Error began, unquestionably, with the repeal of the Act prohibiting slavery in the Louisiana territory above thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes north latitude, and wrong began, just as unquestionably, with the incursion of the Missourians, and their fraudulent voting at the Territorial election in March of 1855. A bogus legislature was thus thrust upon Kansas Territory at the outset. It was a political outrage of the first degree, and it would have justified rebellion against the execution of the enactments of this body. But it does not excuse, or even palliate, the criminal atrocities inaugurated by John Brown at Dutch Henry's Crossing, and the wild reign of murder and robbery which followed in their train. All this was common crime of the blackest and most villainous sort, and the men who engaged in it were cutthroats and highwaymen, who took advantage of the confusion in Kansas to prosecute their nefarious work.
It is often said that the Civil War began in Kansas, and simply spread from there over the country. It is true that violence began there, and in its degeneration into savagery developed those devilish dispositions that carried murder and robbery into Virginia, and thereby helped mightily to create that intensely hostile feeling between the North and the South which resulted in Civil War, but we affront good morals and common sense when we dignify those Kansas atrocities by the title of war; and we obliterate moral distinctions when we attempt to justify them by the end which their authors professed to have in view, the extermination of African slavery throughout the country. Such deeds are not means to anything except the establishment of the reign of hell on earth, and the maudlin adoration sometimes accorded their doers is evidence of an unbalanced moral sense. It is a source of congratulation that the juristic sense of the last decades of the nineteenth century refuses to place the crank who kills or robs for what he considers, or professes to consider, the welfare of society under any other class than that of the most dangerous criminals. It remains for the ethical sense of the twentieth century to sweep the hero-worship too often accorded such characters out of the world's literature.
| The forerunners of war. |
But if the murders, and robberies, and arson committed in Kansas were not war, they were the forerunners of war. The last expedient which the minds of men could invent for putting the slavery question in the position of a purely local matter had been tried, and had utterly and miserably failed. The nation must now settle the question, by peaceable means if it could, but if it could not, then by force. The record of its attempts, first upon the one line, and then upon the other, will be the chief subject of the next and last volume of this series.
APPENDIX I.
THE ELECTORAL VOTE IN DETAIL, 1820-1856.