[ [5]] "These fifteen counties in which there was no registry gave a much larger vote at the October election, even with the six months' qualification, than the whole vote given to the delegates who signed the Lecompton Constitution on the 7th November last."—[Walker to Cass, December 15, 1857. Senate Ex. Doc. No. 8, 1st Sess. 35th Cong. Vol. I, p. 128.]
[ [6]] Walker to Buchanan, June 28, 1857. Report Covode Committee, pp. 117-19.
[ [7]] Buchanan to Walker, July 12, 1857. Report Covode Committee, p. 112.
[ [8]] The ingenuity which evolved 1600 Kansas votes from an old Cincinnati directory and 1200 more from an uninhabited county, was not exhausted by that prodigious labor. The same influences, and perhaps the same manipulators, produced a companion piece known by the name of the "candle-box fraud." At the election of January 4, 1858, for officers under the Lecompton Constitution, the returns from Delaware Agency underwent such suspicious handling that an investigating commission of the Legislature, by aid of a search-warrant, found them secreted in a candle-box buried under a woodpile near Calhoun's "surveyor-general's office" at Lecompton. A forged list of 379 votes had been substituted for the original memorandum of only forty-three votes which had been cut from the certificate of the judges; the votes on the forged list being intended for the pro-slavery candidates. During the investigation Calhoun was arrested, but liberated by Judge Cato on habeas corpus, after which he immediately went to Missouri, and from there to Washington. The details and testimony are found in House Com. Reports, 1st Sess. 35th Cong. Vol. III, Report No. 377.
[ [9]] Minority Report, Select Com. of Fifteen. Report No. 377, page 109, Vol. III., H.R. Reports, 1st Sess. 35th Cong.
This "missing link," no less than the remaining portion of the journal printed in the proceedings of the investigating committee, is itself strong circumstantial proof of the imposture underlying the whole transaction. Many sections of the completed constitution are not even mentioned in the journal; it does not contain the submission clause of the schedule, and the authenticity of the document rests upon the signature and the certificate of John Calhoun without other verification.
[ [10]] "Dr. Tebbs and General Whitfield a month since left very strong letters for publication with the editor of the 'Union' which he promised to publish. His breach of this promise is a gross outrage. If not published immediately our success in convention materially depends on my getting an immediate copy at Lecompton. My friends here all regard now the 'Union' as an enemy and encouraging by its neutrality the fire-eaters not to submit the constitution. Very well, the facts are so clear that I can get along without the 'Union,' but he had no right to suppress Dr. Tebbs's letter. I shall in due time expose that transaction."—Extract from a letter of Robert J. Walker to James Buchanan, dated October, 1857.
[ [11]] For this autograph letter and other interesting manuscripts, we are indebted to General Duncan S. Walker, a son of the Governor, now residing in Washington, D.C.
[ [12]] Under an Act of Congress popularly known as the "English Bill," this same Lecompton Constitution was once more voted upon by the people of Kansas on August 2, 1858, with the following result: for the proposition, 1788; against it, 11,300.—Wilder, "Annals of Kansas," pp. 186-8.
[ [13]] Walker to Cass, Dec. 16, 1857. Senate Ex. Doc. No. 8, 1st Sess., 35th Cong. Vol. I., pp. 131, 130.