious liberty,
that it should secure to the citizens the trial by jury in all criminal
cases, and the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus according to the
Constitution of the United States; and after its admission into the
Union, that the laws which Louisiana might pass, should be promulgated;
its records of every description preserved; and its judicial and