USA > Kansas > Douglas County > Lawrence > The Kansas memorial, a report of the Old Settlers' meeting held at Bismarck grove, Kansas, Sept. 15th and 16th, 1879 > Part 5
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" MINNESOTA, KANSAS and NEBRASKA, destined soon to add the 32d, 33d, and 34th stars to our national ensign, and to prove the pathway of empire to the Pacific."
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THE KANSAS MEMORIAL.
Observe, my friends, there is no declaration here of party or personal opinion. His mind was as clear of prejudice as the youngest child in this vast crowd; if there was any bias it was cer- tainly not against slavery. No missionary ever went forth with a purer purpose, or covered with more fervent popular blessings. I had not long to wait before he wrote to me of his reception in Kansas. He found law defied, life and property unsafe, freedom of speech and the press punished by a pro-slavery mob, his own person in constant peril, and daily demands made upon him to oppose all men and measures but those in the interest of slavery. The effect upon my mind was instant and conclusive. I had had previous occasion to notice the intolerance, and to resist the inso- lence of extreme southern men in Washington. No one had gone farther than myself to extenuate their conduct to northern men; few had done more by printed and spoken word to find excuses for some of their leaders. But these revelations of Governor Reeder were too much for me. They aroused my solicitude for my dis- tant friend, and my deep detestation of the means resorted to for his destruction. I took his letter to President Pierce, and I must do him the justice to say that at first he recoiled with manly indig- nation from the shameless spectacle, and joined me in denouncing the persecution of my friend; but the power that subsequently bullied and finally broke down James Buchanan when he attempted to keep faith to his solemn pledge, was too much for President Pierce. On the 31st of July, 1855, my friend was removed from his post, and on the evening of that day the President's private secretary came to inform me of the fact. My own position was delicate and responsible. I was the editor of the National Demo- cratic organ, the Union, and in those days that personage was always designated by the President, or appointed after consultation with him. I resolved to resign my post if I was called upon to approve the proscription of my friend Governor Reeder; and I mention the fact, also to the credit of President Pierce, that I held my place till the December following without a word in support of the policy that lost Kansas the first brave governor, in the columns of that paper while it was under my control.
Three other governors followed him-Wilson Shannon, of Ohio, J. W. Geary, of Pennsylvania, and Robert J. Walker, born in the same State. Shannon was removed because of his inability to aid the elements arrayed against the people of Kansas. Geary followed Shannon, and resigned at the end of six months, and Walker followed Geary, and resigned at the end of seven months.
The injustice and cruelty to Reeder were surpassed by the treatment of Geary and Walker. There was no mercy for either. They all came here Democrats, but they could not close their eyes to wrong so palpable as to excite horror and amazement every- where else but among those who had resolved to force slavery upon this virgin soil. Reeder was born in the old Tenth Legion, where to be a Democrat was to be with a successful party, and for
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THE KANSAS MEMORIAL.
gifted men like himself to rule and lead. Geary was born in Dem- ocratic Westmoreland, which still votes against the Republicans by a large majority, and Robert J. Walker, born in Northumberland, for many years one of the strongholds of the same party. These three historical men have all been called home, but before they died they became terrible witnesses against the Democratic party, and their eloquent testimony of the dreadful persecutions, frauds, and murders to force slavery upon Kansas, constitutes a volume of proof which has gone to thousands of hearthstones; converting almost millions to the great principles of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. All the former Democratic fortresses in the North have crumbled to the dust. The West, that once voted unanimously on the Democratic side, is now almost unanimously Republican ; so of New England, and so of the Middle States. On the Pacific coast the same republican rule prevails; and I predict that when the eight Territories of Arizona, Dakota, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, New Mexico, and Washington, ripen into States, each will be controlled by the same inspiration, and gravitate. into the same supreme sisterhood. In this grand consummation the chief contributor was Kansas. Her martyrs are the marshals of this transcendent destiny. On her map she marks every school house with a star, and she will soon be girdled by new constella- tions. Her newspapers have become the messengers of new evan- gelism. Her railroads have opened her fruitful solitudes to a grate- ful and continuous exodus, and have welded her into an indestruct- ible unit. At the genesis of her great work, the incomparable Sumner spoke as follows in 1856 :
A few short months only have passed since this spacious mediterranean country was open only to the savage who ran wild in its woods and prairies ; and now it has already drawn to its bosom a population of freemen larger than Athens crowded within her historic gates, when her sons, under Mil- tiades, won liberty for mankind on the field of Marathron; more than Sparta contained when she ruled Greece, and sent forth her devoted children, quickened with a mother's benediction, to return with their shields or on them ; more than Rome gathered on her seven hills, when, under her kings, she commenced that sovereign sway which afterward embraced the whole earth; more than London held, when, on the fields of Crecy and Agincourt, the English banner was carried victoriously over the chivalrous hosts of France.
And now, twenty-four years later, when fruition has baffled prophecy, and the young republic has broadened into an empire, and these shining savannas are opened to all the races of man, alike those who fly from the wars of the Old World, and from the double pestilence of the old South, we can only accept the lesson of Kansas, and wait for the still greater world's quickening in her womb!
I said, a few moments ago, that the seeds of this tremendous transformation were scattered by two great minds more than three- quarters of a century before Kansas was settled and organized- George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, of Virginia, the first
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THE KANSAS MEMORIAL.
American abolitionists. The Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson, and his public record, prove his inherent hostility to human slavery, and his devotion to absolute human equality, and the last will and testament of George Washington establish his own deep-rooted hatred of the whole idea of property in man. The ordinance making all the Northwest Territory free was Jefferson's conception, and to the last his best thoughts were given to the education of the people and to religious liberty. But there is one measure which is so rarely referred to, and which has borne such magnificent results, that I feel justified by all the exi- gencies of the hour, and the memories of this anniversary, in recall- ing it to your mind. I mean the purchase of Louisiana in 1803. How few Americans out of Kansas ever think that Kansas was a part of this grand acquisition, and how few that this same Virginia slave-holder was not only the real author of the great ordinance that made the whole of the Northwest free, but that he organized the expeditions of Lewis and Clarke, the discoverers of the Rocky Mountains and the road to the Pacific; that Zebulon Pike, who penetrated to the sources of the Upper Mississippi, and gave his name to Pike's Peak, in the Rocky Mountains, was appointed and sent forth by the Virginia author of the Declaration of Independ- ence !
But it is of the Louisiana purchase that I desire to speak to- day, and of the part played by the South, led by Virginia, in sub- sequent additions to the public domain. It is a fact that nine-tenths of the territory acquired since the organization of the Government has been mainly acquired under southern administrations, and every foot has been cleansed of slavery by the doctrines planted in our system by Thomas Jefferson, a Virginia statesman ! It was a Southern President that gave us Louisiana. It was a Southern President, James K. Polk, that gave us California. Two Virginia Generals, Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott, defeated the Mexi- cans, and gave us California and New Mexico, and the latter made the treaty, aided by Nicholas P. Trist, son-in-law and executor of Thomas Jefferson, which secured this vast empire. It was another Virginian, Sam Houston, that secured the independence of Texas and added it to our Union; and it was a North Carolinian, Andrew Jackson, that aided another Virginian, President Monroe, to secure Florida in 1821, as in 1815 Jackson had aided President James Madison, also of Virginia, to drive back the British when they attempted to capture New Orleans, the capital of Thomas Jeffer- son's Territory of Louisiana.
Observe how logically these magnificent acquisitions followed the great first example of Thomas Jefferson; and how irresistibly his original declaration in favor of human liberty finally controlled all government action.
Add the acquisition of Florida in 1821; the annexation of Texas in 1846; the acquisition of California and New Mexico in 1848; and at a glance you see what southern statesmen and sol-
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THE KANSAS MEMORIAL.
diers have secured to our national domain. I am not here to-day to speak of northern sagacity, courage, or patriotism. As Daniel Webster said in his reply to Hayne, of South Carolina, in 1830 :
I shall enter no encomium upon Massachusetts ; she needs none. There she is. Behold her and judge for yourselves. There is her history; the world knows it by heart. The past, at least, is secure. There is Boston, and Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill ; and there they will remain forever. The bones of her sons, falling in the great struggle for Indepen- dence, now lie mingled with the soil of every State from New England to Georgia ; and there they will lie forever.
I address another audience to-day.
It is to the South that I would read this lesson of Kansas. It is to leaders like Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi; R. M. T. Hunter, of Virginia; Alexander H. Stephens, of Georgia; George S. Hous- ton, of Alabama; George W. Jones, of Tennessee; and J. W. Throckmorton, of Texas, that I would affectionately recommend this interesting study.
Thomas Jefferson was the real leader of the movement that made the abolition of slavery necessary for the preservation of the Union; the author of the policy which added to the old thirteen States a domain larger than the area they first occupied ; and all those who succeeded him were in sympathy with his known anti- slavery convictions, excepting only James K. Polk. Let us repeat for a moment the significant truth-that Monroe, who made the treaty with Spain that gave us Florida; and Jackson, who fought the battle of New Orleans in 1815, and commanded the army in Florida in 1821; and Houston, who secured the annexation of Texas; and Scott and Taylor, who defeated the Mexicans and made the acquisition of California inevitable, were all in sympathy with the anti-slavery sentiments of Thomas Jefferson, and primarily devoted to the preservation of the Union at all hazards. And as I recur to Jefferson's passionate and persevering efforts to secure Lou- isiana at the time the great Napoleon was preparing for his gigan- tic struggle with the European monarchs, seventy-six years ago, I often wonder whether he saw through the clouds of the future his mighty mission. He seems certainly to have been gifted with a strange and overmastering inspiration. Having resided for years at the French capital, he acquired a new love for his own great ideal of human freedom, among that impulsive and agreeable peo- ple. He had seen king-craft face to face only to despise it, and he prefigured a universal republic before the blood and flame of the first French Revolution. His pictures of the reigning sovereigns of Europe, seven years before the Revolution, makes Louis XVI a fool; also the kings of Spain, Naples and Sardinia ; the queen of Portugal an idiot; and so the king of Denmark; the king of Prussia a hog in body and mind; Gustavus of Sweden, and Joseph of Austria, both crazy ; and George of England in a straight- jacket. Such was continental Europe when it became the easy prey of the great Napoleon, who held Louisiana in his clutch, and
·
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THE KANSAS MEMORIAL.
to get it from whom was Jefferson's eager desire. Benjamin Frank- lin, before his death, had proclaimed in 1787, in the same spirit of prescience : "I would rather agree with the Spaniards to buy at a great price the whole of their right on the Mississippi, than sell a drop of its waters. A neighbor might as well ask me to sell my street door." What a romance the struggle of his ministers, Livingston and Monroe, to induce Napoleon to sell Louisiana. The wild excitement along the great rivers at that early day, while this nego- tiation was pending, is still remembered; the strange uncertainty of Napoleon ; the intrigues of his ministers; the sleepless nights of President Jefferson; and his abounding joy and gratitude, when at last the ambitious First Consul consented to sell that priceless territory to raise money for his projected invasion of England. We were a poor people seventy-six years ago, and the millions asked for Louisiana was more than we could afford. Besides, to make such a contract was a distinct violation of the National Constitu- tion, which made no provision for our holding foreign territory, or incorporating foreign territories with our Union. But Jefferson did not stop. He did what Jackson did at New Orleans in 1815, when to save the city he defied the judicial opinion of Judge Hall, and what Abraham Lincoln did between 1861 and 1865, in the great crisis of the rebellion. Now let the tranquil historian speak of that transcendent act of the great Republican President, Thomas Jeffer- son, and I read it here on a part of the magnificent empire he secured to human liberty. I quote from Henry S. Randall's great book :
No conqueror who has ever trod the earth to fill it with desolation and mourning, ever conquered and permanently amalgamated with his native kingdom a remote approach to the same extent of territory. But one knig- dom in Europe equals the extent of one of its present States (The State of Nebraska contains 335,882 square miles.) Germany supports a popula- tion of thirty-seven millions of people. All Germany has a little more than the area of two-thirds of Nebraska, and, acre for acre, less tillable land. Louisiana, as densely populated in proportion to its natural materials of sustentation as parts of Europe, would be capable of supporting some- where from four to five hundred millions of people. (Its area, not includ- ing Texas-afterward improperly surrendered from the purchase -- and the region west of the Rocky Mountains, is not far probably from a million square miles. But for all practical purposes and results, the purchase ex- tended beyond the mountains to the Pacific; and Texas should have been ours without a remuneration.) The whole United States became capable, by this acquisition, of sustaining a larger population than ever occupied Europe. The purchase secured, independently of territory, several prime national objects. It gave us that homogeneousness, unity, and indepen- dence which is derived from the absolute control and disposition of our commerce, trade, and industry in every department, without the hindrance or meddling of any intervening nation between us and any natural element of industry, between us and the sea, or between us and the open market of the world.
It gave us ocean boundaries on all exposed sides, for it left Canada ex- posed to us and not us to Canada. It made us indisputably and forever (if our Union is preserved) the controllers of the Western Hemisphere. It placed our national course, character, civilization and destiny solely in our
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own hands. It gave us the certain sources of a not distant numerical strength to which that of the mightiest empires of the past or present is in- significant.
A Gallic Cæsar was leading his armies over shattered kingdoms. His armed foot shook the world. He decimated Europe. Millions on millions of mankind perished, and there was scarcely a human habitation from the Polar Seas to the Mediterranean, where the voice of lamentation was not heard over slaughtered kindred, to swell the conqueror's strength and "glory !" And the carnage and rapine of war are trifling evils compared with its demoralizations. The rolling tide of conquest subsided. France shrunk back to her ancient limits. Napoleon died a repining captive on a rock of the ocean. The stupendous tragedy was played out ; and no physi- cal results were left behind but decrease, depopulation and universal loss. A republican President, on a distant continent, was also seeking to aggran- dize his country. He led no armies. He shed not a solitary drop of human blood. He caused not a tear of human woe. He bent not one toiling back lower by governmental burdens. Strangest of political anomalies (and ludicrous as strange to the representatives of the ideas of the tyrannical and bloody past), he lightened the taxes while he was lightening the debts of a nation. And without interrupting either of these meliorations for an in- stant-without imposing a single new exaction on his people-he acquired, peaceably and permanently for his country, more extensive and fertile do- mains than ever for a moment owned the sway of Napoleon-more exten- sive ones than his gory plume ever floated over.
Which of these victors deserves to be termed " glorious ? "
Yet with what serene and unselfish equanimity, which ever preferred his cause to his vanity, this more than conqueror allowed his real agency in this great achievement to go unexplained to the day of his death, and to be in a good measure attributed to mere accident, taken advantage of quite as much by others as by himself. He wrote no laureled letter. He asked no triumph.
And now, in the presence of the almost incredible fruits of the providential work of the third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, I may again ask : Does it not seem as if he saw what was to come ? And if in the unknown and inscrutable sys- tem of nature, his great spirit looks down upon this scene to-day, he may enjoy a rapture greater than the angels, who never knew mortality, and cannot define the unspeakable bliss of a glorious work done on earth to be rewarded in heaven. And if he could speak to-day, if he could arise from the dead, whose silent compa- ny he joined with John Adams, of Massachusetts, on the 4th of July, 1826, he would turn from this dazzling harvest of his own sowing, to those of his own section who still refuse to follow the doctrines of the fathers of the old Democracy, and to gather the fruits of the early Jeffersonian policy. Had these doctrines been followed these fruits would now be shared by the South equally with the North and West. Every step since the Southern departure from the Jefferson standard has been followed by mischief to the South. Every step that the North and West have taken toward the Jeffersonian standard has been followed by prosperity to those sections. The territorial system, by which millions of acres of square miles have been added to the 850,000 square miles of the original thirteen colonies, was a southern, or rather a Jeffer- sonian system, begun by the author of the Declaration of Independ-
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THE KANSAS MEMORIAL.
ence, and carried forth by the disciples I have named in marvelous chronological succession. And its results would have been shared in providential profusion by the South, had the Southern statesmen been inspired by the great ideas that have made Kansas the increasing wonder of the world. "Thomas Jefferson," says a recent critical writer, " was the model American citizen, whose writings contain more to instruct and guide his countrymen in the duties of citizen- ship than those of any other man. His very faults had more of virtue in them than the good deeds of other men. He was a Dem- ocrat by nature. He was a Democrat because he was truly an intelligent man; because he saw things as they are, not as they seem. His heart would have told him that all men are brothers and equals, if his great mind had not discovered it." He was always a Republican, and to the last wrote himself down as a Republican.
Democrats of the South, your real leader has won the great fight. Strange that he should have conquered the Federalists of the North who voted against the purchase of Louisiana, and that his ideas should have conquered the Whigs of the North who opposed the annexation of Texas and the acquisition of California. And yet it is not strange, because they finally saw that all these acquisitions were not to extend but to stop the advancing tide of human slavery. But it is doubly strange that the South, that helped to press these great acquisitions, refuses at the eleventh hour to seize the advantages they have now the right to share. Can they not see that they are losing under a leadership that is fatal now, and must be more and more fatal every hour ? Robert J. Walker, fif- teen years ago, when sent forth by Mr. Lincoln to Great Britain to assist the Union cause during the Rebellion, wrote a series of letters for English circulation, comparing the old Slave and Free States in population, industry, commerce, and intelligence. His book elec- trified all Europe. But had he lived to make a contrast between Kansas and Kentucky, or between Kansas and Louisiana, what a picture he would have drawn! His living contemporaries in the South still refuse to study the great lesson. They are like blind men in a land of light ; deaf men in a land of song : they can neither see nor hear. The world is changing around them, and they live in it unchanged. They hug their delusions to their withered breasts, and dance their weird dances in their skeleton carnivals, listening only to the dreary strains of their ghastly theories, without dream- ing that the Vesuvius of the Census is coming on to exhaust them !
Ah, gentlemen of the South, the great Virginian would have builded better. Had he been here, he would never have allowed John C. Calhoun's ideas to indoctrinate the South; and if he had failed to stop the poison, he would have demanded, at the close of the civil war, and in the face of the generosity proffered to the South by the North, " both hands full," that his people should not be held back in the new race for empire. He would point them to the gigantic growth of the North under free institutions and the
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abolition of human slavery, and he would have proclaimed from this part of his Louisiana purchase, that Kansas was the last and most prodigious product and proof of the justice and beneficence of his prophetic labors. He would say, in words of solemn warn- ing, that whether the southern Democratic leaders desired it or not, the fiat had gone forth, and they could no more resist the cur- rent than Canute could arrest the sea; and then he would talk to the long-deluded masses of the South, and implore them to seize the golden opportunities all around them, and to act for themselves and by themselves, without the reckless pilots that had led them into the storm, and had neither purpose nor capacity to lead them out.
Such would be the master's voice were he alive to speak out. Let me, his humble follower and interpreter, add that there is still time "to recover arms." The South is full of wealth, genius, elo- quence, and invention. The mighty elements that helped to make and fire the Revolution are not dead. Harness these elements to progress; inspire them with Jeffersonian liberty; and before the nineteenth century closes its doors, the old Southern States will be abreast of the new Western Republics, and the next silver wedding of Kansas will find Texas divided into four empires, each as grand and potential as Kansas is at present, and from the Potomac to the Rio Grande, an athletic liberty as strong as that of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania to-day.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, I beg to return to you my heartfelt thanks for your kind reception; and I assure you that my visit to Kansas has been full of inspiration and satisfaction; and I return to my labor at home with the hope that I may visit you again in the future. But whether I do or not, I beg to assure you that I shall always have the kindest feeling for this grand republic.
MUSIC.
At the conclusion of Col. Forney's address, the orchestra and chorus, under direction of Dr. J. D. Patterson's skillful baton, gave one of their wonderful renditions of "O Hail Us, Ye Free," from Ernani. After this, the meeting adjourned to meet at 7 o'clock, p. m.
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