From the point of view of the present, we are compelled to regard the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act as probably the greatest error which the Congress of the United States ever committed, and the arguments by which it was supported as among the most specious fallacies that have ever misled the minds of men. We must take this ground, unless we assume that we could not have solved the slavery problem in any other way than we did, and at any less cost. If we make this assumption, we may then consider this Act as providential, in that it precipitated a crisis, which was bound to come, and which would only have been made more terrible by delay. While, however, we of the succeeding generation may explain the place of this Act in our history in this way, no considerations of this kind can justify the men who produced it, and placed it upon the statute-book. That God should "make the wrath of man to praise him" does not excuse the wrath of man.
CHAPTER XX.
THE STRUGGLE FOR KANSAS
[Eli Thayer and His Emigrant Aid Scheme]—[Reports in Regard to its Character and Purposes]—[The Missouri "Border Ruffian" of 1854]—[Nebraska for the North and Kansas for the South]—[General Atchison]—[Dr. Charles Robinson]—[The First Party of Emigrants]—[The "Platte County Self-defensive Association"]—[The Founding of Lawrence]—[First Invasion of the Missourians]—[Governor A. H. Reeder]—[The Second Invasion of the Missourians and the Election of the Delegate to Congress]—[The Indignation of the North]—[The Republican Party]—[The Third Invasion of the Missourians]—[Governor Reeder and the Territorial Elections]—[The Organization of the First Legislature of Kansas Territory]—[The Topeka Constitution]—[The Removal of Governor Reeder; and His Election as Congressional Delegate]—[Establishment of the "Free-state" Government]—[The First Violence]—[The "Free-state" Government and the Administration]—[The New Governor, Shannon, and the "Law and Order" Party]—[John Brown]—[The President's Proclamation]—[The Congressional Committee to the Territory]—[Application for Admission]—[The "Treason Indictments"]—[The Sacking of Lawrence]—[The Attack on Senator Sumner]—[The Pottawattomie Massacres]—[The Battle at Black Jack]—[The Governor's Proclamation, Enforced by United States Soldiers]—[The Passage of the Bill for the Admission of Kansas by the House]—[Dispersal of the "Free-state" Legislature by Colonel Sumner]—[The "Free-state" Directory]—[The Treaty of August 17th]—[The New Invasion from Missouri]—[General Smith's Attitude Toward Invaders]—[The failure of "Popular Sovereignty" in the Territories]—[The New Governor Establishes Peace by Means of the Army of the United States]—[The Judicial Contribution to Kansas History.]
The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the purchase of nearly fifty thousand square miles of territory from Mexico on the Southern boundary of New Mexico, and the issue of a manifesto from Ostend by the Ministers of the United States to Great Britain, France, and Spain, Messrs. Buchanan, Mason, and Soulé, advising the acquisition of Cuba by the United States, together with the preparation of filibustering expeditions in the South for the execution of this and similar designs, all coming within the same year, 1854, seemed to be sufficient evidence of a fixed plan among the slaveholders for the extension of slavery and the increase of the number of slaveholding Commonwealths in the Union, and roused the people of the North to an appreciation of the impending danger and to extraordinary exertions for meeting the same and warding it off.
| Eli Thayer and his emigrant aid scheme. |
During the debate upon the Kansas-Nebraska bill in Congress, it does not seem to have been generally appreciated that it might, after all, turn out to be a Free-soil measure, and that the question whether it would be such or not in a specific case resolved itself into the problem of immigration. There lived, however, in the town of Worcester, Mass., a shrewd, far seeing business man, with whose shrewdness, however, ideality and patriotism were mingled in an uncommon degree, who immediately comprehended the situation from this point of view. This man was the now well known and universally honored Eli Thayer. Before the Kansas-Nebraska bill had become law, the idea in his mind had ripened into a wide-reaching plan. This plan was the organization of an emigrant aid society, with an immense capital, the purpose of which should be to foster emigration from the Northern Commonwealths and the European states into the Territories and the slaveholding Commonwealths of the Union, to the end that a Free-soil population should gain control of them, and prohibit or abolish slavery in them by their own local acts. Mr. Thayer reasoned with himself that masters would be very timid about immigrating into a Territory with their slaves until the question should be determined whether slavery should have a legal existence in the Territory, while men without such impediments would go boldly forward and occupy the country, and vote the free status for the Territory; and again, that with only about one-fourth of the white population of the slaveholding Commonwealths pecuniarily interested in slavery, the immigration of a few thousand active anti-slavery men into these would finally turn the balance at the polls against the further existence of the institution in the slaveholding Commonwealths themselves. The plan was so comprehensive that most of Mr. Thayer's friends thought it visionary, and he modified it, after having obtained his charter from the legislature of Massachusetts, limiting it to the settlement of the Territories, and especially to that of Kansas Territory, by anti-slavery men. The organization, as thus finally effected, counted among its directors some of the purest, most patriotic, and most capable men of the country—Mr. A. A. Lawrence, Dr. Samuel Cabot, Mr. John Lowell, Mr. Moses H. Grinnell, Rev. Edward E. Hale, Rev. Horace Bushnell, Professor Benjamin Silliman, and others of the like fame and fortune. The way in which they proposed to accomplish their purpose was by lessening the hardships of the journey to the distant country, and the hardships of life in the new country. They proposed to organize the emigrants into companies, procure transportation for them at the most favorable rates, build hotels, boarding-houses, mills, school-houses, churches—in a word to send capital in advance of population, in order to attract a good, law-abiding population by planting for them the advantages and conveniences of civilization in the new country. It was a noble scheme, and none the less so because of the idea of making it pay ultimately as a business venture.