II.

“Baggage-wagons were there, with arms and ammunition enough for a protracted fight, and among them two brass field-pieces, ready charged. They came with drums beating and flags flying, and their leaders were of the most prominent and conspicuous men of their State.”

Of another locality he says:—

“The invaders came together in one armed and organized body, with trains of fifty wagons, besides horsemen, and the night before election pitched their camp in the vicinity of the polls; and having appointed their own judges in place of those who, from intimidation or otherwise, failed to attend, they voted without any proof of residence.”

With this force they were able, on the succeeding day, in some places, to intimidate the judges of elections, in others to substitute judges of their own appointment, in others to wrest the ballot-boxes from their rightful possessors, and everywhere to exercise a complete control of the election, and thus, by preternatural audacity of usurpation, impose a Legislature upon the free people of Kansas. Thus was conquered the Sebastopol of that Territory!

It was not enough to secure the Legislature. The election of a member of Congress recurred on the 1st of October, 1855, and the same foreigners, who had learned their strength, again manifested it. Another invasion, in controlling numbers, came from Missouri, and once more forcibly exercised the electoral franchise in Kansas.

At last, in the latter days of November, 1855, a storm, long gathering, burst upon the heads of the devoted people. The ballot-boxes had been violated, and a Legislature installed, which proceeded to carry out the conspiracy of the invaders; but the good people of the Territory, born to Freedom, and educated as American citizens, showed no signs of submission. Slavery, though recognized by pretended law, was in many places practically an outlaw. To the lawless borderers this was hard to bear; and, like the heathen of old, they raged, particularly against the town of Lawrence, already known, by the firmness of its principles and the character of its citizens, as citadel of the good cause. On this account they threatened, in their peculiar language, to “wipe it out.” Soon the hostile power was gathered for this purpose. The wickedness of this invasion was enhanced by the way in which it began. A citizen of Kansas, by the name of Dow, was murdered by a partisan of Slavery, in the name of “law and order.” Such an outrage naturally aroused indignation and provoked threats. The professors of “law and order” allowed the murderer to escape, and, still further to illustrate the irony of the name they assumed, seized the friend of the murdered man, whose few neighbors soon rallied for his rescue. This transaction, though totally disregarded in its chief front of wickedness, became the excuse for unprecedented excitement. The weak Governor,[73]with no faculty higher than servility to Slavery,—whom the President, in official delinquency, had appointed to a trust worthy only of a well-balanced character,—was frightened from his propriety. By proclamation he invoked the Territory. By telegraph he invoked the President. The Territory would not respond to his senseless appeal. The President was false. But the proclamation was circulated throughout the border counties of Missouri; and Platte, Clay, Carroll, Saline, Howard, and Jackson, each of them, contributed a volunteer company, recruited from the roadsides, and armed with weapons which chance afforded, knownas “the shot-gun militia,”—with a Missouri officer as commissary-general, dispensing rations, and another Missouri officer as general-in-chief,—with two wagon-loads of rifles, belonging to Missouri, drawn by six mules, from its arsenal at Jefferson City,—with seven pieces of cannon, belonging to the United States, from its arsenal at Liberty; and this formidable force, amounting to at least 1,800 men, terrible with threats, oaths, and whiskey, crossed the borders, and encamped in larger part on the Wakarusa, over against the doomed town of Lawrence, now threatened with destruction. With these invaders was the Governor, who by this act levied war upon the people he was sent to protect. In camp with him was the original Catiline of the conspiracy, while by his side were the docile Chief Justice and the docile Judges. But this is not the first instance in which an unjust governor has found tools where he ought to have found justice. In the great impeachment of Warren Hastings, the British orator by whom it was conducted exclaims, in words strictly applicable to the misdeed I here denounce: “Had he not the Chief Justice, the tamed and domesticated Chief Justice, who waited on him like a familiar spirit?”[74]Thus was this invasion countenanced by those who should have stood in the breach against it. For more than a week it continued, while deadly conflict was imminent. I do not dwell on the heroism by which it was encountered, or the mean retreat to which it was compelled; for that is not necessary in exhibiting the Crime which you are to judge. But I cannot forbear to add other features, furnished in a letter written at the time by a clergyman, who saw and was part of whathe describes.

“Our citizens have been shot at,and in two instances murdered, our houses invaded, hay-ricks burnt, corn and other provisions plundered, cattle driven off, all communication cut off between us and the States, wagons on the way to us with provisions stopped and plundered, and the drivers taken prisoners, and we in hourly expectation of an attack.Nearly every man has been in arms in the village.Fortifications have been thrown up, by incessant labor night and day. The sound of the drum and the tramp of armed men resounded through our streets,families fleeing with their household goods for safety. Day before yesterday the report of cannon was heard at our house, from the direction of Lecompton. Last Thursday one of our neighbors,—one of the most peaceable and excellent of men, from Ohio,—on his way home, was set upon by a gang of twelve men on horseback, and shot down. Over eight hundred men are gathered under arms at Lawrence. As yet no act of violence has been perpetrated by those on our side.No blood of retaliation stains our hands. We stand, and are ready to act, purely in the defence of our homes and lives.”

The catalogue is not yet complete. On the 15th of December, when the people assembled to vote on the Constitution submitted for adoption, only a few days after the Treaty of Peace between the Governor on the one side and the town of Lawrence on the other, another and fifth irruption was made. But I leave all this untold. Enough of these details has been given.

Five several times and more have these invaders entered Kansas in armed array, and thus five several times and more have they trampled upon the organic law of the Territory. These extraordinary expeditions are simply the extraordinary witnesses to successive, uninterruptedviolence. They stand out conspicuous, but not alone. The spirit of evil, in which they had their origin, is wakeful and incessant. From the beginning it hung upon the skirts of this interesting Territory, harrowing its peace, disturbing its prosperity, and keeping its inhabitants under the painful alarms of war. All security of person, property, and labor was overthrown; and when I urge this incontrovertible fact, I set forth a wrong which is small only by the side of the giant wrong for the consummation of which all this is done. Sir, what is man, what is government, without security, in the absence of which nor man nor government can proceed in development or enjoy the fruits of existence? Without security civilization is cramped and dwarfed. Without security there is no true Freedom. Nor shall I say too much, when I declare that security, guarded of course by its parent Freedom, is the true end and aim of government. Of this indispensable boon the people of Kansas are despoiled,—absolutely, totally. All this is aggravated by the nature of their pursuits, rendering them peculiarly sensitive to interruption, and at the same time attesting their innocence. They are for the most part engaged in the cultivation of the soil, which from time immemorial has been the sweet employment of undisturbed industry. Contented in the returns of bounteous Nature and the shade of his own trees, the husbandman is not aggressive; accustomed to produce, and not to destroy, he is essentially peaceful, unless his home is invaded, when his arm derives vigor from the soil he treads, and his soul inspiration from the heavens beneath whose canopy he daily toils. Such are the people of Kansas, whose security has been overthrown. Scenes from which Civilization averts her countenance arepart of their daily life. Border incursions, which in barbarous ages or barbarous lands fretted and harried an exposed people, are here renewed, with this peculiarity, that our border robbers do not simply levy blackmail and drive off a few cattle, like those who acted under the inspiration of the Douglas of other days,—they do not seize a few persons, and sweep them away into captivity, like the African slave-traders, whom we brand as pirates,—but they commit a succession of deeds in which border sorrows and African wrongs are revived together on American soil, while, for the time being, all protection is annulled, and the whole Territory is enslaved.

Private griefs mingle their poignancy with public wrongs. I do not dwell on the anxieties of families exposed to sudden assault, and lying down to rest with the alarms of war ringing in the ears, not knowing that another day may be spared to them. Throughout this bitter winter, with the thermometer at thirty degrees below zero, the citizens of Lawrence were constrained to sleep under arms, with sentinels pacing constant watch against surprise. Our souls are wrung by individual instances. In vain do we condemn the cruelties of another age, the refinements of torture to which men were doomed, the rack and thumb-screw of the Inquisition, the last agonies of the regicide Ravaillac,

“Luke’s iron crown, and Damien’s bed of steel”;

for kindred outrages disgrace these borders. Murder stalks, Assassination skulks in the tall grass of the prairie, and the vindictiveness of man assumes unwonted forms. A preacher of the Gospel has been ridden on a rail, then thrown into the Missouri, fastened toa log, and left to drift down its muddy, tortuous current. And lately we have the tidings of that enormity without precedent, a deed without a name, where a candidate for the Legislature was most brutally gashed with knives and hatchets, and then, after weltering in blood on the snow-clad earth, trundled along, with gaping wounds, to fall dead before the face of his wife. It is common to drop a tear of sympathy over the sorrows of our early fathers, exposed to the stealthy assault of the savage foe,—and an eminent American artist[75]has pictured this scene in a marble group, on the front of the National Capitol, where the uplifted tomahawk is arrested by the strong arm and generous countenance of the pioneer, whose wife and children find shelter at his feet; but now the tear must be dropped over the sorrows of fellow-citizens building a new State in Kansas, and exposed to the perpetual assault of murderous robbers from Missouri. Hirelings, picked from the drunken spew and vomit of an uneasy civilization, having the form of men,—

“Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men;As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves are cleptAll by the name of dogs,”—

“Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men;

As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,

Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves are clept

All by the name of dogs,”—

leashed together by secret signs and lodges, renew the incredible atrocities of the Assassins and the Thugs,—showing the blind submission of the Assassins to the Old Man of the Mountain in robbing Christians on the road to Jerusalem, and the heartlessness of the Thugs, who, avowing that murder is their religion, waylay travellers on the great road from Agra to Delhi,—with the more deadly bowie-knife for the dagger of the Assassin, and the more deadly revolver for the noose of the Thug.

In these invasions, with the entire subversion of all security in this Territory, the plunder of the ballot-box, and the pollution of the electoral franchise, I show simply the process in unprecedented Crime. If that be the best government where injury to a single citizen is resented as injury to the whole State, what must be the character of a government which leaves a whole community of citizens thus exposed? In the outrage upon the ballot-box, even without the illicit fruits which I shall soon exhibit, there is a peculiar crime, of the deepest dye, though subordinate to the final Crime, which should be promptly avenged. In other lands, where royalty is upheld, it is a special offence to rob the crown jewels, which are emblems of that sovereignty before which the loyal subject bows, and it is treason to be found in adultery with the queen, for in this way may a false heir be imposed upon the State; but in our Republic the ballot-box is the single priceless jewel of that sovereignty which we respect, and the electoral franchise, where are born the rulers of a free people, is the royal bed we are to guard against pollution. In this plain presentment, whether as regards security or as regards elections, there is enough, without proceeding further, to justify the intervention of Congress, promptly and completely, to throw over this oppressed people the impenetrable shield of the Constitution and laws. But the half is not yet told.

As every point in a wide-spread horizon radiates from a common centre, so everything said or done in this vast circle of Crime radiates from theOne Idea, that Kansas, at all hazards, must be made a Slave State. In all themanifold wickednesses that occur, and in every successive invasion, thisOne Idea, is ever present, as Satanic tempter, motive power,causing cause. Talk of “one idea!” Here it is with a vengeance!

To accomplish this result, three things are attempted:first, by outrage of all kinds, to drive the friends of Freedom out of the Territory;secondly, to deter others from coming; and,thirdly, to obtain complete control of the Government. The process of driving out, and also of deterring, has failed. On the contrary, the friends of Freedom there have become more fixed in resolve to stay and fight the battle which they never sought, but from which they disdain to retreat,—while the friends of Freedom elsewhere are more aroused to the duty of timely succor by men and munitions of just self-defence.

While defeated in the first two processes, the conspirators succeeded in the last. By the violence already portrayed at the election of the 30th of March, when the polls were occupied by armed hordes from Missouri, they imposed a Legislature upon the Territory, and thus, under the iron mask of law, established a Usurpation not less complete than any in history. That this was done I proceed to prove. Here is the evidence.

1. Only in this way can this extraordinary expedition be adequately explained. In the words of Molière, once employed by John Quincy Adams in the other House, “Que diable allaient-ils faire dans cette galère?” What did they go into the Territory for? If their purposes were peaceful, as has been suggested, why cannons, arms, flags, numbers, and all this violence? As simple citizens, proceeding to the honest exercise of the electoral franchise, they might go with nothing more than apilgrim’s staff. Philosophy always seeks asufficient cause, and only in theOne Ideaalready presented can a cause be found in any degree commensurate with the Crime; and this becomes so only when we consider the mad fanaticism of Slavery.

2. Public notoriety steps forward to confirm the suggestion of reason. In every place where Truth can freely travel it is asserted and understood that the Legislature was imposed upon Kansas by foreigners from Missouri; and this universal voice is now received as undeniable verity.

3. It is also attested by harangues of the conspirators. Here is what Stringfellow saidbeforethe invasion.

“To those who have qualms of conscience as to violating laws, State or National, the time has come when such impositions must be disregarded, as your rights and property are in danger;and I advise you, one and all, to enter every election district in Kansas, in defiance of Reeder and his vile myrmidons, and vote at the point of the bowie-knife and revolver. Neither give nor take quarter, as our cause demands it. It is enough that the slaveholding interest wills it, from which there is no appeal. What right has Governor Reeder to rule Missourians in Kansas? His proclamation and prescribed oath must be repudiated. It is your interest to do so. Mind that Slavery is established where it is not prohibited.”

Here is what Atchison saidafterthe invasion.

“Well, what next? Why, an election for members of the Legislature to organize the Territory must be held. What did I advise you to do then? Why, meet them on their own ground, and beat them at their own game again; and cold and inclement as the weather was, I went over with a company of men. My object in going was not to vote. I had no right to vote, unless I had disfranchised myself in Missouri. I was not within two miles of a voting-place. My object in going was not to vote, but to settle a difficulty between two of our candidates; and the Abolitionists of the North said,and published it abroad, that Atchison was there with bowie-knife and revolver,—and, by God, ’twas true! I never did go into that Territory, I never intend to go into that Territory, without being prepared for all such kind of cattle.Well, we beat them, and Governor Reeder gave certificates to a majority of all the members of both Houses, and then, after they were organized, as everybody will admit, they were the only competent persons to say who were and who were not members of the same.”

4. It is confirmed by contemporaneous admission of “The Squatter Sovereign,” a paper published at Atchison, and at once the organ of the President and of these Borderers, which, under date of 1st April, thus recounts the victory.

“Independence, [Missouri,] March 31, 1855.“Several hundred emigrants from Kansas have just entered our city. They were preceded by the Westport and Independence brass bands. They came in at the west side of the public square, and proceeded entirely around it, the bands cheering us with fine music, and the emigrants with good news. Immediately following the bands were about two hundred horsemen in regular order; following these were one hundred and fifty wagons, carriages, &c. They gave repeated cheers for Kansas and Missouri. They report that not an Antislavery man will be in the Legislature of Kansas.We have made a clean sweep.”

“Independence, [Missouri,] March 31, 1855.

“Several hundred emigrants from Kansas have just entered our city. They were preceded by the Westport and Independence brass bands. They came in at the west side of the public square, and proceeded entirely around it, the bands cheering us with fine music, and the emigrants with good news. Immediately following the bands were about two hundred horsemen in regular order; following these were one hundred and fifty wagons, carriages, &c. They gave repeated cheers for Kansas and Missouri. They report that not an Antislavery man will be in the Legislature of Kansas.We have made a clean sweep.”

5. It is also confirmed by contemporaneous testimony of another paper, always faithful to Slavery, the “New York Herald,” in the letter of a correspondent from Brunswick, Missouri, under date of 20th April,1855.

“From five to seven thousand men started from Missouri to attend the election, some to remove, but the most to return to their families, with an intention, if they liked the Territory, to make it their permanent abode at the earliest moment practicable. But they intended to vote. The Missourians were, many of them, Douglas men. There were one hundred and fifty voters from this county, one hundred and seventy-five from Howard, one hundred from Cooper. Indeed, every county furnished its quota; and when they set out, it looked like an army.… They were armed.… And, as there were no houses in the Territory, they carried tents. Their mission was a peaceable one,—to vote, and to drive down stakes for their future homes. After the election some fifteen hundred of the voters sent a committee to Mr. Reeder to ascertain if it was his purpose to ratify the election. He answered that it was, and said the majority at an election must carry the day. But it is not to be denied that the fifteen hundred, apprehending that the Governor might attempt to play the tyrant,—since his conduct had already been insidious and unjust,—wore on their hats bunches of hemp. They were resolved, if a tyrant attempted to trample upon the rights of the sovereign people, to hang him.”

6. It is again confirmed by testimony of a lady for five years resident in Western Missouri, who thus writes in a letter published in the “New Haven Register.”

“Miami, Saline County, November 26, 1855.“You ask me to tell you something about the Kansas and Missouri troubles. Of course you know in what they have originated.There is no denying that the Missourians have determined to control the elections, if possible; and I do not know that their measures would be justifiable, except upon the principle of self-preservation; and that, you know, is the first law of Nature.”

“Miami, Saline County, November 26, 1855.

“You ask me to tell you something about the Kansas and Missouri troubles. Of course you know in what they have originated.There is no denying that the Missourians have determined to control the elections, if possible; and I do not know that their measures would be justifiable, except upon the principle of self-preservation; and that, you know, is the first law of Nature.”

7. And it is confirmed still further by the Circular of the Emigration Society of Lafayette County, in Missouri, dated as late as 25th March, 1856, where the efforts of Missourians are openly confessed.

“The western counties of Missouri have for the last two years been heavily taxed, both in money and time, in fighting the battles of the South.Lafayette County alone has expended more than one hundred thousand dollars in money, and as much or more in time. Up to this time the border counties of Missouri have upheld and maintained the rights and interests of the South in this struggle, unassisted, and not unsuccessfully.But the Abolitionists, staking their all upon the Kansas issue, and hesitating at no means, fair or foul, are moving heaven and earth to render that beautiful Territorya Free State.”

8. Here, also, is amplest testimony to the Usurpation, by the “Intelligencer,” a leading paper of St. Louis, Missouri, made in the ensuing summer.

“Atchison and Stringfellow, with their Missouri followers, overwhelmed the settlers in Kansas, browbeat and bullied them, and took the Government from their hands. Missouri votes elected the present body of men, who insult public intelligence and popular rights by styling themselves ‘the Legislature of Kansas.’ This body of men are helping themselves to fat speculations by locating the ‘seat of Government’ and getting town lots for their votes. They are passing laws disfranchising all the citizens of Kansas who do not believe Negro Slavery to be a Christian institution and a national blessing. They are proposing to punish with imprisonment the utterance of views inconsistent with their own. And they are trying to perpetuate their preposterous and infernal tyranny by appointingfor a term of yearscreatures of their own, as commissioners in every county, to lay and collect taxes, and see that the laws they are passing are faithfully executed. Has this age anything to compare with these acts in audacity?”

9. In harmony with all these is the authoritative declaration of Governor Reeder, in a speech to his neighbors at Easton, Pennsylvania, at the end of April, 1855, and immediately afterwards published in the Washington “Union.” Here it is.

“It was, indeed, too true that Kansas had been invaded, conquered, subjugated, by an armed force from beyond her borders, led on by a fanatical spirit, trampling under foot the principles of the Kansas Bill and the right of suffrage.”

10. In similar harmony is the complaint of the people of Kansas, in public meeting at Big Springs, on the 5th of September, 1855, embodied in these words.

“Resolved, That the body of men who for the last two months have been passing laws for the people of our Territory, moved, counselled, and dictated to by the demagogues of Missouri, are to us a foreign body, representing only the lawless invaders who elected them, and not the people of the Territory,—that we repudiate their action, as the monstrous consummation of an act of violence, usurpation, and fraud, unparalleled in the history of the Union, and worthy only of men unfitted for the duties and regardless of the responsibilities of Republicans.”

11. Finally, the invasion which ended in the Usurpation is clearly established from official Minutes laid on our table by the President. But the effect of this testimony has been so amply exposed by the Senator from Vermont [Mr.Collamer], in his ableand indefatigable argument, that I content myself with simply referring to it.

On this cumulative, irresistible evidence, in concurrence with antecedent history, I rest. And yet Senators here argue that this cannot be,—precisely as the conspiracy of Catiline was doubted in the Roman Senate. “Nonnulli sunt in hoc ordine, qui aut ea quæ imminent non videant, aut ea quæ vident dissimulent; qui spem Catilinæ mollibus sententiis aluerunt, conjurationemque nascentem non credendo corroboraverunt.”[76]These words of the Roman Orator picture the case here. As I listened to the Senator from Illinois, while he painfully strove to show that there is no Usurpation, I was reminded of the effort by a distinguished logician to prove that Napoleon Bonaparte never existed. And permit me to say, that the fact of his existence is not more entirely above doubt than the fact of this Usurpation. This I assert on proofs already presented. But confirmation comes almost while I speak. The columns of the public press are daily filled with testimony solemnly taken before the Committee of Congress in Kansas, which attests, in awful light, the violence ending in the Usurpation. Of this I may speak on some other occasion.[77]Meanwhile I proceed with the development of the Crime.

The usurping Legislature assembled at the appointed place in the interior, and then at once, in opposition to the veto of the Governor, by a majority of two thirds,removed to the Shawnee Mission, a place in most convenient proximity to the Missouri borderers, by whom it had been constituted, and whose tyrannical agent it was. The statutes of Missouri, in all their text, with their divisions and subdivisions, were adopted bodily, and with such little local adaptation that the word “State” in the original is not even changed to “Territory,” but is left to be corrected by an explanatory act. All this general legislation was entirely subordinate to the special chapter entitled “An Act to punish Offences against Slave Property,” where the One Idea that provoked this whole conspiracy is at last embodied in legislative form, and Human Slavery openly recognized on Free Soil, under the sanction of pretended law.[78]This chapter, of thirteen sections, is in itself aDance of Death. But its complex completeness of wickedness without parallel may be partially conceived, when it is understood that in three sections only is the penalty of death denounced no less than forty-eight different times, by as many changes of language, against the heinous offence, described in forty-eight different ways, of interfering with what does not exist in that Territory, and under the Constitution cannot exist there,—I mean property in human flesh. Thus is Liberty sacrificed to Slavery, and Death summoned to sit at the gates as guardian of the Wrong.

The work of Usurpation was not perfected even yet. It had already cost too much to be left at any hazard.

“To be thus is nothing,But to be safely thus.”

“To be thus is nothing,

But to be safely thus.”

Such was the object. And this could not be, except by the entire prostration of all the safeguards of Human Rights. Liberty of speech, which is the very breath of a Republic,—the press, which is the terror of wrong-doers,—the bar, through which the oppressed beards the arrogance of law,—the jury, by which right is vindicated,—all these must be struck down, while officers are provided in all places, ready to be the tools of this Tyranny; and then, to obtain final assurance that their crime is secure, the whole Usurpation, stretching over the Territory, must be fastened and riveted by legislative bolt, spike, and screw,so as to defy all effort at change through ordinary forms of law. To this work, in its various parts, were bent the subtlest energies; and never, from Tubal Cain to this hour, was any fabric forged with more desperate skill and completeness.

Mark, Sir, three different legislative enactments, constituting part of this work.First, according to one act, all who deny, by spoken or written word, “the right of persons to hold slaves in this Territory,” are denounced as felons, to be punished by imprisonment at hard labor for a term not less than two years,—it may be for life. To show the extravagance of this injustice, it is well put by the Senator from Vermont [Mr.Collamer], that, should the Senator from Michigan [Mr.Cass], who believes that Slavery cannot exist in a Territory, unless introduced by express legislative act, venture there with his moderate opinions, his doom must be that of a felon! To such extent are the great liberties of speech and of the press subverted!Secondly, by another act, entitled “An Act concerning Attorneys-at-Law,” no person can practise as attorney, unless heshall obtain a licensefrom the Territorial courts, which, of course, a tyrannical discretion will be free to deny; and after obtaining such license, he is constrained to take an oath not only “to support” the Constitution of the United States, but also “to support and sustain”—mark here the reduplication—the Territorial Act and the Fugitive Slave Bill: thus erecting a test for admission to the bar, calculated to exclude citizens who honestly regard the latter legislative enormity as unfit to be obeyed. And,thirdly, by another act, entitled “An Act concerning Jurors,” all persons “conscientiously opposed to the holding slaves,” or “who do not admit the right to hold slaves in this Territory,” are excluded from the jury on every question, civil or criminal, arising out of asserted slave property,—while, in all cases, the summoning of the jury is left, without one word of restraint, to “the marshal, sheriff, or other officer,” who is thus free to pack it according to his tyrannical discretion.

For the ready enforcement of all statutes against Human Freedom, the President furnished a powerful quota of officers, in the Governor, Chief Justice, Judges, Secretary, Attorney, and Marshal. The Legislature completed this part of the work, by constituting in each county a Board of Commissioners, composed of two persons, associated with the Probate Judge, whose duty it is to “appoint a county treasurer, coroner, justices of the peace, constables, andallother officers provided for by law,” and then proceeding to the choice of this very Board: thus delegating and diffusing their usurped power, and tyrannically imposing upon the Territory a crowd of officers, in whose appointment the people had no voice, directly or indirectly.

And still the final, inexorable work remained to be done. A Legislature renovated in both branches could not assemble until 1858: so that, during this long intermediate period, this whole system must continue in the likeness of law, unless overturned by the National Government, or, in default of such interposition, by the generous uprising of an oppressed people. But it was necessary to guard against possibility of change, even tardily, at a future election; and this was done by two different acts, under thefirstof which all who do not take the oath to support the Fugitive Slave Bill are excluded from the elective franchise, and under thesecondof which all others are entitled to vote who tender a tax of one dollar to the sheriff on the day of election; thus, by provision of Territorial law, disfranchising all opposed to Slavery, and at the same time opening the door to the votes of the invaders; by an unconstitutional shibboleth excluding from the polls the body of actual settlers, and by making the franchise depend upon a petty tax only admitting to the polls the mass of borderers from Missouri. By tyrannical forethought, the Usurpation not only fortified all that it did, but assumed aself-perpetuatingenergy.

Thus was the Crime consummated. Slavery stands erect, clanking its chains on the Territory of Kansas, surrounded by a code of death, and trampling upon all cherished liberties, whether of speech, the press, the bar, the trial by jury, or the electoral franchise. And, Sir, all this is done, not merely to introduce a wrong which in itself is a denial of all rights, and in dread of which mothers have taken the lives of their offspring,—notmerely, as is sometimes said, to protect Slavery in Missouri, since it is futile for this State to complain of Freedom on the side of Kansas, when Freedom exists without complaint on the side of Iowa, and also on the side of Illinois,—but it is done for the sake of political power, in order to bring two new slaveholding Senators upon this floor, and thus to fortify in the National Government the desperate chances of a waning Oligarchy. As the gallant ship, voyaging on pleasant summer seas, is assailed by a pirate crew, and plundered of its doubloons and dollars, so is this beautiful Territory now assailed in peace and prosperity, and robbed of its political power for the sake of Slavery. Even now the black flag of the land pirates from Missouri waves at the mast-head; in their laws you hear the pirate yell and see the flash of the pirate knife; while, incredible to relate, the President, gathering the Slave Power at his back, testifies a pirate sympathy.

Sir, all this was done in the name of Popular Sovereignty. And this is the close of the tragedy. Popular Sovereignty, which, when truly understood, is a fountain of just power, has ended in Popular Slavery,—not in the subjection of the unhappy African race merely, but of this proud Caucasian blood which you boast. The profession with which you began, ofAll by the People, is lost in the wretched reality ofNothing for the People. Popular Sovereignty, in whose deceitful name plighted faith was broken and an ancient Landmark of Freedom overturned, now lifts itself before us like Sin in the terrible picture of Milton, which

“seemed woman to the waist, and fair,But ended foul in many a scaly foldVoluminous and vast, a serpent armedWith mortal sting: about her middle roundA cry of hell-hounds never ceasing barkedWith wide Cerberean mouths full loud, and rungA hideous peal; yet, when they list, would creep,If aught disturbed their noise, into her womb,And kennel there, yet there still barked and howledWithin, unseen.”

“seemed woman to the waist, and fair,

But ended foul in many a scaly fold

Voluminous and vast, a serpent armed

With mortal sting: about her middle round

A cry of hell-hounds never ceasing barked

With wide Cerberean mouths full loud, and rung

A hideous peal; yet, when they list, would creep,

If aught disturbed their noise, into her womb,

And kennel there, yet there still barked and howled

Within, unseen.”

The image is complete at all points; and with this exposure I take my leave of the Crime against Kansas.

Emerging from all the blackness of this Crime, where we seem to have been lost, as in a savage wood, and turning our backs upon it, as upon desolation and death, from which, while others have suffered, we have escaped, I come now tothe Apologieswhich the Crime has found. Sir, well may you start at the suggestion, that such a series of wrongs, so clearly proved by various testimony, so openly confessed by the wrong-doers, and so widely recognized throughout the country, should find apologists. But partisan spirit, now, as in other days, hesitates at nothing. Great crimes of history have never been without apologies. The massacre of St. Bartholomew, which you now instinctively condemn, was at the time applauded in high quarters, and even commemorated by a Papal medal, which may still be procured at Rome,—as the Crime against Kansas, which is hardly less conspicuous in dreadful eminence, has been shielded on this floor by extenuating words, and even by a Presidential message, which, like the Papal medal, can never be forgotten in considering the perversity of men.

Sir, the Crime cannot be denied. The President himself has admitted “illegal and reprehensible” conduct. To such conclusion he was compelled by irresistible evidence. But what he mildly describes I openly denounce. Senators may affect to put it aside by sneer, or to reason it away by figures, or to explain it by theory, such as desperate invention has produced on this floor, that the Assassins and Thugs of Missouri are in reality citizens of Kansas; but all these efforts, so far as made, are only tokens of weakness, while to the original Crime they add another offence of false testimony against innocent and suffering men. But the Apologies for the Crime are worse than the efforts at denial. In essential heartlessness they identify their authors with the great iniquity.

They are four in number, and fourfold in character. The first is theApology tyrannical; the second, theApology imbecile; the third, theApology absurd; and the fourth, theApology infamous. This is all. Tyranny, imbecility, absurdity, and infamy all unite to dance, like the weird sisters, about this Crime.

TheApology tyrannicalis founded on the mistaken act of Governor Reeder, in authenticating the Usurping Legislature, by which it is asserted, that, whatever may have been the actual force or fraud in its election, the people of Kansas are effectually concluded, and the whole proceeding is placed under formal sanction of law. According to this assumption, complaint is now in vain, and it only remains that Congress should sit and hearken to it, without correcting the wrong, as the ancient tyrant listened and granted no redress to the human moans that issued from the heated brazen bull which subtile cruelty had devised. This I call the Apology of technicality inspired by tyranny.

The facts on this head are few and plain. Governor Reeder, after allowing only five days for objections to the returns,—a space of time unreasonably brief in that extensive Territory,—declared a majority of the members of the Council and of the House of Representatives “duly elected,” withheld certificates from certain others, because of satisfactory proof that they were not duly elected, and appointed a day for new elections to supply these vacancies. Afterwards, by formal message, he recognized the Legislature as a legal body, and when he vetoed their act of adjournment to the neighborhood of Missouri, he did it simply on the ground of illegality in such adjournment under the organic law. Now to every assumption founded on these facts there are two satisfactory replies:first, that no certificate of the Governor can do more than authenticate a subsisting legal act, without of itself infusing legality where the essence of legality is not already; and,secondly, that violence or fraud, wherever disclosed, vitiates completely every proceeding. In denying these principles, you place the certificate above the thing certified, and give a perpetual lease to violence and fraud, merely because at an ephemeral moment they are unquestioned. This will not do.

Sir, I am no apologist for Governor Reeder. There is sad reason to believe that he went to Kansas originally as tool of the President; but his simple nature, nurtured in the atmosphere of Pennsylvania, revolted at the service required, and he turned from his patron to duty. Grievously did he err in yielding to the Legislature any act of authentication; but in some measure he has answered for this error by determined effortsince to expose the utter illegality of that body, which he now repudiates entirely. It was said of certain Roman Emperors, who did infinite mischief in their beginnings and infinite good towards their end, that they should never have been born or never died; and I would apply the same to the official life of this Kansas Governor. At all events, I dismiss the Apology founded on his acts, as the utterance of Tyranny by the voice of Law, transcending the declaration of the pedantic judge, in the British Parliament, on the eve of our Revolution, that our fathers, notwithstanding their complaints, were in reality represented in Parliament, inasmuch as their lands, under the original charters, were held “in common socage, as of the manor of East Greenwich in Kent,” which, being duly represented, carried with it all the Colonies.[79]Thus in another age has Tyranny assumed the voice of Law.

Next comes theApology imbecile, which is founded on the alleged want of power in the President to arrest this Crime. It is openly asserted, that, under existing laws, the Chief Magistrate has no authority to interfere in Kansas for this purpose. Such is the broad statement, which, even if correct, furnishes no Apology for any proposed ratification of the Crime, but which is in reality untrue; and this I call the Apology of imbecility.

In other matters no such ostentatious imbecility appears. Only lately, a vessel of war in the Pacific haschastised the cannibals of the Feejee Islands for alleged outrage on American citizens. But no person of ordinary intelligence will pretend that American citizens in the Pacific have received wrongs from these cannibals comparable in atrocity to those suffered by American citizens in Kansas. Ah, Sir, the interests of Slavery are not touched by any chastisement of Feejees!

Constantly we are informed of efforts at New York, through the agency of the Government, and sometimes only on the breath of suspicion, to arrest vessels about to sail on foreign voyages in violation of our neutrality laws or treaty stipulations. Now no man familiar with the cases will presume to suggest that the urgency for these arrests is equal to the urgency for interposition against these successive invasions from Missouri. But the Slave Power is not disturbed by such arrests in New York.

At this moment the President exults in the vigilance with which he prevented the enlistment of a few soldiers, for transportation to Halifax, in breach of our territorial sovereignty, and England is bravely threatened, even to the extent of rupture of diplomatic relations, for her endeavor, though unsuccessful, and at once abandoned.[80]No man in his senses will urge that this act was anything but trivial by the side of the Crime against Kansas. But the Slave Power is not concerned in this controversy.

Thus, where the Slave Power is indifferent, the President will see that the laws are faithfully executed; but in other cases, where the interests of Slavery are at stake, he is controlled absolutely by this tyranny, ready at all times to do, or not to do, precisely as it dictates. Therefore it is that Kansas is left a prey to the Propagandists of Slavery, while the whole Treasury, the Army, and Navy of the United States are lavished to hunt a single slave through the streets of Boston. You have not forgotten the latter instance; but I choose to refresh it in your minds.

As long ago as 1851 the War Department and Navy Department concurred in placing the forces of the United States near Boston at the command of the Marshal, if needed for the enforcement of an Act of Congress which is without support in the public conscience, as I believe it without support in the Constitution; and thus these forces were degraded to the loathsome work of slave-hunters. More than three years afterwards an occasion arose for their intervention. A fugitive from Virginia, who for some days had trod the streets of Boston as a freeman, was seized as a slave. The whole community was aroused, while Bunker Hill and Faneuil Hall quaked with responsive indignation. Then, Sir, the President, anxious that no tittle of Slavery should suffer, was curiously eager in the enforcement of the statute. The despatches between him and his agents in Boston attest his zeal. Here are some of them.

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