Of actual slaveholders there were not enough to influence public sentiment greatly. But the people of Southern extraction, although neither slaveholders nor desiring to become such, had no strong moral convictions on the subject. Indeed, they were likely to feel that the anti-slavery restriction imposed an unfortunate impediment in the way of immigration from the South. Hence the persistent demand of citizens of Indiana and Illinois for a relaxation of the drastic prohibition of slavery in the Ordinance of 1787. In 1796 Congress was petitioned from Kaskaskia to extend relief; in 1799 the territorial Legislature was urged to bring about a repeal; in 1802 an Indiana territorial convention at Vincennes memorialized Congress in behalf of a suspension of the proviso for a period of ten years. Not only were violations of the law winked at, but both Indiana and Illinois deliberately built up a system of indenture which partook strongly of the characteristics of slavery. After much controversy, Indiana, in 1816, framed a state constitution which reiterated the language of the Northwest Ordinance, but without invalidating titles to existing slave property; while Illinois was admitted to the Union in 1818 with seven or eight hundred slaves upon her soil, and with a constitution which continued the old system of indenture with slight modification.
In a heated contest in Illinois in 1824 over the question of calling a state convention to draft a constitution legalizing slavery the people of Northern antecedents made their votes tell and defeated the project. But, like other parts of the Northwest, this State never became a unit on the slavery issue. Certainly it never became abolitionist. By an almost unanimous vote the Legislature, in 1837, adopted joint resolutions which condemned abolitionism as "more productive of evil than of moral and political good"; and in Congress in the preceding year the delegation of the State had given solid support to the "gag resolutions," which were intended to deny a hearing to all petitions on the slavery question.
Throughout the great era of slavery controversy the Northwest was prolific of schemes of compromise, for the constant clash of Northern and Southern elements developed an aptitude for settlement by agreement on moderate lines. The people of the section as a whole long clung to popular, or "squatter," sovereignty as the supremely desirable solution of the slavery question--a device formulated and defended by two of the Northwest's own statesmen, Cass and Douglas, and relinquished only slowly and reluctantly under the leadership, not of a New England abolitionist, but of a statesman of Southern birth who had come to the conclusion that the nation could not permanently exist half slave and half free.