DEMOCRACY IN KANSAS.
I appear before you as the candidate of a great party, honored by its confidence and proud to bear its standard, to ask you in its name for your support. I have been a citizen of this State for nearly thirty years. I came here, a boy of 18, when Kansas was a poor, weak, distracted Territory, rent and torn by civil war, invaded by hordes of ruffians and marauders, and suffering under all the evils of the worst government that ever harassed and oppressed a free people. For more than two years this intolerable lawlessness had prevailed—for nearly three years longer it continued; and the party that confronts us to-day, and is asking your support, is the same party that, from 1854 to 1861, held Kansas by the throat, and by fraud, and murder, and arson, and turbulence, and every crime that ever disgraced humanity, endeavored to fasten upon it the curse of Human Slavery.
Beaten in its attempt to enslave Kansas, the Democratic party plunged the whole country into civil war, and for four long and bloody years the Nation struggled on to universal freedom and national unity; and this young State, that had been fighting for five years to get into the Union, now had to fight for four years more to preserve the Union. Republicanism and Kansas were wedded together in this long and terrible struggle. When Jefferson Davis marched out of the Senate, William H. Seward moved to take up the Kansas bill, and as the coat-tails of the Rebel chief disappeared through one door, young Kansas, smiling and triumphant, marched in at the other.