| Denver advises the President against the admission of Kansas under the Lecompton instrument. |
As yet the Lecompton constitution had not been presented by the President to Congress, and Acting Governor Denver hastened to give him a truthful statement of the condition of affairs in the Territory, and to urge him not to recommend to Congress the admission of Kansas under this constitution, but to suggest to that body the passage simply of an enabling act, under which the people of Kansas might begin again the work of forming a Commonwealth constitution.
| The President's message of February 2nd (1858). |
But the President did not heed this wise warning. On February 2nd, 1858, he sent the Lecompton constitution, with the provision making slavery a permanent institution in Kansas, to Congress, and recommended the admission of the distracted Territory into the Union, as a "State," under it. His line of argument was that every step in the procedure of framing and adopting this constitution had been regularly and legally taken, and that all the voters could have participated in the work if they had chosen to do so. He claimed that the act of the Territorial legislature, after it came under the control of the "Free-state" men, in ordering another vote, and a different sort of vote, upon the constitution, than and from that appointed and required by the convention, was irregular; and he undertook to comfort the "Free-state" men with the suggestion that, Kansas once admitted, they could change its constitution to suit themselves, if they were really in majority.
| The passage of the Lecompton bill by the Senate. |
The President's argument carried the Senate with him despite the powerful opposition of Mr. Douglas, who bravely antagonized the Administration, and held firmly that his great principle of "popular sovereignty" required the unreserved submission of every part of the constitution to the free suffrages of the people, in order to establish its validity. He declared that unless this should be done Congress could not know whether the people of Kansas had made a constitution or not, and that without that knowledge the admission of Kansas under the constitution before the Senate was tantamount to making a constitution for Kansas by Congressional act. The honest and manly stand taken by Mr. Douglas upon this great subject certainly presents him in the rôle of a patriotic statesman, rather than in his usual character of the shrewd politician.