"All honest anti-slavery men, here and elsewhere, will spit on your platform!"
He paused and faced the leaders who had drafted it.
"And all pro-slavery men must forever despise the base sycophants who originated it!"
John Brown, Jr., applauded. The crowd laughed.
Old John Brown had paid no further heed to the proceedings of the Convention. His eyelids were drawn half down. Only pin points of glittering light remained.
The resolutions were adopted by an overwhelming majority.
In the East, Horace Greeley in the Tribune reluctantly accepted the platform: "Why free blacks should be excluded it is difficult to understand; but if Slavery can be kept out by compromise of that sort, we shall not complain. An error of this character may be corrected; but let Slavery obtain a foothold there and it is not so easily removed."
Brown's hopes were to be still further dashed by the persistence with which the leaders of this Convention followed up the program of establishing a white man's country on the free plains of the West.
When the Convention met at Topeka on the twenty-third of October, to form a Constitution, the determination to exclude all negroes from Kansas was again sustained. The majority were finally badgered into submitting the issue to a separate vote of the people. On the fifteenth of December, the Northern settlers voted on it and the question was settled.
Negroes were excluded by a three-fourths majority.