CHAP. VIII.] DISTRICT CONVENTIONS. 337 On the other hand, the Presbyterian churches were to be governed according to the Book of Discipline, with the right of appeal to the convention as an ecclesiastical court, holding the place of a Presbytery, Synod, and General Assembly. In other words, the convention was to do all for the Presbyterian churches that these several bodies could do; and be their ultimate appeal in all cases. This was the state of things until June, 1842, when the General Convention began to erect District Conventions. Then, the district conventions took the place of Presbyteries for the churches of that order, and the general convention that of a Synod; while to the Congregational churches, the district organizations were either standing councils or consociations, or simply conferences or district associations, of which there are now (1878) nine in the whole State. These conventional arrangements are said to have worked well in the main, and quite harmoniously. But this perhaps is to be attributed to the fact that the Presbyterians have so generally withdrawn from the convention, or withheld their coöperation; while nearly or quite all the Congregational churches in the State are now and ever have been connected with it, and bound by its constitution and rules and regulations. The Old School Presbyterians set up their own ecclesiastical courts as early as 1846; and the New School Presbyterians erected a Presbytery in 1851, and began at once to withdraw from the convention; so that in 1878, only seven Presbyterian churches were reported as still connected with the State Convention, though there must be at least a hundred and fifty of their churches in the State.* Wisconsin owes much to her New England population for her position in regard to educational institutions. In 1870 this State stood the tenth in a list of forty-seven States and Territories, for the number of her public schools, and the eighth for the number of her pupils; while she ranked the fifteenth in aggregate population. As early as June, 1842, the Ecclesiastical Convention was discussing measures for establishing a "Literary Institution;" and this discussion did not cease fully until its members had coöperated in the establishment of four collegiate institutions: one at Beloit, in Rock county; one at Ripon, Fond du Lac county; one at Prairie du Chien, in Crawford county, on the Mississippi; and a female college at Fox Lake, in Dodge county. NOTE. Beloit College - the first institution for superior instruction in Wisconsin - was founded in 1845. In 1874 it had a corps of eleven instructors, and one hundred and forty-six stu * In 1868, the Presbyterians had one hundred and thirteen churches in Wisconsin, thirteen of which only were in the General Convention; while the Congregationalists had one hundred and sixty churches, nearly or quite every one of which was in the Convention. CHAP. VIII.] COLLEGIATE INSTITUTIONS. 339 dents in the preparatory department, and sixty-five in the collegiate. Ripon College-founded by the Congregationalists in 1851 - is at Ripon, twelve or fifteen miles northwest of Fond du Lac, at the southern extremity of Lake Winnebago. It was organized as a college in 1863; and in 1875-76 it had thirteen instructors and three hundred and fifty-eight students. The Wisconsin Female College at Fox Lake in the northwest corner of Dodge county, fifty or sixty miles west of Lake Michigan was organized by Congregationalists in 1856. In 1875 it had six instructors and sixty-five students. We have now surveyed the progress of Congregationalism over the old Northwestern Territory, which extended from the Ohio river to the great northern lakes and Canada, and from Pennsylvania on the east to the Mississippi river on the west; which in 1787 contained scarcely a solitary American settler, but in 1871 had more than nine millions of citizens of the United States. This Territory reached the remotest northwestern boundary of the United States, fixed upon at the close of our Revolution, and recognized in the Treaty of Paris, signed September 3d, 1783, and ratified by the Congress of the United States, January 4th, 1784. And this sketch of Wisconsin completes the history of Congregationalism in all the Northwest Territory; and more than that, it finishes the history of the denomination in all the country won from Great Britain by the Revolutionary War, and all the country between the Atlantic ocean and the Mississippi river, and between the Gulf of Mexico and the Canada line; and of one State beyond the river, namely: Missouri. We are now to look cursorily over the vast regions west of the Mississippi river, to the Pacific ocean which was the original western boundary, according to their charters, of the first New England colonies-and between Canada and the Gulf of Mexico, west of the Mississippi; which embraces considerably more territory than is contained within the old United States and all the country east of the Mississippi. CHAPTER IX. KANSAS AND NEBRASKA. KANSAS and Nebraska, though not entirely contemporaneous in their settlement, are contiguous States, and have a common history to start with. In January, 1854, a bill was introduced into the United States Senate by Stephen A. Douglas, of Illinois, providing for the organization of two Territories north of latitude 36° 30', to be called Kansas and Nebraska, leaving the question whether they should be slave or free Territories to the decision of the inhabitants. This was in effect to repeal the "Missouri Compromise" of 1821, which provided that Missouri might come into the Union as a slave State, but that all the rest of the Louisiana Territory north of latitude 36' 30'-the southern boundary line of Missouri-should forever be free territory. This agreement was assented to by the North only because it was understood to be a complete and final settlement of the vexed question of slavery, which had come up on the admission of every Western State, and was continually agitating and irritating the people. But this Kansas-Nebraska bill not only violated this compromise, but was also in flagrant disregard of more recent compromise measures introduced by Henry Clay, chairman of a special |