Into a Kansas frenzied with the work of Brown on the one side and that of the “border ruffians,” as the Missourians were called, on the other, the President sent Robert J. Walker as governor, commissioned to solve the insoluble problem. So great was the faith of the country in Walker that he was hailed as the next President of the United States by fair-minded men and important newspapers. Walker called an election for a constitutional convention. Again the Missourians participated, and the Lecompton constitution was the result. The Free-State men refused to recognize the convention unless the new constitution should be submitted to a fair vote. This the convention refused to do, and the governor appealed to the President to compel submission. This was denied, and Walker resigned. The Lecompton, pro-slavery constitution of Kansas was submitted to the first Congress of Buchanan in December, 1857, and the Administration urged its adoption. Walker openly condemned Buchanan for deserting him, and he declared the Lecompton constitution to be a fraud. Yet the leaders of the South, resentful and angry, supported it, and the majority of the Senate was on the same side. The judges of the Supreme Court were known to favor it. The Republicans urged the adoption of the Topeka constitution of 1855, and the majority of the people seemed to be of the same view. What was the way out of the dangerous impasse?
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Most interesting and trustworthy accounts of subjects discussed in the chapter are: T. C. Smith's Parties and Slavery, in American Nation series; F. Bancroft's The Life of William H. Seward (1900); Allen Johnson's The Life of Stephen A. Douglas (1908); O. G. Villard's John Brown; a Biography (1910); L. D. Scisco's Political Nativism in New York (1901); William Salter's Life of James W. Grimes (1876); George W. Julian's Life of Joshua R. Giddings (1892). Rhodes, McMaster, and Schouler treat the period critically. Some special studies of importance are P. O. Ray's Repeal of the Missouri Compromise (1909); Allen Johnson's Genesis of Popular Sovereignty (Iowa Journal of History and Politics, III); F. H. Hodder's Douglas and the Kansas-Nebraska Act (Wisconsin Historical Society Proceedings, 1912); and E. S. Corwin's The Dred Scott Decision (American Historical Review, XVII).
Some of the most instructive contemporary narratives will be found in M. W. Cluskey's Political Text Book (1857), and Speeches, Messages, and other Writings of A. G. Brown (1859); H. Wilson's Rise and Fall of the Slave Power (1872-77); Horace Greeley's The American Conflict (1864); Mrs. Jefferson Davis's Jefferson Davis; a Memoir (1890); J. M. Cutts's Constitutional and Party Questions (1866); S. J. May's Recollections of the Anti-Slavery Conflict (1869); Works of Charles Sumner (1874-83), and many other works of a similar character.
William McDonald's Select Documents gives the most important sources for this whole period. But the Congressional Globe, U.S. Documents, House Reports, 34th Cong., 1st Sess., vol. II, must be studied in order to get the spirit of the times.
CHAPTER XIII[ToC]
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill had greatly angered a majority of the people of the North. The sudden rise of the Republican party in protest against it, and the promise of Northern control of the Federal Government, heartened them to the great struggle of 1856. But the failure to win the populous States of Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Illinois, and the solid front of the South, the compact pro-Southern Senate, and the moral effect of the Dred Scott decision discouraged them. Moreover, the Republican victories of 1854-55 proved misleading, for in 1856 and 1858 the party failed to win a majority in the House of Representatives. All that the ardent protestants and idealists could do was to block extreme measures in Congress and enact laws in the Republican States to harass the “enemy.” Seward yielded the struggle to the extent of indorsing popular sovereignty, which did indeed promise more than any other line of procedure. Greeley, the enemy of Seward but the arch-enemy of the South, actually proposed Douglas, the “squire of slavery,” for the Presidency in 1860. Chase seemed to be losing ground in Ohio, where he had never had a majority on his own account. Business, as we have already seen, had made peace with the South, and conservative leaders of the East regarded slave-owners as in the same class morally with bankers and railway directors.[10] The federal law against the African slave trade could not be enforced. More than a hundred ships sailed unmolested each year from New York Harbor to the African Coast to bring back naked negroes for the cotton planters.