The Lecompton constitution provided for holding an election of State officers, a legislature and a member of Congress, on the first Monday of January, 1858. The President sent instructions to the Territorial governor which secured a peaceable election. A larger vote was polled than at any previous election. The party which had previously refused to vote, now changed their tactics. They elected a large majority of the members of the legislature, and the political power of the proposed new State was therefore in their hands. But for their previous factional resistance to the authority of the Territorial government, they might have attained this result at a much earlier period.
On the 30th of January, 1858, the President received the so-called Lecompton constitution from the president of the convention, with a request that it be laid before Congress. And here it is necessary to pause, for the purpose of a just understanding of the grounds on which the President recommended the admission of Kansas with this constitution. He was assailed with almost every epithet of vituperation of which our language admits, as if he was responsible for and in favor of the pro-slavery feature of this constitution. A simple and truthful consideration of his official duty under the organic Act by which the Territory was organized, and a candid recital of the reasons on which he urged the admission of the State with this constitution, will enable my readers to determine with what justice he was treated in this matter.
Mr. Buchanan was elected President upon a political “platform,” adopted by the Cincinnati Convention, which nominated him, and which, like all the platforms of that period, dealt, among other things, with the vexed subject of slavery in Territories. But the Cincinnati platform of the Democratic party did not affirm the right of a Territorial legislature to establish or to prohibit slavery: nor did it admit the doctrine of “popular sovereignty,” as applied to a people while in the Territorial condition. What it did affirm was, that at the period when the people of a Territory should be forming and adopting a State constitution, they should be allowed to sanction or exclude slavery as they should see fit. This distinction has of course no interest at the present day. But in the condition of the Union in the year 1856, this distinction was of great practical importance. The political men who framed the Cincinnati platform had to consider how they could present to the people of the United States a principle of action on this exciting topic of slavery in the Territories, that would be consistent with the rights of slave-holding and non-slaveholding States in the common property of the Union, and at the same time affirm as a party doctrine a basis of proceeding that could be safely applied in any Territory and that would maintain its true relation as a Territory to the Government of the United States. If they were in pursuit of votes for their candidate, it should also be remembered that they were preparing for a great national party a set of political principles that would live and be active for a long time to come. Mr. Douglas had caused the Missouri Compromise to be swept away; he had procured the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which had affirmed something that was both new and strange in the politics of this difficult subject. This was, that in creating the body politic known as a Territory of the United States, Congress should neither legalize nor prohibit slavery while the Territorial condition continued, but that the same species of “popular sovereignty” should be held to be inherent in the people of a Territory that is inherent in the people of a State, so that they could act on the subject of slavery for themselves from the time of their first entry into the Territory and before they had been authorized to form themselves into a State. The ad captandum phrase “popular sovereignty” procured for this theory many adherents. But it was irreconcilable with what others asserted to be the true relation of a Territory to the Congress of the United States, and equally irreconcilable with the claim of the Southern slaveholder to go into a Territory with his property in slaves and to maintain there that property until the State constitution had sanctioned or prohibited it. The framers of the Cincinnati platform did not propose to elect a President on this basis. They therefore did not affirm that a Territorial legislature, or the people of a Territory, should be allowed to act on the subject of slavery in any way; but they proclaimed as their doctrine that when the people of a Territory, acting under the authority of an organic law, should frame and adopt a State constitution, they should be at liberty to make their State free or slave as they might see fit.
Before this period the Cincinnati platform was silent; and it was silent because its framers did not see fit to trammel themselves or their candidate with a doctrine of “popular sovereignty” irreconcilable with the governing authority of Congress, and also because in this matter of slavery there was a question of property involved. When, therefore, Mr. Buchanan accepted the Cincinnati platform, and was elected upon it, he went into the office of President without being in any way committed to the doctrine of “popular sovereignty,” as expounded by Mr. Douglas.
But the Kansas-Nebraska Act was both a bone of contention between two portions of the Democratic party and a law of the land. As President, Mr. Buchanan had only to construe and administer it. It contained, as explanatory of the purpose of Congress in abolishing the Missouri Compromise restriction, the following declaration: “It being the true intent and meaning of this Act not to legislate slavery into any Territory or State, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States.” This was in one respect ambiguous, and in another not so. It was ambiguous in not clearly defining the time at which this right to form their own domestic institutions was to be considered as inhering in the people of a Territory. It was unambiguous in subordinating the exercise of this right to the Constitution of the United States. In carrying out the law, the President had to consider what was the limitation imposed by the Constitution of the United States upon the operation of this newly created right. This brought before him the action of the Supreme Court of the United States on the subject of slave property in the Territories, which had occurred a few days after his inauguration.
Whatever may be said of the action of the Supreme Court in the well-known case of “Dred Scott,” in regard to its being technically a judicial decision, there can be no doubt as to what a majority of the judges meant to affirm and did affirm in their respective opinions.[[34]] This was that property in slaves, being recognized as a right of property by the Constitution of the United States, although established only by the local law of a particular State, travelled with the person of the owner into a Territory; and while the Territorial condition continued, such property could not be abolished by the legislation of Congress or the legislation of the Territorial government. Mr. Buchanan always regarded this as a judicial decision of this question of property; and as the construction of the Kansas-Nebraska Act was by its express terms to be determined by the court, he considered it his duty to regard the period of time on which the people of Kansas were to decide the question of slavery or no slavery to be at the formation and adoption of a State constitution. This was the clear deduction to be drawn from the constitutional doctrine which had been enunciated by a majority of the judges.
Hence it was that all his official influence was exerted, through the Territorial government, to induce the people of Kansas to act on the question of slavery at the proper time and in the only practical way: namely, by voting for delegates to the convention called under the authority of the Territorial laws, and then voting on the constitution which that convention should frame. It certainly was no wish of his to have Kansas become a slaveholding State; he could have no motive in the whole matter but to get it decided what her domestic condition was to be, by the ballot-box instead of the rifle, by voting and not by fighting. He could, by no sort of justice, be held responsible for the result which was produced by the refusal of the anti-slavery party to vote; and when the Lecompton constitution reached him, he could not avoid submitting it to Congress. He submitted it with a strong recommendation that Kansas be received into the Union under it. His reasons for this recommendation are now to be stated.
1. The Lecompton constitution was republican in form, and it had been framed and voted upon in a free and open ballot, which the convention had directed to be taken on the all-important question of slavery. 2. The question of slavery was thus localized, confined to the people whom it immediately concerned, and banished from the halls of Congress, where it had been always exerting a baneful influence upon the country at large. 3. If Congress, for the sake of those who had refused to exercise their power of excluding slavery from the constitution of Kansas, should now reject it because slavery remained in it, the agitation would be renewed everywhere in a more alarming form than it had yet assumed. 4. After the admission of the State, its people would be sovereign over this and every other domestic question; they could mould their institutions as they should see fit, and if, as the President had every reason to believe, a majority of the people were opposed to slavery, the legislature already elected under this constitution could at once provide for amending it in the proper manner. 5. If this constitution should be sent back by Congress because it sanctioned slavery, a second constitution would have to be framed and sent to Congress, and there would be a revival of the slavery agitation, both in Congress and throughout the Union. 6. The speedy admission of Kansas, which would restore peace and harmony to the whole country, was of infinitely greater consequence than the small difference of time that would be required for the people to exercise their own sovereign power over the whole subject after they had become a State, compared with the process of a new convention to be held under the auspices of the Territorial government.[[35]]
“This message,” says Mr. Buchanan, “gave rise to a long, exciting, and occasionally violent debate in both Houses of Congress, between the anti-slavery members and their opponents, which lasted for three months. In the course of it, slavery was denounced in every form which could exasperate the Southern people, and render it odious to the people of the North; whilst on the other hand, many of the speeches of Southern members displayed characteristic violence. Thus two sessions of Congress in succession had been in a great degree occupied with the same inflammatory topics, in discussing the affairs of Kansas.”[[36]] At length, however, an Act which had been reported by a committee of conference of both Houses, admitting Kansas into the Union as a State under the Lecompton constitution, was passed in the Senate by a vote of 31 to 22, and in the House by a vote of 112 to 103, and was signed by the President on the 4th of May, 1858.[[37]] The validity of the proceedings in Kansas which had produced the Lecompton constitution was expressly admitted by the preamble of this statute.
But the Act annexed a condition precedent to the final admission of the State under this constitution. This related, not to slavery, but to the public lands within the territory. The ordinance of the convention which accompanied the Lecompton constitution demanded for the State a cession of the public lands more than six times the quantity that had ever been granted to any other State, when received into the Union. Congress would not assent to such an exaction. It was therefore provided that the people of the State should vote upon a proposition reducing the number of acres to be ceded to the same number that had been granted to other States; and that when this proposition should have been ascertained by the President’s proclamation to have been accepted, the admission of the State, upon an equal footing with all the other States, should be complete and absolute. But the condition was never fulfilled. The people of Kansas rejected it on the 2d of August, 1858, and the Lecompton constitution thus fell to the ground. “Notwithstanding this,” Mr. Buchanan observes, “the recognition by Congress of the regularity of the proceedings in forming the Lecompton constitution, did much good, at least for a season. It diverted the attention of the people from fighting to voting, a most salutary change.”[[38]]