Part 13

In depicting this consummation, the simplest outline, without one word of color, will be best. Whether regarded in mass or detail, in origin or result, it is all blackness, illumined by nothing from itself, but only by the heroism of the undaunted men and women whom it environed. A plain statement of facts is a picture of direst truth, which faithful History will preserve in its darkest gallery. In the foreground all will recognize a familiar character, in himself connecting link between President and border ruffian,--less conspicuous for ability than for the exalted place he has occupied,--who once sat in the seat where you now sit, Sir,--where once sat John Adams and Thomas Jefferson,--also, where once sat Aaron Burr. I need not add the name of David R. Atchison.[70] You do not forget, that, at the session of Congress immediately succeeding the Nebraska Bill, he came tardily to his duty here, and then, after a short time, disappeared. The secret was long since disclosed. Like Catiline, he stalked into this Chamber, reeking with conspiracy,--_immo etiam in Senatum venit_,--and then, like Catiline, he skulked away,--_abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit_,--to join and provoke the conspirators, who at a distance awaited their congenial chief. Under the influence of his malign presence the Crime ripened to its fatal fruits, while the similitude with Catiline is again renewed in the sympathy, not even concealed, which he finds in the very Senate itself, where, beyond even the Roman example, a Senator has not hesitated to appear as his open compurgator.

And now, as I proceed to show the way in which this Territory was overrun and finally subjugated to Slavery, I desire to remove, in advance, all question with regard to the authority on which I rely. The evidence is secondary, but it is the best which, in the nature of the case, can be had; and it is not less clear, direct, and peremptory than any by which we are assured of the campaigns in the Crimea or the fall of Sebastopol. In its manifold mass, I confidently assert that it is such a body of evidence as the human mind is not able to resist. It is found in the concurring reports of the public press, in the letters of correspondents, in the testimony of travellers, and in the unaffected story to which I have listened from leading citizens, who, during this winter, have “come flocking” here from that distant Territory. It breaks forth in the irrepressible outcry, reaching us from Kansas, whose truthful tones leave no ground of mistake. It addresses us in formal complaint, instinct with the indignation of a people determined to be free, and unimpeachable as the declarations of a murdered man on his dying-bed against his murderer. And let me add, that all this testimony finds echo in the very statute-book of the conspirators, and also in language dropped from the President of the United States.

I begin with an admission from the President himself, in whose sight the people of Kansas have little favor. After arraigning the innocent emigrants from the North, he is constrained to declare that their conduct is “far from justifying the _illegal_ and _reprehensible_ counter movements which ensued.”[71] By the reluctant admission of the Chief Magistrate, then, there was a counter movement at once “_illegal_ and _reprehensible_.” I thank thee, President, for teaching me these words; and I now put them in the front of this exposition, as in themselves a confession. Sir, this “illegal and reprehensible counter movement” is none other than the dreadful Crime--under an apologetic _alias_--by which, through successive invasions, Slavery is forcibly planted in this Territory.

Next to this Presidential admission must be placed details of invasions, which I now present as not only “illegal and reprehensible,” but also unquestionable evidence of the resulting Crime.

The violence, for some time threatened, broke forth on the 29th of November, 1854, at the first election of a Delegate to Congress, when companies from Missouri, amounting to upwards of one thousand, crossed into Kansas, and with force and arms proceeded to vote for General Whitfield, the candidate of Slavery. An eye-witness, General Pomeroy,[72] of superior intelligence and perfect integrity, thus describes this scene.

“The first ballot-box that was opened upon our virgin soil was closed to us by overpowering numbers and impending force. So bold and reckless were our invaders, that they cared not to conceal their attack. They came upon us, not in the guise of voters, to steal away our franchise, but boldly and openly, to snatch it with a strong hand. They came directly from their own homes, and in compact and organized bands, with arms in hand and provisions for the expedition, marched to our polls, and, when their work was done, returned whence they came.”

Here was an outrage at which the coolest blood of patriotism boils. Though, for various reasons unnecessary to develop, the busy settlers allowed the election to pass uncontested, still the means employed were none the less “illegal and reprehensible.”

This infliction was a significant prelude to the grand invasion of the 30th of March, 1855, at the election of the first Territorial Legislature under the organic law, when an armed multitude from Missouri entered the Territory in larger numbers than General Taylor commanded at Buena Vista, or than General Jackson had within his lines at New Orleans,--much larger than our fathers rallied on Bunker Hill. On they came as “an army with banners,” organized in companies, with officers, munitions, tents, and provisions, as though marching upon a foreign foe, and breathing loud-mouthed threats that they would carry their purpose, if need were, by the bowie-knife and revolver. Among them, according to his own confession, was David R. Atchison, belted with the vulgar arms of his vulgar comrades. Arrived at their several destinations on the night before the election, the invaders pitched their tents, placed their sentries, and waited for the coming day. The same trustworthy eye-witness whom I have already quoted says of one locality:--

“Baggage-wagons were there, with arms and ammunition enough for a protracted fight, and among them two brass field-pieces, ready charged. They came with drums beating and flags flying, and their leaders were of the most prominent and conspicuous men of their State.”

Of another locality he says:--

“The invaders came together in one armed and organized body, with trains of fifty wagons, besides horsemen, and the night before election pitched their camp in the vicinity of the polls; and having appointed their own judges in place of those who, from intimidation or otherwise, failed to attend, they voted without any proof of residence.”

With this force they were able, on the succeeding day, in some places, to intimidate the judges of elections, in others to substitute judges of their own appointment, in others to wrest the ballot-boxes from their rightful possessors, and everywhere to exercise a complete control of the election, and thus, by preternatural audacity of usurpation, impose a Legislature upon the free people of Kansas. Thus was conquered the Sebastopol of that Territory!

It was not enough to secure the Legislature. The election of a member of Congress recurred on the 1st of October, 1855, and the same foreigners, who had learned their strength, again manifested it. Another invasion, in controlling numbers, came from Missouri, and once more forcibly exercised the electoral franchise in Kansas.

At last, in the latter days of November, 1855, a storm, long gathering, burst upon the heads of the devoted people. The ballot-boxes had been violated, and a Legislature installed, which proceeded to carry out the conspiracy of the invaders; but the good people of the Territory, born to Freedom, and educated as American citizens, showed no signs of submission. Slavery, though recognized by pretended law, was in many places practically an outlaw. To the lawless borderers this was hard to bear; and, like the heathen of old, they raged, particularly against the town of Lawrence, already known, by the firmness of its principles and the character of its citizens, as citadel of the good cause. On this account they threatened, in their peculiar language, to “wipe it out.” Soon the hostile power was gathered for this purpose. The wickedness of this invasion was enhanced by the way in which it began. A citizen of Kansas, by the name of Dow, was murdered by a partisan of Slavery, in the name of “law and order.” Such an outrage naturally aroused indignation and provoked threats. The professors of “law and order” allowed the murderer to escape, and, still further to illustrate the irony of the name they assumed, seized the friend of the murdered man, whose few neighbors soon rallied for his rescue. This transaction, though totally disregarded in its chief front of wickedness, became the excuse for unprecedented excitement. The weak Governor,[73] with no faculty higher than servility to Slavery,--whom the President, in official delinquency, had appointed to a trust worthy only of a well-balanced character,--was frightened from his propriety. By proclamation he invoked the Territory. By telegraph he invoked the President. The Territory would not respond to his senseless appeal. The President was false. But the proclamation was circulated throughout the border counties of Missouri; and Platte, Clay, Carroll, Saline, Howard, and Jackson, each of them, contributed a volunteer company, recruited from the roadsides, and armed with weapons which chance afforded, known as “the shot-gun militia,”--with a Missouri officer as commissary-general, dispensing rations, and another Missouri officer as general-in-chief,--with two wagon-loads of rifles, belonging to Missouri, drawn by six mules, from its arsenal at Jefferson City,--with seven pieces of cannon, belonging to the United States, from its arsenal at Liberty; and this formidable force, amounting to at least 1,800 men, terrible with threats, oaths, and whiskey, crossed the borders, and encamped in larger part on the Wakarusa, over against the doomed town of Lawrence, now threatened with destruction. With these invaders was the Governor, who by this act levied war upon the people he was sent to protect. In camp with him was the original Catiline of the conspiracy, while by his side were the docile Chief Justice and the docile Judges. But this is not the first instance in which an unjust governor has found tools where he ought to have found justice. In the great impeachment of Warren Hastings, the British orator by whom it was conducted exclaims, in words strictly applicable to the misdeed I here denounce: “Had he not the Chief Justice, the tamed and domesticated Chief Justice, who waited on him like a familiar spirit?”[74] Thus was this invasion countenanced by those who should have stood in the breach against it. For more than a week it continued, while deadly conflict was imminent. I do not dwell on the heroism by which it was encountered, or the mean retreat to which it was compelled; for that is not necessary in exhibiting the Crime which you are to judge. But I cannot forbear to add other features, furnished in a letter written at the time by a clergyman, who saw and was part of what he describes.

“Our citizens have been shot at, _and in two instances murdered_, our houses invaded, hay-ricks burnt, corn and other provisions plundered, cattle driven off, all communication cut off between us and the States, wagons on the way to us with provisions stopped and plundered, and the drivers taken prisoners, and we in hourly expectation of an attack. _Nearly every man has been in arms in the village._ Fortifications have been thrown up, by incessant labor night and day. The sound of the drum and the tramp of armed men resounded through our streets, _families fleeing with their household goods for safety_. Day before yesterday the report of cannon was heard at our house, from the direction of Lecompton. Last Thursday one of our neighbors,--one of the most peaceable and excellent of men, from Ohio,--on his way home, was set upon by a gang of twelve men on horseback, and shot down. Over eight hundred men are gathered under arms at Lawrence. As yet no act of violence has been perpetrated by those on our side. _No blood of retaliation stains our hands. We stand, and are ready to act, purely in the defence of our homes and lives._”

The catalogue is not yet complete. On the 15th of December, when the people assembled to vote on the Constitution submitted for adoption, only a few days after the Treaty of Peace between the Governor on the one side and the town of Lawrence on the other, another and fifth irruption was made. But I leave all this untold. Enough of these details has been given.

Five several times and more have these invaders entered Kansas in armed array, and thus five several times and more have they trampled upon the organic law of the Territory. These extraordinary expeditions are simply the extraordinary witnesses to successive, uninterrupted violence. They stand out conspicuous, but not alone. The spirit of evil, in which they had their origin, is wakeful and incessant. From the beginning it hung upon the skirts of this interesting Territory, harrowing its peace, disturbing its prosperity, and keeping its inhabitants under the painful alarms of war. All security of person, property, and labor was overthrown; and when I urge this incontrovertible fact, I set forth a wrong which is small only by the side of the giant wrong for the consummation of which all this is done. Sir, what is man, what is government, without security, in the absence of which nor man nor government can proceed in development or enjoy the fruits of existence? Without security civilization is cramped and dwarfed. Without security there is no true Freedom. Nor shall I say too much, when I declare that security, guarded of course by its parent Freedom, is the true end and aim of government. Of this indispensable boon the people of Kansas are despoiled,--absolutely, totally. All this is aggravated by the nature of their pursuits, rendering them peculiarly sensitive to interruption, and at the same time attesting their innocence. They are for the most part engaged in the cultivation of the soil, which from time immemorial has been the sweet employment of undisturbed industry. Contented in the returns of bounteous Nature and the shade of his own trees, the husbandman is not aggressive; accustomed to produce, and not to destroy, he is essentially peaceful, unless his home is invaded, when his arm derives vigor from the soil he treads, and his soul inspiration from the heavens beneath whose canopy he daily toils. Such are the people of Kansas, whose security has been overthrown. Scenes from which Civilization averts her countenance are part of their daily life. Border incursions, which in barbarous ages or barbarous lands fretted and harried an exposed people, are here renewed, with this peculiarity, that our border robbers do not simply levy blackmail and drive off a few cattle, like those who acted under the inspiration of the Douglas of other days,--they do not seize a few persons, and sweep them away into captivity, like the African slave-traders, whom we brand as pirates,--but they commit a succession of deeds in which border sorrows and African wrongs are revived together on American soil, while, for the time being, all protection is annulled, and the whole Territory is enslaved.

Private griefs mingle their poignancy with public wrongs. I do not dwell on the anxieties of families exposed to sudden assault, and lying down to rest with the alarms of war ringing in the ears, not knowing that another day may be spared to them. Throughout this bitter winter, with the thermometer at thirty degrees below zero, the citizens of Lawrence were constrained to sleep under arms, with sentinels pacing constant watch against surprise. Our souls are wrung by individual instances. In vain do we condemn the cruelties of another age, the refinements of torture to which men were doomed, the rack and thumb-screw of the Inquisition, the last agonies of the regicide Ravaillac,

“Luke’s iron crown, and Damien’s bed of steel”;

for kindred outrages disgrace these borders. Murder stalks, Assassination skulks in the tall grass of the prairie, and the vindictiveness of man assumes unwonted forms. A preacher of the Gospel has been ridden on a rail, then thrown into the Missouri, fastened to a log, and left to drift down its muddy, tortuous current. And lately we have the tidings of that enormity without precedent, a deed without a name, where a candidate for the Legislature was most brutally gashed with knives and hatchets, and then, after weltering in blood on the snow-clad earth, trundled along, with gaping wounds, to fall dead before the face of his wife. It is common to drop a tear of sympathy over the sorrows of our early fathers, exposed to the stealthy assault of the savage foe,--and an eminent American artist[75] has pictured this scene in a marble group, on the front of the National Capitol, where the uplifted tomahawk is arrested by the strong arm and generous countenance of the pioneer, whose wife and children find shelter at his feet; but now the tear must be dropped over the sorrows of fellow-citizens building a new State in Kansas, and exposed to the perpetual assault of murderous robbers from Missouri. Hirelings, picked from the drunken spew and vomit of an uneasy civilization, having the form of men,--

“Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men; As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs, Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves are clept All by the name of dogs,”--

leashed together by secret signs and lodges, renew the incredible atrocities of the Assassins and the Thugs,--showing the blind submission of the Assassins to the Old Man of the Mountain in robbing Christians on the road to Jerusalem, and the heartlessness of the Thugs, who, avowing that murder is their religion, waylay travellers on the great road from Agra to Delhi,--with the more deadly bowie-knife for the dagger of the Assassin, and the more deadly revolver for the noose of the Thug.

In these invasions, with the entire subversion of all security in this Territory, the plunder of the ballot-box, and the pollution of the electoral franchise, I show simply the process in unprecedented Crime. If that be the best government where injury to a single citizen is resented as injury to the whole State, what must be the character of a government which leaves a whole community of citizens thus exposed? In the outrage upon the ballot-box, even without the illicit fruits which I shall soon exhibit, there is a peculiar crime, of the deepest dye, though subordinate to the final Crime, which should be promptly avenged. In other lands, where royalty is upheld, it is a special offence to rob the crown jewels, which are emblems of that sovereignty before which the loyal subject bows, and it is treason to be found in adultery with the queen, for in this way may a false heir be imposed upon the State; but in our Republic the ballot-box is the single priceless jewel of that sovereignty which we respect, and the electoral franchise, where are born the rulers of a free people, is the royal bed we are to guard against pollution. In this plain presentment, whether as regards security or as regards elections, there is enough, without proceeding further, to justify the intervention of Congress, promptly and completely, to throw over this oppressed people the impenetrable shield of the Constitution and laws. But the half is not yet told.

As every point in a wide-spread horizon radiates from a common centre, so everything said or done in this vast circle of Crime radiates from the _One Idea_, that Kansas, at all hazards, must be made a Slave State. In all the manifold wickednesses that occur, and in every successive invasion, this _One Idea_, is ever present, as Satanic tempter, motive power, _causing cause_. Talk of “one idea!” Here it is with a vengeance!

To accomplish this result, three things are attempted: _first_, by outrage of all kinds, to drive the friends of Freedom out of the Territory; _secondly_, to deter others from coming; and, _thirdly_, to obtain complete control of the Government. The process of driving out, and also of deterring, has failed. On the contrary, the friends of Freedom there have become more fixed in resolve to stay and fight the battle which they never sought, but from which they disdain to retreat,--while the friends of Freedom elsewhere are more aroused to the duty of timely succor by men and munitions of just self-defence.

While defeated in the first two processes, the conspirators succeeded in the last. By the violence already portrayed at the election of the 30th of March, when the polls were occupied by armed hordes from Missouri, they imposed a Legislature upon the Territory, and thus, under the iron mask of law, established a Usurpation not less complete than any in history. That this was done I proceed to prove. Here is the evidence.

1. Only in this way can this extraordinary expedition be adequately explained. In the words of Molière, once employed by John Quincy Adams in the other House, “_Que diable allaient-ils faire dans cette galère?_” What did they go into the Territory for? If their purposes were peaceful, as has been suggested, why cannons, arms, flags, numbers, and all this violence? As simple citizens, proceeding to the honest exercise of the electoral franchise, they might go with nothing more than a pilgrim’s staff. Philosophy always seeks a _sufficient cause_, and only in the _One Idea_ already presented can a cause be found in any degree commensurate with the Crime; and this becomes so only when we consider the mad fanaticism of Slavery.

2. Public notoriety steps forward to confirm the suggestion of reason. In every place where Truth can freely travel it is asserted and understood that the Legislature was imposed upon Kansas by foreigners from Missouri; and this universal voice is now received as undeniable verity.

3. It is also attested by harangues of the conspirators. Here is what Stringfellow said _before_ the invasion.

“To those who have qualms of conscience as to violating laws, State or National, the time has come when such impositions must be disregarded, as your rights and property are in danger; _and I advise you, one and all, to enter every election district in Kansas, in defiance of Reeder and his vile myrmidons, and vote at the point of the bowie-knife and revolver_. Neither give nor take quarter, as our cause demands it. It is enough that the slaveholding interest wills it, from which there is no appeal. What right has Governor Reeder to rule Missourians in Kansas? His proclamation and prescribed oath must be repudiated. It is your interest to do so. Mind that Slavery is established where it is not prohibited.”

Here is what Atchison said _after_ the invasion.