USA > Louisiana > The province and the states, a history of the province of Louisiana under France and Spain, and of the territories and states of the United States formed therefrom, Vol. IV > Part 11
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CHAPTER XIII
The Struggle for Kansas
T HE repeal of the Missouri compromise was a momentous thing. - To Benton and many others-a few in his state and millions throughout the North-the removal of this ancient landmark was like the death of an old and indispensable friend. That compact had stood guard over the territories so long that it seemed to be a part of the checks and balances of the constitution. A generation of men had grown up since its enact- ment. Even to many of those whose memory went back beyond the beginning of the Missouri admission contest it had acquired an aspect of permanence as one of the established institutions of the government. To the vast majority of the residents of the free states and to some of the people of Missouri it seemed as if one of the props of the Union had suddenly been swept away.
But most of the people of Missouri were glad that it had been removed. Among these were enemies as well as friends of slav- cry. Each felt that the South had been treated unfairly by the exclusion of the South's peculiar institution from the country's common territory. Now, by the removal of what they considered to be an injustice, each section would be on an equality with the other in the struggle for the possession of the new lands, and neither would have any cause for complaint against the govern- ment for the result, whatever it might be.
Of Missouri's 682,000 inhabitants in 1850, as shown by the national census, 87,000 were slaves. The slaves were not keeping pace in growth with the whites, but out of the aggregate of 1,182,000 population which was to be shown in 1860, the slaves were to contribute 115,000. At an average valuation of four hundred dollars for each slave, the amount of property which Mis-
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souri in 1854 felt would be imperiled by the erection of Kansas into a free state was over thirty-five million dollars. This amount was small compared with the aggregate value of the property of the state, and the slaveholders constituted an even smaller propor- tion of the state's total voting population. The slavery interest, however, had a powerful influence over the state's politics. More- over, when the contest between the North and the South actually began for the control of Kansas, and when Missouri's prosperity and prestige seemed to be imperiled, local pride and passion incited many Missourians to take the pro-slavery side in the fight who neither owned slaves nor had any sympathy for slavery as an institution.
The counties on or near the Kansas border would be especially exposed to adverse influences if the North should get possession of that territory. They had a vital concern in making Kansas a slave state. It was from the western counties that most of the raiding parties into the territory in 1854-57 were recruited. Platte county, on the Kansas line, which had 2,800 slaves out of a total population of a little less than 17,000 in 1850, took the leading part in these incursions. In these demonstrations David R. Atchi- son, a resident of Platte City, in that county, was the master spirit. Atchison, Missouri's senior senator, president pro tempore of his branch of congress ; then forty-seven years of age and in the height of his powers, physically and intellectually ; able, generous, elo- quent and magnetic ; an aspirant for the presidential nomination in 1856, to succeed Pierce, was admirably qualified for leadership in that cause. At that particular moment he had some of the ascendancy in his party in his state which Benton wiekdled at an earlier day, and which he had now lost.
Associated with Atchison in that crusade were Ex-State Attor- ney Gen. Benjamin F. Stringfellow, his brother Dr. John H. Stringfellow, James N. Burnes, Col. John W. Reid, a gallant officer in Doniphan's regiment in the Mexican war; Claiborne F. Jackson, sponsor of the resolutions of 1849 which split the Demo- cratic party of Missouri, who was destined to be governor of the state at the outbreak of the war of 1861-65; Colonel Boone, a descendant of the Kentucky and Missouri pioneer, and others then or afterward prominent in the state's political or social affairs.
The organs through which the struggle for the control of Kan- sas was started were the Emigrant Aid Company on the part of the free state men and the Blue Lodges on that of the pro- slaveryites. The former was formeded in Massachusetts in March, 1854, just after the Kansas-Nebraska bill was passed in the senate,
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but several weeks before it went through the house, whose lead- ing spirit was Eli Thayer, an educator and member of the Massa- chusetts legislature. The genesis of the opposing organization was given by the congressional committee (Howard of Michigan and Sherman of Ohio, Republicans, and Oliver of Missouri, a former Whig, who was then acting with the Democrats) which investigated the Kansas disturbances in 1856, and which made a report to the house. According to the committee, before any election was held in Kansas Territory in 1854 "a secret political society was formed in the state of Missouri. It was known by different names, such as 'Social Band,' 'Friends' Society,' 'Blue Lodge,' 'The Sons of the South.' It embraced great numbers of the citizens of Missouri, and was extended into other slave states and into the territory. Its avowed purpose was not only to extend slavery into Kansas, but also into other territories of the United States, and to form a union of all the friends of that institution." The report added that this society "was alto- gether the most effective instrument in organizing the subsequent armed invasions and forays."
The object of each side was to get as many men as possible into the territory, so as to carry the election for delegate to congress and for members of the legislature, under the popular sovereignty, or squatter sovereignty, principle. Making all reasonable allow- ance for exaggeration on both sides, each party sometimes vio- lated the spirit of the law and occasionally its letter. Each sent many men to the territory who were not bona fide settlers. The Blue Lodges undoubtedly were the greater offenders in this respect. Their acts, however, should be tested by the importance of their stake and by the passions and the standards of the time and place. This explains their conduct, but, of course, does not excuse it. The greater part of their work, though, was legitimate.
While the Emigrant Aid Company on the one hand and the Blue Lodges on the other established in Kansas the first settle- ments of any consequence which were planted in the territory, affiliated societies took the work up quickly, and unorganized effort was a powerful factor eventually. This was especially true of the free state party, which had the entire North to draw upon. The bulk of the work on the slave state side, at the outset at least, had to be done by Missouri. At the outset in 1854, from their nearness to the battleground in the case of Missouri, the pro- slaveryites had the advantage. The free soil men, however, had a far larger field from which to gain recruits, had immeasurably greater resources at their command, and, what in the long run was
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still better, they had the time spirit, civilization, the eternal order of the universe, on their side.
Some prompt work was done by the pro-slavery leaders in Mis- souri. A speech made by General Atchison in Weston, Platte county, in 1854 is thus summarized, in part, by the Platte Argus:
"The people of Kansas in their first election would decide the question whether or not the slaveholder was to be excluded, and it depended upon a majority of the votes cast at the polls. Now, if a set of fanatics and demagogues a thousand miles off could advance their money and exert every nerve to abolitionize the territory and exclude the slaveholder when they have not the least personal interest in the matter, what is your duty? When you reside within one day's journey of the territory, and when your peace, your quiet and your property depend upon your action, you can, without any exertion, send five hundred of your young men who will vote in favor of your institutions. Should each county in the state of Missouri only do its duty the question will be decided quietly and peaceably at the ballot box. If we are defeated, then Missouri and the other Southern states will have shown themselves recreant to their interests and will have deserved their fate. . If these abolitionists steal your negroes they gain nothing. The negroes are injured. You are
ruined. So much greater is the motive for activity on your part. . If abolitionism, under its present auspices, is estab- lished in Kansas, there will be constant strife and bloodshed between Kansas and Missouri. Negro stealing will be a principle and a vocation. It will be the policy of philanthropie knaves, until they force the slaveholder to abandon Missouri. Nor will it be long until it is done. . . It was not sufficient for the South to talk, but to act; to go peacefully and inhabit the terri- tory, and peacefully to vote and settle the question according to the principles of the Douglas bill."
Similar exhortations were delivered at many points on or near the Kansas frontier by Atchison and others. Weston, however, was the principal radiating center of the aggressive pro-slavery influences of the time. At a meeting at that point on July 29, 1854, which was addressed by Atchison, B. F. Stringfellow, Barnes and others, resolutions were passed, declaring that all emigrants sent to Kansas by northern emigrant aid societies should be turned back, and the Platte County Defensive Associa- tion was formed. The Kansas League, a subsidiary institution, and composed largely of the same persons, was founded about the same time, to carry into effect that society's decrees.
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But a large number of the Missourians even of the western border were against the purposes of Atchison and his comrades. On September 1, 1854, a law and order meeting was held in Weston, which protested against the resolutions of the Platte County Defensive Association, and pledged loyalty to the govern- ment and fair play to Kansas. The declaration was signed by one hundred and thirty-six citizens of Platte county. This law abiding element existed in large numbers throughout the whole of Missouri, but naturally it was the doings of the other and aggressive ingredient which attracted the country's attention and got into the newspapers and the histories.
On June 13, 1854, two weeks after Pierce signed the Kansas- Nebraska bill, at a meeting in Weston, at which General Atchison was present, thirty-two pro-slavery men formed an association which laid out Leavenworth, the first town founded in Kansas. On July 27 Burnes, Dr. J. H. Stringfellow and others formed the association which created Atchison, which was named, of course, for the leader in the colonizing movement in Missouri. Lawrence, the first of the towns formed in Kansas by the free state party, was not established until after these two pro-slavery settlements were formed, or on July 30. Leavenworth, Atchison, Kickapoo, Lecompton and a few other towns, all established by Missourians, were the centers of the slavery influence in the early days of Kan- sas. The Missourians also printed the first newspaper which appeared in Kansas, the Leavenworth Herald, started on Septem- ber 15, 1854. Doctor Stringfellow and Robert S. Kelley, a prac- tical printer from Parkville, Mo., started a paper in Atchison soon afterward, the Squatter Sovereign. Stringfellow was one of the leading residents of Atchison, and was chosen to the house of representatives of Kansas' first legislature, becoming speaker of that body. From the beginning the Missourians have been the largest single ingredient in the Kansas population, until recent years, when Illinois has gained a slight lead.
On November 29, 1854, on March 30, 1855, and at other times when territorial delegates to congress, or territorial legislatures were chosen, large bodies of armed Missourians, generally under the lead of Atchison, B. F. Stringfellow, James N. Burnes, John W. Reid or others, and often under the direction of several of these, invaded Kansas and polled fraudulent votes, and in some cases these elections were set aside. Said the congressional inves- tigating committee, in its report in 1856: "Every election has been controlled, not by the actual settlers, but by the citizens of Mis- souri ; aud as a consequence, every officer in the territory, from
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constable to legislators, except those appointed by the President, owe their positions to non-resident voters." Mordecai Oliver of Missouri, however, the minority member of the committee, dis- sented from some of the statements of the majority report. Atchi- son and Stringfellow, with many other Missourians, were in the attack on Lawrence on May 21, 1856, in which the Emigrant Aid Company's hotel, the office of the Herald of Freedom and other property was destroyed.
But some of the shrewder members of the pro-slavery party in Missouri began to see by this time that their cause was lost. Said the Emigration Society of Lafayette county, Mo., in an appeal to the South issued on March 25, 1856:
"The western counties of Missouri have for the last two years been heavily taxed, both in money and time, in fighting the battles of the South. Lafayette county alone has expended more than one hundred thousand dollars in money, and as much more in time. Missouri, we feel confident, has done her duty, and will still be found ready and willing to do all she can fairly . and honorably for the maintenance of the integrity of the South. But the time has come when she can no longer stand up single- handed, the lone champion of the South, against the myrmidons of the entire North. Settle the territory with emigrants from the South. The population of the territory at this time is about equal-as many pro-slavery settlers as abolitionists. ... Those who cannot emigrate can contribute money to assist those who can. . The great struggle will come off at the next election, in October, 1850, and noless the South can at that time maintain her ground all will be lost. We repeate it, the crisis has arrived. . . . We tell you now, and tell you frankly, that unless you come quickly, and come by thousands, we are gone. The elections once lost are lost forever."
This told the story. It was virtually Missouri against the entire North, and not all of Missouri was interested in the control of Kansas. Some of the re-enforcements of settlers from the South came for which Missouri appealed, but not in anything like the number which would have been required. The free state men quickly obtained the preponderance when fair elections began to be had in the territory, they increased their ascendancy as time passed, and Kansas was admitted as a free state on January 29, 1861, after a large number of the southern senators had left con- gress and joined their states in secession.
Meanwhile Missouri's home politics were cyclonic. In the most exciting congressional contest in the state in 1854 Benton wlio
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ran as an Independent Democrat, was beaten for the house of representatives in the St. Louis district by Enther M. Kennett, American. The Whig party had practically disappeared as an organized force in most of the states by the fall of 1854, and most of its members in the border slave states began to call themselves Americans, or Know Nothings, while the great body of the Whigs in the slave states farther south joined the Democratic party either then or soon afterward. Most of the men whom Missouri elected to congress in 1854 called themselves Americans.
Atchison's term in the senate expired in March, 1855, and not- withstanding his prominence both in Washington and in the home affairs of his state, he failed of re-election, nor did the legis- lature, after repeated attempts, succeed in electing anybody in 1855, and for two years Missouri had only one representative in the senate, Henry S. Geyer, whose term was to end in 1857. After a service of twelve years in the senate, during which he was the most powerful man in Missouri next to Benton, and in the latter part of which time he led Benton in influence, Atchison stepped down into private life in 1855. He retired to his farm in Platte county, continued his interest in the Kansas raids until the free state men in the territory gained the upper hand perma- uently, was in sympathy with the confederacy during the civil war, and died in 1886.
The election of 1856 was of peculiar interest in Missouri, as it was in many of the other states. The Benton schism cut off many votes from the Missouri Democracy, but not enough to endanger its supremacy in the state. For president the contest in Missouri was between Buchanan, the national Democratic candidate, and Ex-President Fillmore, the former Whig, who was now the can- didate of the American party. That organization had dropped the designation Know Nothing by this time all over the country. A new national party, the Republican, which had its rise in the repeal of the Missouri compromise in 1854, appeared in the can- vass of 1856, with John C. Fremont, the patlıfinder, as its presi- dential candidate. For two reasons the Republican party had attractions for the Benton section of the Democrats. The cardinal principle of its creed was the Benton doctrine of the exclusion of slavery from the territories. Its candidate, Fremont, was Ben- ton's son-in-law, having married Jessie Benton a dozen years earlier.
Nevertheless Benton, although he had been out of harmony with every democratic president since Van Buren, and was decidedly hostile to Pierce, the president of that day, particularly on account
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of his leaning toward the pro-slavery faction of his party in the Kansas struggle, refused to support the Republicans. He did this chiefly because he believed-and truly, of course, as the Lincoln election of 1860 proved-that the success of the Republicans would send the South into secession, and Benton's first regard was to save the Union whatever else might be lost.
Moreover, the Republican party had not effected an organiza- tion in Missouri in 1856. Blair, Benjamin Gratz Brown, Arnold Krekel and many others of the Benton section of the Democracy, were in thorough sympathy with the Republicans, and joined the party in 1857, when a regular organization was formed in the state. Restricted to a choice between Buchanan and Fillmore, many of Benton's friends, particularly the German element of St. Louis and vicinity, threw their support to the latter. Said Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, in a speech in the senate at Washington on December 19, 1856: "In the city of St. Louis nearly three thousand Germans, to show their devotion to liberty, went to the ballot boxes, when they could get up no state ticket for Fremont, and voted for Millard Fillmore, the Know Nothing candidate, with the word 'Protest' printed on their ballots." Gam- aliel Bailey, an old abolitionist, Free Soiler and original Repub- lican, early in 1856 proposed Benton for president by the Repub- licans in that year and Seward for vice-president.
Missouri cast a heavy vote for president in 1856, Buchanan's poll being 58,161, or 20,000 greater than Pierce's four years earlier, and Fillmore receiving 18,521, or 19,000 more than Scott, Pierce's Whig opponent, obtained. Buchanan's majority in Mis- souri was 9,0.40.
But Missouri took much more interest in its canvass for gov- ernor than it did in that for president. There were three candi- dates for that office. The regular Democrats nominated Trusten Polk ; the Americans, or Fillmore party, put up Robert C. Ewing, and Benton led the Independent Democrats. Benton, then seventy-four years of age, but still wonderfully vigorous physi- cally and mentally, was making his last battle for the nationalist cause, and his canvass attracted the attention of the whole coun- try. It was a canvass memorable for the excitement which it aroused in the state, for the great number of meetings which were held by the opposing parties, and for the uncertainty as to the result in the triangular campaign. Benton himself boasted that he tra, eled over one thousand two hundred miles throughout the state, and that he made forty speeches of an hour or over in duration besides many short ones. He was serenely confident to
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the last, expressing contempt for Polk and the rest of his local enemies, and predicting the overwhelming and permanent over- throw of the disunionist, or what he called the disunionist, sec- tion of the Democracy in Missouri. The result, however, showed that of the three elements in the canvass, his Democratic enemies were the first in the poll, the Americans were the second, and he was the last.
As between Benton and his Democratic enemies, the Americans would have preferred Benton. But Benton had been fighting that element under its old Whig name for a quarter of a century. The bitterness of his assaults had raised up personal foes to him among influential men in all the state's political sects. He des- pised the arts of conciliation in which his friend Linn of the olden days was a master. In dealing with antagonists his aim was not to placate but to crush. Then, too, the Americans of 1856 had some hope, through the split in the Democracy, of gaining a governor, as they, as Whigs, had won a senator, Geyer, from the same cause, in 1851. In the poll for governor of 1856 Polk, the regular Democrat, received 10,993 votes; Ewing, American, 40,580; and Benton, Independent, 27,618; Polk's lead over Ewing, his principal competitor, being 6,10.4.
That was the end. Benton indulged in no repinings over his misfortune, and expressed no regret for his course, but promptly finished the literary work which he started inunediately after retiring from the senate in 185t, and which comprised, chiefly, the "Thirty Years' View" and the "Abridgement of the Debates of Congress." This task and an attack on Tancy in the Pred Scott case, he prosecuted with fierce energy, his life and the last lines of the "Abridgement" closing simultaneously in 1858; he passed away at the age of seventy-six.
His state, despite the passions which his later conflicts aroused, has not neglected to do honor to Benton's memory. This great- est of all Missourians, with his distinguished disciple Francis P. Blair, are Missouri's contributions to the gallery of the celebrities of the various states in Statuary Hall, at the nation's capital at Washington.
The contest for senator began to excite the state immediately after the voting for governor and president had taken place in 1856, and in 1857 the legislature filled the vacancy which had then existed for two years, and chose James S. Green to succeed Atchison for the term to end in 1861. As Geyer's term was to close in rasy the legislature had two senators to name, and it put Polk, the new governor, in Geyer's place, for the term which was to close in 1803.
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Polk resigned the governorship, the lieutenant governor, Han- cock Jackson, served as governor for a few months, and in a spe- cial election in 1857 Robert M. Stewart, an anti-Benton Democrat, defeated the old Whig leader James S. Rollins. Stewart, a native of New York, and a lawyer by profession, had resided in Missouri from an early age, served in the state senate before becoming governor in 1857, was a staunch Union man in 1861-65, and died in St. Joseph in 1871, at the age of fifty-six.
The career of both Polk and Green in the senate was cut short by expulsion. Polk, a native of Delaware, an old resident of Missouri, and a lawyer of great ability, held one or two local offices in St. Louis before his election as governor in 1856, was turned out of the senate on a charge of disloyalty to the govern- ment in 1862, and died in St. Louis in 1876, aged sixty-five. Green, who died in the same town in 1870, at the age of fifty-three, was born in Virginia, was a man of eloquence and acuteness, served in the popular branch of congress before going to the sen- ate, and was expelled from that chamber early in 1861, shortly . before the close of the term, for talk in favor of secession.
By the beginning of Governor Stewart's service, in December, 1857, the raids from Missouri into Kansas had ended. Geary, the third governor which Kansas had in the territorial days of 1854-61 (Reeder and Shannon preceding him and Walker, Den- ver, Medary and Beebe following him), informed President Buchanan shortly before Stewart became governor of Missouri that order had been completely established in the territory. Doc- tor Stringfellow, from his home in Atchison, wrote to the Wash- ington Union, Buchanan's organ at the national capital, in January, 1858, against the admission of Kansas as a state under the Lecompton pro-slavery constitution, which Buchanan was endeav- oring to force on the people of Kansas, against the wishes of what some of the pro-slavery men on the ground, like this ex-Mis- sourian, knew to be a majority of the bona fide residents of the territory. "To do so," said Stringfellow, "will break down the Democratic party in the North, and seriously endanger the peace and interests of Missouri and Kansas, if not of the whole Union. The slavery question in Kansas is settled against the South by emigration."
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