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AMERICAN COMMONWEALTHS Edited by HORACE E. SCUDDER
GEN
ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 00083 0973
Gc 978.1 Sp82ka Spring, Leverett Whison, 1840- Kansas
A
1/21905
American Commonwealths.
EDITED BY
HORACE E. SCUDDER.
102"
101
100"
99*
Longitude
West 98' from
Greenwich
97
96*
95
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KANSAS TO ACCOMPANY
LEVERETT W. SPRING'S
KANSAS in AMERICAN COMMONWEALTHS.
Plattsmouth
WV
4
Nebraska City
A
Missour
ST. JOSEPH
Beaver
Columbus
Medicine
American Commonwealths
KANSAS
THE PRELUDE TO THE WAR FOR THE UNION
BY
LEVERETT W. SPRING
PROFESSOR IN ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS
PER
ASTRA
ASPERA
BOSTON HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY New York : 11 East Seventeenth Street Che Riverside Press, Cambridge 1885
Allen County Public Library Ft. Wayne, Indiana
978.1 Tp 8
Copyright, 1885, BY LEVERETT W. SPRING.
All rights reserved.
The Riverside Press, Cambridge : Electrotyped and Printed by II. O. Houghton & Co.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER L 5
PAGE
PRELIMINARY
.
CHAPTER II.
THE FIELD .
.
.
17
CHAPTER IIL
DRIVING DOWN STAKES
.
€
.
24
CHAPTER IV.
LESSONS IN POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY
.
37
CHAPTER V.
COUNTER-MOVES
.
.
. 59
CHAPTER VI.
WAR ON THE WAKARUSA .
.
79
CHAPTER VII.
SOME HEAVY BLOWS
.
.
. 102
CHAPTER VIII.
DUTCH HENRY'S CROSSING, BLACK JACK, AND OSAWAT-
OMIE
.
.
. 137
. CHAPTER IX.
PER ASPERA
.
.
. 163
iv
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER X.
PAGE . 209
THE LECOMPTON STRUGGLE
CHAPTER XI.
JAYHAWKING
. 237
CHAPTER XII.
CLOSE OF THE TERRITORIAL PERIOD . . 257
CHAPTER XIII.
DURING THE WAR FOR THE UNION . . 268
CHAPTER XIV.
AD ASTRA
.
.
. . 306
BIBLIOGRAPHY
. . 323
INDEX . . . . . . . . 329
PREFATORY NOTE.
-
THE limits prescribed for this volume have not permitted a minutely detailed account of the Kansas struggle. I have endeavored to exhibit the logic and spirit of "the first actual national conflict between slaveholding and free-labor im- migrants," rather than to attempt an exhaustive collection of facts. Newspaper files, public doc- uments, books, manuscripts that promised to throw light upon the subject have been carefully examined. A large amount of material has been derived from personal intercourse with men of all parties who helped to make the history of Kansas. If my version of it should not prove to be colored with the dyes in vogue twenty- five years ago, I beg the reader to bear in mind that there is too much truth in what Theodore Parker said in 1856, at the anniversary of the Anti-Slavery Society, concerning the Kansas busi- ness, - " I know of no transaction in human
vi
PREFATORY NOTE.
history which has been covered up with such abundant lying, from the death of Ananias and Sapphira down to the first nomination of Gov- ernor Gardner."
The map which accompanies this volume is designed to illustrate the text, rather than to exhibit the Kansas of to-day. It shows the chief places of historic interest, - some of which no longer exist.
L. W. S.
STATE UNIVERSITY, LAWRENCE, KANSAS,
September, 1885.
KANSAS.
-
CHAPTER I.
PRELIMINARY.
THE eminent Union-savers, who devised and car- ried through Congress the compromise of 1850, fully expected that it would drive the question of slavery totally and permanently out of national politics. They drained their vocabulary in ap- plauding that wonderful specific which involved the enactment of a stringent fugitive slave law ; the admission of California with a free-labor constitution ; the organization of Utah and New Mexico as territories on the basis of popular sov- ereignty ; and the removal of slave marts from the District of Columbia. When at last it received the sanction of Congress, Henry Clay, drawn from retirement by the stress of public affairs to undertake a mission of pacification, felicitated the country upon the peace which quickly followed and gave promise of permanence. General Lewis Cass did not believe that "any party could now be built up in relation to the question of slavery."
2
KANSAS.
He even contemplated the extraordinary self-de- nial of making no more speeches about it. To put the matter beyond recall; to breathe against the great disturber
" The hopeless word of - never to return,"
forty-four members of the thirty-first Congress, including many leading politicians of the South, solemnly and publicly pledged themselves to op- pose the candidacy of any man for the office of president, vice-president, congressman, or state legislator who should favor "a renewal of sec- tional controversy upon the subject of slavery." In 1852 Whig and Democratic conventions struck hands in eulogizing the compromise, and resolved that mankind should be dumb in regard to the wrongs of the negro. The triumphant election of Franklin Pierce as president turned upon the popular conviction, that he was more unqualifiedly in sympathy with the policy and measures of con- ciliation than his illustrious rival.
But the drowsy syrups of compromise were swallowed in vain. The conflict, which no genius of skillful temporizing could effectually stifle, after a brief and uneasy repose broke out afresh. Slavery, so recently and so impressively banned from the halls of national legislation, returned thither almost before the applause that greeted its exile had died away. In the Senate, December 4th, 1853, A. C. Dodge of Iowa offered a bill, of the usual form and purport, for the organization of
3
PRELIMINARY.
Nebraska - a measure unsuccessfully attempted during the preceding session. After considera- tion by the Committee on Territories, of which Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois was chairman, the bill reappeared in the Senate January 4th, 1854, variously amended and accompanied by an elabo- rate disquisition upon the status of slavery in the public domain.
Though Mr. Douglas did not leave his theo- ries in doubt, and insisted that the compromise of 1850 reposed on principles of congressional non- action in the territories, yet he shrank from defi- nite, downright announcement that the compro- mise of 1820 was at an end. By the terms of that adjustment Missouri came into the Union as a slave state, but all unoccupied portions of the old Louisiana province north of the parallel 36° Jan- 30' were perpetually reserved for freedom. uary 16th, Senator Dixon of Kentucky, dissatis- fied with the hesitation of the bill, offered an amendment that directly assailed the Missouri restriction. Douglas finally espoused the bolder policy - not without reluctance and uncomfort- able augury. "I have become perfectly satisfied," he said to Dixon, "that it is my duty as a fair- minded national statesman to cooperate with you as proposed, in procuring the repeal of the Mis- souri Compromise restriction. It is due to the South; it is due to the constitution ; it is due to
4
KANSAS.
that character of consistency which I have here- tofore labored to maintain. The repeal, if we can effect it, will produce much stir in the free states of the Union for a season. Every opprobri- ous epithet will be applied to me. I shall prob- ably be hung in effigy. . . This proceeding may end my political career. But acting under the sense of duty which actuates me, I am prepared to make the sacrifice."
Douglas recalled the bill, which was subjected to repeated and essential revisions. In its ulti- mate form, as reported from the workshop of the committee February 7th, it cancelled the Missouri Compromise; cut Nebraska into halves - styling the southern section Kansas and the northern Nebraska; and enunciated the doctrine that citi- zens of the United States, peopling the territories, have plenary jurisdiction over all their domestic institutions.
The debate which instantly sprang up on the reappearance of the slavery question in Congress - inferior to none of its predecessors in violence or duration of parliamentary noise- fell below the contest of 1850 in freshness of thought and ex- pression. It affords no exhibition of scenical and oratorical tableaux so memorable as when Cal- houn, wrecked in health but with intellect and power of will still unbroken, listened to the reading of his last speech, thickly sown with anx- ieties and ill-boding ; as when Daniel Webster on
5
PRELIMINARY.
the 7th of March rallied all the splendid forces of his oratory and renown for an assault on the anti- slavery movement - the tendency and outcome of which had been " not to enlarge, but to restrain, not to set free but to bind faster, the slave popu- lation of the South."
Douglas did not assume a new rôle by leading the crusade against congressional restriction in the territories. He bore a distinguished part in the compromise of 1850, of which popular sover- eignty constituted a prominent if not paramount feature. Alexander H. Stephens, who has given in his " War between the States " interesting de- tails not generally known of its evolution through private conferences between representative men of the North and the South, argues with apparent conclusiveness that popular sovereignty " was the compromise of that year ; " that "the other asso- ciated measures all depended upon it." Mr. Doug- las, as chairman of the Senate Committee on Ter- ritories, introduced bills for the organization of Utah and New Mexico in harmony with the con- ference adjustments. " A few weeks afterward," he said in a speech March 3d, 1854, " the committee of thirteen took these two bills and put a wafer between them and reported them back to the Senate as one bill, with some slight amendments. One of these amendments was that the territorial legislatures should not legislate upon the subject of African slavery. I objected to that provision
6
KANSAS.
upon the ground that it subverted the great prin- ciple of self-government upon which the bill had been originally framed by the territorial commit- tee. On the first trial the Senate refused to strike it out, but subsequently did so, after full debate, in order to establish that principle as the rule of action in territorial organizations." William H. Seward, silent on this particular point during the earlier stages of the Kansas struggle, substantially admitted at a later period all that Stephens and Douglas claimed. The pacification of 1850, he repeatedly conceded, secured for Utah and New Mexico " the right to choose freedom or slavery when ripened into states."
While Douglas possessed some capital qualifi- cations for leadership; while his resources em- braced remarkable endowments of rude, boister- ous, half-educated force, of invincible self-as- sertion, of insolent and unsurpassed dexterity in the practices of forensic gladiatorship, yet he was weak in those essential qualities and inspira- tions that spring out of a profound ethical convic- tion. In regard to the moral aspects of slavery, which stirred the conscience of the civilized world, he affected a phlegmatic, nonchalant sentiment - an indifference whether it was voted up or down in the territories.
Southern congressmen, reinforced by liberal Democratic contingents from the North, rallied with enthusiasm in support of popular sovereignty.
7
PRELIMINARY.
This doctrine had been uncordially received by all parties on its appearance in the arena of politics. " Well do I remember," said Thomas H. Benton in the House of Representatives, April 25th, 1854, " the day when it was first shown in the Senate. Mark Antony did not better remember the day when Cæsar first put on that mantle through which he was afterwards pierced with three and twenty envious stabs. It was in the Senate in 1848, and was received . . . as the quintessence of nonsense." In 1854 Southern political sentiment blew from an opposite quarter. Then Southern leaders accepted popular sovereignty with enthu- siasm as a providential expedient for the defense and extension of their social institutions. They argued that Congress had no legitimate compe- tency to draw lines of restriction across the public domain, which excluded one half of the country from fair and equal occupancy of it; that the Missouri Compromise was in no sense a compact, as it lacked every element of state and party con- sent ; that the principle of popular sovereignty, the right of communities, state and territorial, to legislate for themselves, is distinctly and emphat- ically an American doctrine; that it was the issue at stake in the colonial struggle with Great Brit- ain and in the crisis of 1850; that the much-quoted anti-slavery sentimentalities of the fathers of the republic carry little weight because notable ad- vances in sociology have been made since their day,
8
KANSAS.
because the domestic institutions of the South, tested by a wider experience, are seen to embody and define the great race-subordinations of nature. Besides, the geographical makeshift failed to tran- quillize sectional disturbances, as it furnished abo- litionists a precedent for intermeddling. " It is a disunion line," said Representative Caskie of Vir- ginia. " No, sir," exclaimed Senator Butler of South Carolina, "instead of Peace standing on the Missouri line with healing in her wings and olive- branches in her hands, it has been Electra with snakes hissing from her head and the torch of dis- cord in her hand."
The champions of popular sovereignty disa- greed as to the time when the inhabitants of a territory might constitutionally exercise the right "to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way." Current Southern construc- tions, which the Supreme Court afterwards con- firmed, maintained that nothing could be done previous to the formation of a state constitution. Douglas insisted, on the contrary, that the people could act legally and effectively whenever they pleased. Among the questions propounded to him by Abraham Lincoln in the joint debates of 1858, there was one which touched this point. Douglas replied that as slavery could not exist a day nor an hour anywhere, unless supported by local police regulations which the territorial legis- lature must establish, the people need only elect
9
PRELIMINARY.
anti-slavery representatives effectually to balk the introduction of it, whatever course the Supreme Court might pursue. In other words, decisions of the highest legal tribunal could be successfully evaded.
Congressional opposition to the Kansas-Ne- braska legislation marshaled chiefly under three leaders, - Sumner, Chase, and Seward. Other well-known men, like Samuel Houston, John Bell, Thomas H. Benton, and Edward Everett, were among the dissenters; but the trio, inferior to none of their associates in ability, and representa- tive of a more radical antagonism to slavery than was in repute among them, passed easily and nat- urally into leadership.
In Charles Sumner, brilliant, scholarly, persist- ent, courageous, impassioned, at home in tasks of rhetoric rather than of statesmanship, - suffusing his opinions with personal intensities that some- times passed over into intolerance, - the fiercer, extremer phases of anti-slaveryism found fitting utterance.
Salmon P. Chase, a man of large, roundabout, intellectual mould, came up out of Democratic antecedents, from the influence of which he was never wholly emancipated. Persuaded that the Whigs could not be roused to take the field against Southern encroachments, he purposed to recruit the Democratic party for that service. The dream proved sufficiently unrealizable. Nei-
1
10
KANSAS.
ther Whigs nor Democrats were prepared to en- list in anti-slavery enterprises. Despairing of the older parties if abandoned to the impulse of in- clination and bias, he threw himself into the Free- Soil movement with an expectation of holding them to the slavery problem by some balance-of- power tactics. Though Chase's radicalism did not fall much below Sumner's theoretically, yet a cooler, more judicial and practical temperament gave it less violent and exasperating tongue.
William H. Seward did not rank himself among abolitionists, though in the debate of 1850 he pronounced " all legislative compromises radically wrong and essentially vicious," and enunciated the doctrine of a higher law in which constitutions as well as statutes must be read, - sentiments that naturally would have driven him into their camp. But a cool, sagacious conservatism, a corrective, unfanatical habit of looking before and after, qual- ified his radicalism and held it down to consti- tutional methods. He was content to let slavery alone so long as it remained within the ring-fence of stipulated boundaries. Keen, adroit, felicitous in diction, endued with unmistakable intuitions of statesmanship, at times soaring into regions of philosophico-poetic inspiration, he was surpassed by no contemporary politician in comprehension of the present or in forecast of the future.
These men and their coadjutors, opponents of the Kansas-Nebraska bill, protested that the cir-
11
PRELIMINARY.
cumstances under which the restrictive Missouri legislation originated, the sanction of Monroe's administration in which Calhoun figured, the re- peated acts of congressional recognition and re- affirmation, all conspired to clothe it with the moral force of a constitutional provision. That the latest pacification wrecked the compact of thirty years before they indignantly denied. "It is said," remarked Benton of Missouri, "that the measures of 1850 superseded this compromise of 1820. ... If it was repealed in 1850, why do it over again in 1854? Why kill the dead ?" There was voluminous argument that slavery existed by virtue of local legislation only, which had no extra-state validity ; that in the territories, under- age wards of the general government for whom no inconsiderable fraction of their civil machinery is provided arbitrarily and without consultation, popular sovereignty in the nature of things must be fragmentary and delusive; that the federal con- stitution, interpreted by the utterances and meas- ures of the men who made it, is not committed to slavery, but dips unmistakably toward liberty. The possible, nay probable consequences of a war upon the Missouri settlement - consequences even gathering, darkening, turmoiling,
" As clouds grow on the blast, Like tower-crowned giants striding fast "- were luridly set forth. Unspeakable calamities would follow this profane attempt to remove an-
12
KANSAS.
cient land-marks. " It will light up a fire in the country," said Mr. Chase, with a touch of prophecy in his words, "which may consume those who kindled it."
The debate, which began in January and ter- minated on the morning of May 26th with a con- tinuous discussion in the Senate of thirteen hours, was emphatically an affair in which there were " blows to take as well as blows to give." How- ever triumphant the anti-slavery argument may have been along ethical and humanitarian lines, it was not equally successful in other parts of the field. The Missouri Compromise hinged upon de- grees of latitude and longitude, upon the principle of parceling unorganized portions of the country between the North and the South. It was not, to say the least, an ideal basis of settlement for ques- tions surcharged with gravest moral considera- tions. That the enemies of slavery in 1848 and again in 1850 should have declined to expand "the time-honored and venerated policy of a geograph- ical line " into a rule of universal application is not surprising. The past of the Missouri Compromise must not be disturbed, but they moved heaven and earth to hedge it out of an enlarged future. In fact, their creed of territorial philosophy was -no more slave states. The compromise of 1850, however, rejected all articles of restriction, and sanctioned the principle of popular sovereignty. The adoption of a new policy, applying to terri-
13
PRELIMINARY.
tories in the main but not literally, and absolutely untouched by the elder agreement, may not have technically snuffed out the compact of 1820, though such eminent legal authorities as Rufus Choate and Daniel Webster are quoted in the affirmative. Yet, practically, the effect of it could only be to overlay and obliterate the Mis- souri bargain. Mr. Douglas, in the bill organiz- ing Kansas and Nebraska, simply followed the latest precedent.
The congressional pother, which resulted in the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska bill by a vote of thirty-seven ayes to fourteen nays in the Senate and of one hundred and thirteen ayes to one hun- dred nays in the House of Representatives, roused intense excitement throughout the North, where popular sovereignty had an evil, pro-slavery repu- tation. Conventions, town-meetings, state legis- latures denounced the repeal of the Missouri Com- promise. Clergymen in great numbers and of all denominations swelled the chorus of protest, a spectacle that caused much unfriendly comment in conservative quarters. " Alas, alas," lamented William M. Tweed of New York in the House of Representatives, " such a profanation of the American pulpit was never before known. The head of the devout follower droops." Northern congressmen who befriended the Nebraska busi- ness generally found life a burden. In newspa- pers of the day lists of these reprobates appeared
14
KANSAS.
bordered with black lines and annotated with un- eulogizing comments. Mr. Douglas's rueful pre- monition that storms of indignation and wrath would assail him was signally fulfilled. "I could then travel," he said in an address at Spring- field, Illinois, during the summer of 1858, "from Boston to Chicago by the light of my own effi- gies."
The immediate political consequences of the Kansas-Nebraska agitation were startling. It ut- terly overthrew the Whig party and reduced the Democratic party from national to sectional rank. " Where are the men of the North," asked Repre- sentative English of Indiana during the Lecomp- ton debate in 1858, " who voted for the Kansas- Nebraska bill in this House? I look around this hall in vain for their familiar faces. The gentle- man from Pennsylvania and myself ... are the only persons voting for the bill who have retained seats on this floor. And in the Senate I am told but one Northern man who voted for it has been reelected. Sir, the passage of that bill was fol- lowed by an overwhelming defeat of the Democ- racy in all the Northern States."
But to these destructive and crippling tenden- cies a remarkable antithesis appeared, in the in- tegration of Northern anti-slavery sentiment that ensued. The pioneers of abolitionism purposely and persistently devoted themselves to tasks of agitation - to the creation of anti-slavery senti-
15
PRELIMINARY.
ment in the North -a measure successfully prose- cuted in the face of the most formidable difficul- ties - and to the exasperation of the South, " so that every step she takes, in her blindness, is one step more toward ruin." Statesmen they were in the unpartisan, ethical, future-moulding sense of that word -politicians they declined to be. By the very necessities of their mission they were dedicated to comparative isolation - solitary knights bestriding
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