was Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright, inventor of the mental illnesses of drapetomania (the desire of a slave to run away) and dysaesthesia aethiopica ("rascality"), both cured by whipping. The Medical Association of Louisiana set up a committee, of which he was chair, to investigate "the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race". Their report, first delivered to the Medical Association in an address, was published in their journal, and then reprinted in part in the widely circulated DeBow's Review. Proposed expansion of slavery Whether or not slavery was to be limited to the Southern states that already had it, or whether it was to be permitted in new states made from the lands of the Louisiana Purchase and Mexican Cession, was a major issue in the 1840s and 1850s. Results included the Compromise of 1850 and the Bleeding Kansas period. Also relatively well known are the proposals, including the Ostend Manifesto, to annex Cuba as a slave state. There was also talk of making slave states of Mexico, Nicaragua (see Walker affair) and other lands around the so-called Golden Circle. Less well known today (2019), though well known at the time, is that pro-slavery Southerners: Spoke openly of their desire to reopen the Atlantic slave trade (see Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves#Antebellum proposals by Fire-Eaters to reopen). Wanted to reintroduce slavery in the Northern states, through federal action or Constitutional amendment making slavery legal nationwide, thus overriding state anti-slavery laws. (See Crittenden Compromise.) This was described as "well underway" by 1858. Said openly that slavery should by no means be limited to Negros, since in their view it was beneficial. Northern white workers, who were allegedly "wage slaves" already, would allegedly have better lives if they were enslaved. None of these ideas got very far, but they alarmed Northerners and contributed to the growing polarization of the country. Abolitionism in the North Beginning during the Revolution and in the first two decades of the postwar era, every state in the North abolished slavery. These were the first abolitionist laws in the Atlantic World. However, the abolition of slavery did not necessarily mean that existing slaves became free. In some states they were forced to remain with their former owners as indentured servants: free in name only, although they could not be sold and thus families could not be split, and their children were born free. The end of slavery