USA > Kansas > Kansas : the prelude to the war for the union > Part 4
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Reeder soon afterwards visited Washington, where his reputation needed attention. President Pierce and Jefferson Davis, secretary of war, dis- liked the situation in Kansas, the responsibility for which they charged principally upon the gov- ernor. Missourians posted to the capital, grew red in the face denouncing him, and would listen to nothing less than his removal. The president intimated that his resignation would be accepta- ble, and should not fail of suitable reward. Might not the mission to China have attractions for him ?
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The negotiations failed. Reeder finally declined to present himself as a burnt-offering to the ad- ministration and returned to Kansas.
July 2, 1855, the first territorial legislature as- sembled at Pawnee, a town of the smallest real- ized attainments, situated inland on the Kansas River about one hundred and forty miles from its mouth. Preparations to accommodate the law- makers were of a scanty and primitive character. Rev. Thomas Johnson, long time missionary to the Indians at Shawnee Mission Manual Labor School and president of the council, states that "nearly all the members of the legislature had to camp out in the open sun, and do their own cooking without a shade tree to protect them ; for there were no boarding-houses in the neigh- borhood excepting two unfinished shanties." The gentry came prepared for roughing it, as they brought an unprecedented assortment of legislato- rial fixtures - pots, kettles, sauce-pans, provisions, and tents.
The supplementary elections ordered by the governor and held May 22d, since the pro-slavery party did not contest them, resulted in a complete free-state victory. At the outset, therefore, the legislature contained twenty-eight pro-slavery and eleven anti-slavery members. As a preliminary move in the policy of repudiation, strong pressure was brought to bear upon the latter to prevent them from taking their seats. These efforts were
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unsuccessful, except in the case of Martin F. Conway, who was finally induced, after a good deal of reluctance and hesitation, mainly through the insistent if not imperative urgency of Dr. Robinson and Colonel Kersey Coates, of Kansas City, to send in his resignation to the governor as member of the council. Mr. Conway's highly- charged phrases and defiant sentiments show no trace of the dubious, irresolute state of mind that preceded his discussions with Robinson and Coates. " Instead of recognizing this as the legislature of Kansas," he wrote June 30th, 1855, " and par- ticipating in its proceedings as such, I utterly re- pudiate it, and repudiate it as derogatory to the respectability of popular government and insult- ing to the virtue and intelligence of the age. . . . I am so unfortunate as to have been trained to some crude notions of human rights -some such notions as those for which, in ages past, our fool- ish ancestry periled their lives on revolutionary fields. . . . Simply as a citizen and a man I shall, therefore, yield no submission to this alien legis- lature. On the contrary, I am ready to set its as- sumed authority at defiance, and shall be prompt to spurn and trample under my feet its insolent enactments whenever they conflict with my rights or inclinations."
To the homespun, brown-fisted, doing-its-own work legislature at Pawnee Governor Reeder ad- dressed a sonorous and courtly message. He ex-
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horted the statesmen there convened " to lay aside all selfish and equivocal motives, to discard all un- worthy ends, and in the spirit of justice and char- ity to each other, with pure hearts, tempered feel- ings, and sober judgments," to enter upon their duties.
The legislature, as soon as an organization had been effected, gave attention to the ten remaining anti-slavery members. Nine were summarily un- seated and their places filled by the men to whom Governor Reeder denied certificates. A solitary Free-Soiler -S. D. Houston - kept his place un- til July 22d, when he retired, as " to retain a seat in such circumstances would be . . . a condescen- sion too inglorious for the spirit of an American freeman," and left the legislature unvexed by po- litical heresy or schism.
At Pawnee the legislature attempted little ex- cept the expulsion of obnoxious members. After a session of only four days - reports that cholera had appeared in the neighborhood materially con- tributing to the discontent - there was an adjourn- ment to Shawnee Mission, where it reassembled July 16th.
It was this adjournment which led Governor Reeder to break with the legislature. Though the members of it had been elected by notorious invasions from Missouri, that scarlet political of- fense could be absolved ; he could still hope that they would escape all unworthy conduct, "save
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that which springs from the inevitable fallibility of just and upright men ; " but when, in the phrase of Toombs of Georgia, " they removed from Reeder's town to somebody else's town," then was there committed a monstrous and unforgivable sin. To be in the wrong place destroyed the constitu- tionality of the legislature. The circumstance that Governor Reeder was financially interested in the success of Pawnee, which the action of the legislature ruined, furnished his enemies with a convenient text for abusive discourse. Yet the more probable explanation of the matter is that, repenting of his blunder in failing to set aside the March election, he took advantage of the adjourn- ment, which was at the expense of some techni- calities, as the most plausible excuse at hand for parting company with the legislature.
Nothing in the work of the legislature at Shaw- nee Mission has any flavor of originality - unless the slave-code be excepted. A natural instinct led it to transfer to Kansas almost in bulk the statutes of Missouri. That was in harmony with Atchison's frank confession - " I and my friends wish to make Kansas in all respects like Mis- souri." The pro-slavery managers steeped their slave-code in despotism. Uncertain of the future, confronted by vague, indefinite perils - perils which, like clouds on the horizon no bigger than a man's hand, might dissolve or blacken the heav- ens with storm - they went nervously to work and
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ran into absurd extremes of precaution and strin- gency. In their code two years of imprisonment would expiate the crime of kidnapping and selling into bondage a free colored man, but death was denounced against him who aided in the escape of a slave. To question the right of slave-holding in Kansas might draw upon the querist's head pains of felony. A citizen could be disfranchised should he decline taking oath to support the Fu- gitive Slave Law-thus impertinently enlarging the area of penalty in a federal enactment. The statesmen at Shawnee Mission succeeded in mak- ing "the enunciation of the great and eternal principles of liberty a penitentiary offense." Their code struck at the liberty of the press, at freedom of speech, and the sanctities of the ballot- box. And not the least singular feature of this extraordinary legislation is that according to the official publication of 1855 the territorial gov- ernor had no power to pardon offenses against it. In the act of Congress organizing the ter- ritory of Kansas it was provided, that the gov- ernor " may grant pardons and respites for of- fenses against the laws of said territory, and re- prieves for offenses against the laws of the United States until the decision of the president can be known thereon." In " The Statutes of the Terri- tory of Kansas," printed at Shawnee Mission in 1855, the congressional act of organization is re- published, and from design or accident the clause is made to read - the governor " may grant par-
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dons and respites for offenses against the laws of the United States, until the decision of the pres- ident can be known thereon." Free-state men charged that the mutilation was intentional, and one of their first measures on getting possession of the legislature was to order the publication of a correct copy of the organic act.
The legislature and its allies successfully prose- cuted their quarrel with Governor Reeder, who re- ceived notice of his removal from office August 15th. In the fight they had effective aid from the territorial supreme court, which decided the removal of the capital to be constitutional. The grievances, which did duty in public as the cause of Reeder's removal, were charges of delay in reaching the territory and in getting the govern- ment under way, of usurpation, lack of sympathy with the people, and land-speculation ; but the real difficulty was that he did not submit tamely and obediently to pro-slavery dictation.
Governor Reeder's administration ran
its troubled course in less than a year. It achieved no very signal success. That were perhaps im- possible in the condition of the territory - hope- less as a child's freak to stamp out a spring bub- bling up under stones. Unquestionably it was beyond the reach of a man, without preeminent endowments of insight, adaptation, or executive force - a stranger to border life, suddenly thrust into the wilderness with a commission to smother outbreaks of the irrepressible conflict.
CHAPTER V.
COUNTER-MOVES.
MISSOURIANS felicitated themselves upon the state of affairs in Kansas, upon a legislature unan- imously, fanatically pro-slavery, upon a judiciary not at all unfriendly, upon an executive depart- ment purged of an obnoxious incumbent. Free- state men certainly found themselves confronted by a very grave question - what course shall be pursued in the emergency ? Few and beggarly were the signs of promise visible for them. Their cause seemed to have foundered. Something should be done, but what ?
The line of policy adopted - repudiation of the territorial legislature as an illegal, usurping, " bogus " concern, and organization forthwith of a state government and application to Congress for admission to the Union -emanated from Robinson. This scheme, an outgrowth and suggestion in part of the California struggle, began to shape itself in his thoughts on the very day that Reeder handed over the territorial legislature to the Philistines. The rise of a state government, independent of the territorial government, severing all friendly
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relations with it and aiming to effect its overthrow -like the emergence in the Roman world of a standing army of twenty-five legions from the ruins of the republic - was an event of capital importance in Kansas history.
A preliminary step in the counter-move against Missouri was to secure a supply of Sharpe's rifles. The reputed " military colonies " were practically without weapons. Robinson lost no time in dispatching G. W. Deitzler to New Eng- land for arms, ostensibly to protect the polls at the special elections May 22d, but really as the first stroke in the projected scheme of anti-Mis- souri operations. Sharpe's rifles, he saw, were an absolutely essential preliminary. They would en- sure the settlers respect and consideration which they might not otherwise receive. One hundred of these weapons soon reached Lawrence in pack- ages marked " books " - a species of literature that created wide interest on the border. "Sharpe's rifles," said the "Democratic Review," are "the religious tracts of the new Free-Soil system."
Then it would be necessary to establish in place of the disowned territorial government some polit- ical organization to serve as a rallying point for the people until the legislature could be captured or admission to the Union secured. To provide for this emergency a state government was de- cided upon, which would be put into actual ser- vice whenever Congress should authenticate it. In
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the interval the anti-slavery portion of the com- munity proposed to do without laws as best it might. November 1st, 1855, Dr. Robinson wrote A. A. Lawrence, reviewing somewhat in detail the progress of events up to that time. "[We must be ] as independent and self-reliant and confident," he said, " as the Missourians are, and never in any instance be cowed into silence or subserviency to their dictation. This course on the part of prom- inent free-state men is absolutely necessary to in- spire the masses with confidence and keep them from going over to the enemy. . . . I have been censured for the defiant tone of my Fourth of July speech, but I was fully convinced that such a course was demanded. The legislature was about sitting and free-state men were about despairing. . [A few of us] dared to take a position in defiance of the legislature and meet the conse- quences. We were convinced that our success depended upon this measure, and the demonstra- tion of the Fourth was to set the ball in motion in connection with Conway's letter to Governor Reeder resigning his seat and repudiating the legislature. For a while we had to contend with opposition from the faint-hearted, but by perse- vering in our course, by introducing resolutions into conventions and canvassing the territory, re- pudiation became universal with free-state men. We conceived it important to disown the leg- islature, if at all, before we knew the character of
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its laws, believing they would be such as to crush us out if recognized as valid, and believing we should stand on stronger ground if we came out in advance. . . . The 1st of July forms an im- portant epoch in our history. It was about that time that open defiance was shown our enemies. . .. Pro-slavery bullies were daily in the streets and insulted all free-state men whom they sup- posed would make no resistance. This drove our people into a secret organization of self-defense, and it was not long before they were glad to cry for quarters. A free-state Missourian, a regular California bully, came among us and took them in their own way and frightened every pro-slavery man from the field. His name is David Evans, and if I had a Sharpe's rifle at my disposal I should make him a present of it. . . . To divide into parties before our admission into the Union would be ruinous and give our enemies the advan- tage."
Between the 8th of June and the 15th of Aug- ust, 1855, not including the large Fourth of July meeting already mentioned, when Dr. Robinson delivered an address on local and national issues, seven so-called political conventions were held in Lawrence. These conventions - one or two of the first being small, impromptu affairs - were all except one in opposition to the federal ad- ministration and its territorial policy. On the evening of June 27th a few Democrats assembled
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and resolved that " the best interests of Kansas re- quire an early organization of the Democratic party." The master spirit in this convention was James H. Lane, recently from Indiana, where he had obtained some notoriety. He participated in the Mexican war, was elected lieutenant-governor of Indiana in 1848, and appeared in Congress as representative from that state in 1852. For some cause Lane's political fortunes did not thrive in Indiana, and in the spring of 1855 he betook him- self to the fresh fields of Kansas, pro-slavery in sentiment, boasting that he would as readily buy a negro as a mule, conceding the legality of the territorial legislature, and accepting it as a fore- gone conclusion that Kansas would become a slave state if its soil should prove to be adapted to ser- vile labor. But the Democratic venture came to nothing. It touched no responsive chord among the people. Lane's interest in feeble minority parties was very slight, and he soon found his way to the opposition benches.
The various minor assemblies at Lawrence led up to a more pretentious convention which be- gan on the 14th of August, and continued until the following day. The special significance of this convention lies in the fact, that it initiated measures looking toward the formal organization of a political party. It declined to attempt that task itself as being too local and unrepresentative in its make-up, and confided it to a more compre-
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hensive assembly that should meet October 5th at Big Springs, for the purpose of "constructing a national platform upon which all friends of mak- ing Kansas a free state may act in concert."
Big Springs in the autumn of 1855 was a place of four or five shake-cabins and log-huts. To that town repaired one hundred delegates and thrice as many spectators, who took quarters out of doors on the prairie. At this convention all the anti- Missouri elements- heretofore unassociated and without definite concert of action - got into a kind of organic connection and denominated them- selves the Free-State party.
The platform put forth by the new political clanship emphatically confirmed the declaration of " The Liberator," that no abolitionists had taken passage for Kansas. As a matter of fact, Dr. Rob- inson was at that time almost the only free-state man of prominence in the territory who avowed himself an abolitionist, and he did not happen to be a member of the convention. And it is a sig- nificant fact, which forcibly illustrates the absence of any general and radical sentiment of abolition- ism in Kansas, that so late as the year 1858 Mis- sourians hired out slaves at Lawrence, received their wages, and nobody made objection.
Though recently escaped from the stranded Democratic movement, Lane intrigued himself into the chairmanship of a committee of thirteen to which the construction of a platform was intrusted.
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The question of slavery brought on an all-night discussion, in which he persuaded the committee to adopt violent anti-negro principles. Only one among the thirteen stood out to the end, - an in- expugnable home missionary, James H. Byrd. The platform branded the charges of abolitionism, so industriously circulated against free-state men, as " stale and ridiculous." With that mischievous and deplorable fanaticism it disavowed all sym- pathy. "The best interests of Kansas require a population of white men." When the time came for the establishment of a state government, ne- groes of every stripe, bond and free, should be excluded. The convention adopted the platform without dissent. At Big Springs assuredly the anti-slaveryism was of a diluted milk-and-water type.
The convention appointed a committee to draft resolutions in regard to the territorial legislature. That assembly the committee treated with pow- erful verbal caustics. Such a course might have been expected in any case, but the fact that Gov- ernor Reeder wrote the resolutions made assur- ance doubly sure. After his removal from office Reeder threw himself heartily and unreservedly into the free-state cause. Widely and favorably known in Eastern States, where his defense of repudiation had great influence in the persuasion of a conservative and law-abiding public that this revolutionary measure must arise out of in-
5
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exorable necessities, he was an accession of pri- mary importance. National as well as local con- siderations entered into the problem pressing upon the new free-state party. Unless the country at large could be wakened ; unless the few hundred men at the front could be backed by moral and material support from non-slaveholding states, it would be folly to risk a contest with Missouri. Governor Reeder's chief service lay outside of Kansas. No other man in the free-state ranks had anything like a national reputation ; no other man could then command a hearing so wide or so effective.
Reeder's aggrieved personal experiences tinct- ured his resolutions with a tang of wormwood. Five months after fitting out the territorial leg- islature with certificates, and couching his com- munications to it in the most courtly phrases of official etiquette, he deseribes that body as " the monstrous consummation of an act of violence, usurpation, and fraud," - "a contemptible and hypocritical mockery of republicanism," tramp- ling down as with the hoofs of a buffalo the Kan- sas-Nebraska bill, libeling the Declaration of In- dependence, and staining the country with indeli- ble disgrace. Whenever " peaceful remedies shall fail, and forcible resistance shall furnish any rea- sonable prospect of success," - then let the now shrinking and reluctant hostility be pushed to " a bloody issue." The resolutions scourging the leg-
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islature evoked a response quite as rapturous as Lane's negrophobia.
The first and only discord that jangled the har- monies at Big Springs occurred when a subject, incidental and subordinate to the special purposes of the convention, was reached - the question of establishing a state government. It was stirring the community - an uppermost theme in the pub- lic thought - and could not be ignored. The special committee, that took it under advisement, shrank from pledging the party to the support of so novel and venturesome an experiment. They pronounced it "untimely and inexpedient." But the convention thought differently, and adopted approving resolutions.
As epilogue to the labors of the convention, and as prologue to the opening career of the new party, there was nomination of a delegate for Congress. Only one man received a moment's consideration for this honor - Reeder. The presentation of his name called out tremendous applause. His speech in accepting the candidacy produced a powerful impression. " A steady, unflinching pertinacity of purpose, never-tiring industry, dogged persever- ance, and all the abilities with which God has en- dowed " him - such was the service he pledged to Kansas. Reeder's speech modulated in its closing paragraphs into the belligerent tone of the resolu- tions on the legislature -" when other resources fail, there still remain to us the steady eye and the
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strong arm, and we must conquer or mingle the bodies of the oppressors with those of the op- pressed upon the soil which the Declaration of Independence no longer protects ! "
The convention secured unity and concert among the detached anti-Missouri elements, which merged into a political party as vapor-wreaths combine into the larger cloud. But the conven- tion unfortunately exposed itself to damaging crit- icism. Lane's " black-law " platform and Reeder's heated declamation gave the enemy aid and com- fort. The unlucky " bloody - issue " phrase was worn threadbare in Congress and out of it by the incessant service to which administration speak- ers put it. Douglas thundered against " the dar- ing and defiant revolutionists in Kansas," who were plotting " to overthrow by force the whole system of laws under which they live." He pro- fessed great anxiety lest, through the inefficiency of federal processes, the insurgents should escape the just penalty of their deeds. This government, he remarked, has been "equal to any emergency . except the power to hang a traitor !"
If the formation of a political party was a matter of too considerable magnitude for the Lawrence convention of August 14th and 15th to enter upon, reasons still more cogent and conclu- sive existed why it should shrink from initiating the movement for a state government. The con- vention met primarily and avowedly in the interest
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of a new political organization, and therefore could not escape charges of partisanship, whereas it was thought particularly desirable that the state gov- ernment should have an origin at least techni- cally unpartisan. During the progress of the first convention a petition was circulated and numerously signed, calling a second convention of citizens, without regard to political affiliations, to consider the state - government project. No sooner had the former body adjourned on the 15th than the latter, composed of substantially the same membership, assembled. The recent poli- ticians now became simply citizens, and made brief work of the business before them. The re- sources of talk had been pretty much exhausted by the first convention, where the discussion took wide range and the expenditure of words was less than usual. Opposition to the experiment of a state organization showed little or no strength. A delegate territorial convention, to meet at Topeka September 19th, was agreed upon.
The Topeka convention subjected the straw which had been violently threshed at Lawrence and Big Springs to a fresh flailing, with no re- sults other than attended earlier experiments. A constitutional convention seemed feasible, dele- gates to which were elected October 9th. They received in the aggregate twenty-seven hundred and ten votes. On the same day Reeder was elected free-state delegate to Congress and re-
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ceived all the ballots cast - twenty-eight hun- dred and forty-nine. The territorial legislature had also ordered an election for congressional del- egate and selected October 1st as the date. J. W. Whitfield received twenty - seven hundred and twenty - one votes - only seventeen scattering ballots disturbed the unanimity of this election - and secured the governor's certificate. Reeder, backed by protests from thirty-two voting pre- cincts, contested Whitfield's seat, but did not carry his point.
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