USA > Kansas > A standard history of Kansas and Kansans, Volume I > Part 40
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No public action was ever taken to protect the American bison from the ravages of the hired hunter. From 1871 to 1876, Congress made several creditable efforts to do so, but was so hedged in and beset, that it utterly failed.
In 1889, there were only 635 wild unprotected buffalo in North America. Today, there are in existence, owing to stringent game-laws, something like four or five thousand head of bison. In the wild "bad- lands" and in such preserves as Yellowstone and in many private parks, they graze unmolested. Of all the millions of the buffalo, there remains only this pitiful remnant.
There have been many plans for domesticating and keeping the buffalo. Most of them were impracticable. While there is yet some bitterness over the unjust treatment and the complete passing of the buffalo from the plains, still there is this point to be considered.
The plains were needed by the increasing number of Americans, to supply homes, and food-stuffs for the rest of the world. This could not be while the buffalo roamed them in freedom. As all other factors in the world's progress, the buffalo had to yield to the necessities of man and the advance of his civilization. It is a piteous thing, and a tragic, this passing of the buffalo and the Great Plains. But it had to be. The two were compelled before the coming of the white settler.
But these two -- the Great Plains and the buffalo-are fixed features in the romances of the early days. The haze of passing time can never hide them. Indissoluably linked for all the coming ages, they offer yearning memories to the old hunters still living, and rich dreams of the boundless freedom and untrammeled life of pioneer times, to the romancer of the future.
CHAPTER XII
THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE
The "Louisiana Purchase" was not designed by Jefferson for imme- diate settlement by the white people. He believed the transaction he had concluded with France to be in conflict with the constitution. To correct this defect he proposed that Congress should pass a constitu- tional amendment. This amendment he prepared. It provided that all that portion of Louisiana west of the Mississippi River and cast of the Rocky Mountains, north of the thirty-second parallel should remain in the possession of the Indians inhabiting it, and that the tribes east of the Mississippi should be gradually moved into that reserved domain. The policy of removing the Eastern Indians to the country west of the Mississippi had its origin in the amendment, which, however, was never adopted. The policy was later put into effect, almost all the Indians living east of the Mississippi being forced to settle west of Arkansas and Missouri.
John C. Calhoun elaborated the plan proposed by Jefferson. In his report of 1825 he put forward his plan to invest the Indians with an inalienable title to the land west of the Missouri River north of the thirty-second parallel. In this plan he might have been sustained in that early day. But he had coupled with it another region. All that territory west of Lake Michigan was likewise to become Indian coun- try in perpetuity.
It will be seen that all the country to be forever excluded from white settlement lay in the free North-in the bounds wherein slavery could not be introduced-in which it had been proscribed and excluded by the Ordinance of 1787 and the Missouri Compromise. It is sup- posed that the loss of Texas to the prospective slave territory caused Calhoun to seek in this way to defeat the provisions of the Missouri Compromise.
The issues underlying the Missouri Compromise developed sud- denly and unexpectedly. Slavery had been so generously dealt with by Congress that the South considered the status of the institution fixed. Kentucky had been admitted as a slave State. A drastic fugi- tive-slave law had been passed in 1793. The cession of the Tennessee country by North Carolina had been accepted with the promise that slavery would not be prohibited in the state to be erected from it. And thereupon Tennessee was at once brought in as a slave state. Missis- sippi Territory was organized in 1798, and slavery was imbedded in the
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organic act. In 1803 Louisiana had been purchased with the under- standing that slavery should remain unmolested. In 1805 Congress had refused by a decisive vote to provide for the emancipation of the slaves in the District of Columbia. And, finally, Louisiana had been admitted as a slave state in 1812.
Slavery had disappeared in the North, and it was believed that it would do so in the South. This might have been the fate of the insti- tution but for the invention of the cotton gin, in 1793. An immense impetus was given cotton production. In this industry slave labor was extremely profitable. While the industries and the life of the people of the North were not influenced by slavery, it was the foundation of the industrial life of the South. It became the settled policy of the South to foster, push and fortify it in every possible way. It was made the para- mount consideration in every political question. It engrossed thie polit- ical energies of the South. This condition had been of gradual growth. Little had been heard of slavery in Congress after the passage of the law prohibiting the importation of slaves, in 1807.
So, there was surprise in the South when opposition arose in Con- gress to the admission of Missouri with a slave constitution. Slavery had been firmly established in the Territory. That it should be antag- onized when that Territory demanded statehood had not occurred to the statesmen of the slave-holding area of the Union. The application of Missouri for admission was presented in March, 1818. No action was had at that session. The next session began in December, 1818. One of the first bills introduced was one to organize Arkansas Territory with the boundary line of the thirty-six thirty north latitude. The Ohio River had been recognized as the line between free and slave soil. The north line of Arkansas as proposed in the bill, was nearly a prolonga- tion of that line, from the mouth of the Ohio.
The serious consideration of these bills did not begin until Febru- ary, 1819. Determined opposition to the slavery feature of the bills developed at once. James W. Talmadge, member of the House from New York, moved as an amendment to the Missouri bill, "that further introduction of slavery or involuntary servitude be prohibited and that all children of slaves born within the said state after the admission thercof into the Union shall be free." The members from the North saw no injustice in the amendment. Missouri lay north of the accepted line between free and slave soil. It was immediately west of the free State of Illinois. And the amendment was adopted, the bill being then sent to the Senate. The Arkansas bill was then taken up. The Tal- madge amendment was in substance proposed for it by John W. Taylor, also from New York. The motion was defeated only by the deciding vote of IIenry Clay, then Speaker of the House. At this juncture was offered the first proposal to fix by law a line between free and slave territory. It was suggested by McLane, of Delaware. Mr. Taylor accepted the suggestion and moved that slavery should be prohibited north of the parallel of thirty-six thirty. It became apparent that the House would not concur in that amendment, and Mr. Taylor with-
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drew it. The Arkansas bill was then passed and sent to the Senate. That body accepted the bill, but it rejected the Talmadge amendment to the Missouri bill. Congress then adjourned.
The debates had been earnest and even exciting in Congress. The whole country was aroused. Mass meetings were held in the North at which the extension of slavery was condemned. Meetings in the South invoked the Constitution and demanded the rights it guaran- teed, slavery being affirmed one of these. The legislatures of Dela- ware, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania passed resolu- tions protesting against the admission of Missouri with slavery.
The debates in Congress turned at times on the power of that body to pass the Talmadge amendment. It had power to "admit new states to this Union." Those favoring the amendment insisted that Congress had power to admit, which implied power to refuse to admit. They said this power had been in a measure exercised in the admission of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, they having been required to form constitu- tions prohibiting slavery. To this contention the South replied by asserting that principle which was later to be developed into the doc- trine of squatter-sovereignty-that Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois might under the Constitution, have insisted that they had the right to deter- mine for themselves what their domestic institutions should be. South- ern representatives argued that the right of Congress to fix terms upon which a state might came into the Union would establish a centralized despotism. The institutions of the states would be determined by Con- gress, which might or might not make them equal. They insisted that states coming into the Union must have the same powers possessed by the original states.
The Missouri question became the leading matter for consideration by the Congress which assembled in December, 1819. Maine had secured the consent of Massachusetts, of which she had been a part since 1677, to apply for admission into the Union as a state. In December, 1819, the application of Maine was submitted, and with it a copy of her con- stitution, which, of course, was anti-slavery. The house promptly passed the bill admitting Maine, and sent it to the Senate. When the Senate came to consider the Maine bill, the Missouri bill was attached to it as an amendment. This brought up the whole matter of the extension and restriction of slavery. The Senate rejected the Talmadge amend- ment, but it was clear that the main question must have some form of settlement. Otherwise, no states could be admitted as long as either party controlled one branch of Congress. As each branch was stand- ing firm in its attitude toward the bills as they then were, the only hope for action was in compromise. For the Talmadge amendment to the Missouri bill, Senator Jesse B. Thomas, of Illinois, proposed the fol- lowing amendment :
That in all that territory ceded by France to the United States under the name of Louisiana, which lies north of thirty-six degrees. thirty minutes, north latitude, not included within the limits of the state con- templated by this act, slavery and involuntary servitude, otherwise than
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in the punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been con- victed, shall be and is hereby forever prohibited.
There was a provision for the reclamation of fugitive slaves in the excluded territory.
This was the Missouri Compromise. By it Maine was admitted. Missouri was authorized to form a constitution and submit it for approval, when she would be formally admitted. This constitution was laid before Congress in 1821. It was found to contain a provision for- bidding free negroes from entering the state. This raised another trou- blesome question. For free negroes were citizens of the United States. The resolution admitting Missouri twice passed the Senate and was twice rejected by the Senate. On motion of Henry Clay a committee was appointed by the House to act with a committee to be appointed by the Senate to consider the new controversy over the admission of Missouri. The joint committee agreed on a report and brought in a resolution in favor of the admission of the State, "Upon the condition that her legislature should first deelare that the clause in her constitution relative to the free colored immigration into the State, should never be construed to authorize the passage of any act by which any citizen of either of the States of the Union should be excluded from the enjoyment of any privilege to which he may be entitled under the Constitution of the United States; and the President of the United States being furnished with a copy of said act, should, by proclama- tion, declare the State to be admitted."
This declaration was soon made by the legislature, and Missouri was admitted. There were, in fact, two compromises. The main ques- tion, however, is the one involving the national controversy. Its set- tlement is regarded as the Missouri Compromise. Its author was Sen- ator Jesse B. Thomas, of Illinois, and not Henry Clay, as has so often been asserted.
The South furnished the votes for the enactment of the Missouri Compromise and was for some time satisfied with that measure. But it was the beginning of the end of slavery in America. Southern states- men began to realize this some years later, and by the year 1850 they were willing to repeal it. This feeling grew until 1854, when they forced its repeal. To permit it to stand meant the ruin of slavery. In its repeal there might be a hope for the institution. The Compromise gave the South Arkansas and Texas for slavery west of the Mississippi. To freedom it consecrated a territory of vast extent, later to be increased, capable of furnishing many states.
The Missouri Compromise was the most important matter with which Congress had been required to deal to that time. It was a struggle for power between the North and the South. Jefferson said of it : "This momentous question like a fire bell in the night, awakened me and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed indeed for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line coinciding with a marked princi-
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ple, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry pas- sions of men will never be obliterated, and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper."
This prophecy burst into flames on the prairies of Kansas in 1855. The fires kindled there raged with uncontrollable fury until slavery was burned out of America.
CHAPTER XIII
THE COMPROMISE OF 1850
The first serious incident in the slavery controversy after the Missouri Compromise grew out of the War with Mexico. In 1846 President Polk applied to Congress for two million dollars with which to promote a peace with Mexico, and at the same time secure a large amount of Mexi- can territory. This territory was to be acquired in the interest of Slavery. David Wilmot, a Democratic Member of the House, from Pennsylvania, offered the following amendment to the bill: "Provided, That, as an express and fundamental condition. to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico by the United States in virtue of any treaty which may be negotiated between them, and to the use by the Executive of the monies herein appropriated, neither slavery nor involuntary servi- tude shall ever exist in any part of said territory except for crime, whereof the party shall first be duly convicted."
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Thus was the whole slavery matter precipitated for debate in Congress and discussion in the country. The Proviso was immediately championed by the North and utterly condemned in the South. Except that of Iowa, the legislatures of the free States passed resolutions affirming that Congress had power to prohibit slavery in all the Territories of the Union, and it was its duty to do so. The country was divided for the first time on sectional lines, and the Proviso was defeated. The first threat of slavery to resort to actual war was uttered by the legislature of Virginia in the consideration of the Wilmot Proviso.
The questions raised by the Proviso were avoided in the Presidential election of 1848. The convention which nominated Lewis Cass for the Presidency on the Democratic ticket voted down a resolution condemning thie Proviso, and adopted a strict-construction platform. The Whigs did not adopt a platform, but nominated Zachary Taylor, a slaveholder and a Louisiana planter. He was elected. While the issue was slavery, it was not in the form it later assumed. At that time the opponents of slavery were not in favor of abolition, but opposed its extension. That was, in fact, the intent of the Wilmot Proviso.
The vast territory ceded us by Mexico brought many troublesome questions with it. Gold was discovered in California in 1848. The influx of population as a consequence created the need of a sufficient government there. In the first attempt to form a State government the people de- clared against slavery. Then, what form of government should be pro- vided for the remainder of the Mexican cession? Coming up with these
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were other problems. The North had hoped to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, while the South demanded a more stringent Fugi- tive-slave law.
These questions came before the Congress of 1850 for settlement. The Senate was favorable to the contentions of the South, but the House stood against the extension of slavery. Neither side could secure the enactment of its desires. A compromise was the only peaceful recourse. This was proposed by Henry Clay, then a Senator from Kentucky. Through his efforts the following settlement was effected :
1. California was admitted as a free State.
2. New Mexico and Utah were organized as territories to be admitted as States with or without slavery as their constitutions might provide when application for statehood was made.
3. The Slave trade in the District of Columbia was prohibited, but it was declared inexpedient to abolish slavery in the District.
4. A very severe Fugitive-slave law was enacted.
In addition there was the declaration that Congress had no power over the interstate slave trade and could not prohibit it. And Texas was paid $10,000,000 to relinquish her claims to a portion of New Mexico.
All these provisions had been embodied in what was known at the time as the "Omnibus Bill," which was defeated. The result was attained by separate measures. Daniel Webster committed political suicide in the delivery of his "Seventh-of March" speech on these questions. He took refuge in the climatic defense of slavery, as did Governor Robert J. Walker of Kansas, a few years later, saying that slavery was excluded from the territory under consideration by "the law of Nature, of physical geography, the law of the formation of the earth."
The Compromise of 1850 destroyed the Whig party. The execution of the Fugitive-slave law of that year disgusted the North, and the Whig party, being charged with the responsibility of its enactment, was in due course abandoned and wrecked.
CHAPTER XIV
THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT
The country of which Kansas was a part was known as early as 1844 as "The Platte Country." It was inevitable that the whites should sooner or later demand that country for settlement. The two great trails across the continent passed through it. Knowledge of its fertility and suitability for settlement gradually spread over the United States. Not- withstanding the fact that the eastern portion of it abutting on the State of Missouri had been given to Emigrant. Indian tribes, many people believed that it should be thrown open to white occupation. In the year 1844 the Secretary of War recommended the organization of a territorial government for that part of the country lying immediately West of the State of Missouri.1 Mr. Douglas was a member of the House Commit- tee on Territories. On the 17th of December, 1844, he introduced a bill to establish the Territory of Nebraska. The bill was referred in the usual manner, and an amendatory bill was reported January 7, 1845. This bill was referred to the Committee of the Whole on the State of the Union, but no further action was ever had on it. The country embraced in the Territory of Nebraska, as defined in the bill, extended from thirty-six thirty to what is now the north line of the State of Nebraska.
No other effort was made to organize a territory from the Platte Country until 1848. In the meantime Mr. Douglas had been elected
1 The suggestion of "Nebraska" for the name of a territory was made by Hon. William Wilkins, Secretary of War under President Tyler. This is the original mention of Nebraska in connection with the territory to be organized in that country between the states of Missouri and Iowa and the crest of the Rocky Mountains. In his report dated November 30, 1844, he discussed at some length the exploration of Lieutenant Fremont. He was moved to this discussion by the disinclination manifested by Congress to organize a Territorial Government for Oregon. He believed that the organization of Nebraska Territory and the extension westward of military posts, would strengthen the claim of the United States on the Oregon country. He said in his report: "A territorial organiza- tion of the country, and a military force placed on the very summit, whence flows all the great streams of the North American Continent. either into the Gulf of Mexico or the Pacific Ocean, would no longer leave our title to the Oregon territory a barren or untenable claim. Its possession and occupancy would thenceforth not depend upon the naval superiority on the Pacific Ocean. Troops and supplies from the pro- jected Nebraska Territory would be able to contend for its possession with any force coming from the sea."
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Senator from Illinois. A bill which he had introduced in the Senate to establish the Territory of Nebraska was made the order of the day for April 24, 1848, but no action was ever had on it.
On the 4th of December, 1848, Mr. Douglas gave notice in the Senate that he would prepare and introduce another bill for the organization of Nebraska Territory. The bill was introduced on the 20th of December, 1848, but no action was ever taken by the Senate on that bill.
The introduction of these bills increased the demand for the organiza- tion of a territory west of Missouri. In some of the Emigrant Indian tribes having reservations there, men of education and influence were to be found. This was especially true of the Shawnees, Delawares and Wyandots. They comprehended their condition, and plainly diseerned the tendeneies of the time. Only an invisible line separated them from the people of Missouri. There were missions in the reservations of these tribes where good schools were maintained. Among the Wyandots especially, there were a number of excellent business men. There was not so much as a quarter-blood Indian in the entire tribe. Many of the Wyandots had very little Indian blood. They had sought the country in the fork of the Missonri and Kansas rivers because of its proximity to civilization. They erected comfortable dwellings, and they had an estab- lished government of their own, which was very nearly as good as any in the states. A number of the Wyandots engaged in business at Westport, and, later, at the Kansas Landing, which finally beeame Kansas City, Missouri. These people realized that the organization of a territory for the country in which they lived would enhance the value of their lands. They understood perfeetly that the government would eventually find a way to divest them of their reservation as it had done in the ease of all the tribes east of the Mississippi River. They were not averse to being ineInded in an organized state or territory.
The people of Missouri were more interested in the organization of a territory adjoining their Western frontier than those of any other state. The organization of this territory soon became a political issue in Mis- souri. Thomas H. Benton was the great Senator from that state at the time. IIe had served nearly thirty years. He had favored slavery, but had become more liberal in his views with passing time. When the Demo- «ratie party was made a pro-slavery party Benton was no longer in accord with it. Two factions developed in the party in Missouri. One was lead by Benton, while the other was led by David R. Atchison. With Atchi- son were a number of men who had assisted in carrying the Demoeratie party over to the extreme slavery interests. Among these were William C. Priee, of Greene County, and Claiborne F. Jackson. These men re- solved to drive Senator Benton from publie life. They eaused to be intro- dneed in the General Assembly in December, 1848, what became known as the "Jackson Resolutions, " for the purpose of "instructing Benton ont of the Senate." These resolutions affirmed that the actions of the Nor- thern states on the subject of slavery had released the slaveholding states from all further adherence to the basis of the Missouri Compro- mise. Also that the right to prohibit slavery in any territory belonged
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exclusively to the people thereof to be expressed and exercised by them in forming their constitution for admission as a state. Also that the passage of any act of Congress conflicting with the principles of these resolutions would force Missouri to act with the other Southern states against the encroachments of "Northern fanaticism." The sixth resolu- tion instructed the representatives of Missouri to act in conformity with the resolutions. These resolutions were prepared by the followers of Senator Calhoun, of South Carolina, and who were active in the slavery propaganda which was taking possession of the Democratic party. They were formulated by William C. Price.2
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