The thirty-three judges appointed by the Government to conduct the election in the eleven districts, all swore that the returns contained a true statement of the votes polled by the lawful voters. The Governor, two weeks after giving certificates of election, issued his proclamation commanding the members to assemble on the 2d of July. He recognized the legitimacy of the legislature in his message, invoking the Divine blessing on it and recommending the passage of important laws. But he afterward quarreled with the legislature. He then sought to repudiate it and impeach its validity by charging that it had been elected by Missouri invaders. The only evidence before the Committee tending to show irregularities in the election was the hearsay statement of the Governor, which flatly contradicted his solemn official declarations. The legislature itself had investigated the elections of all members against whom contests were filed and its legitimacy was finally and conclusively established. The malcontents having failed to capture the legislature, encouraged by Governor Reeder (who had meanwhile been relieved from office), instituted their rebellious Topeka movement and, in defiance of the law, attempted to organize a State.
The movement was revolutionary and intended to subvert the existing Government. Only two laws enacted by the territorial legislature were complained of as unjust,—that relating to elections and that relating to slaves. The social, domestic and pecuniary relations of the people had adjusted themselves to this body of laws which Congress was asked to annul; and these friends of the negro who had organized a rebellious State government in his behalf, had adopted a Constitution which forever excluded him from the State. The entire trouble in Kansas, he continued, rose not from any vice inherent in the law, but from abuses of the rights given by it to the people. The law simply permitted them to form their domestic institutions in their own way. If that great principle had been permitted free operation, there would have been no violence or trouble in Kansas. The good order reigning in Nebraska, where the law was fairly tried, was sufficient proof of its wisdom.
The opponents of this great principle had insisted on moulding the State of Kansas from without. Having failed to induce Congress to interfere in the internal affairs of the Territory, they then sought to accomplish their purpose by means of a society organized in Washington and charted in Massachusetts, with several millions of capital. They had deliberately attempted to discredit the Kansas-Nebraska bill and its supporters, in order to influence the approaching presidential election. The whole responsibility for the disturbance in Kansas rested upon the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company and its affiliated societies. The people of Missouri never contemplated the invasion of conquest of the Territory. If they had imitated the example set by New England, they had done it on the principle of self-defense, and had always been ready to abandon their counter-movement as soon as the managers of the New England invasion ceased their efforts to shape the domestic institutions of the Territory by an unwarranted scheme of foreign interference. When the cardinal principle of self-government should be recognized as binding on all, there would be an end of the slavery controversy, and the occupation of political agitators, whose hopes of position and promotion depended upon their capacity to disturb the country, would be gone.
The debate lingered along indecisively through the Spring weeks and the Senators poured out their mutual recriminations with increasing bitterness. Personal relations among them were seriously strained. Both parties were conscious that their constituents shared their passions and applauded their acrimony.
On the 19th and 20th of May, Sumner delivered his philippic on "The Crime Against Kansas." The title of the speech was a gratuitous insult to the power which had held sway in American politics for fifty years and learned to enjoy that sense of superiority and sacredness which characterized the hierarchy in the middle ages. The assaults on brother Senators were brutal. Senator Butler of South Carolina, a polite, formal gentleman of the old school, was recognized as the social and intellectual head of the Southern aristocracy. Douglas, though forever excluded from its inner circles, was an efficient and useful ally.
These senatorial leaders of the slavery crusade in Kansas were the victims of Sumner's bitter invective. He referred to them as the Don Quixote and Sancho Panza of slavery and, as if to prove that this comparison was not a mere momentary inspiration of playful humor but the elaboration of malignant hate, he developed the parallel to its minute details. He described Douglas in his speech defending his report as "piling one mass of elaborate error on another mass and constraining himself to unfamiliar decencies of speech." But he drew hope from the reflection that the Illinois Senator "is but mortal man; against him is immortal principle. With finite power he wrestles with the Infinite and he must fall. Against him are stronger battalions than any marshaled by mortal arm, the inborn, ineradicable, invincible sentiments of the human heart; against him is Nature with all her subtle forces; against him is God. Let him try to subdue these." He compared the Kansas troubles to the barbarous warfare of the Scottish Highlands when blackmail was levied and robberies committed by marauders "acting under the inspiration of the Douglas of other days," and compared Douglas' recent speech to "the efforts of a distinguished logician to prove that Napoleon Bonaparte never existed."
Douglas answered with extreme bitterness. He declared that Sumner's speech had been got up like a Yankee bedquilt by sewing all the old scraps and patches together. He pronounced his classic quotations obscene and indecent.
"Is it his object," he asked, "to provoke some of us to kick him as we would a dog in the street? * * * * * The Senator from Massachusetts," he declared, "had his speech written, printed, committed to memory, and practiced every night before the glass, with a negro boy to hold the candle and watch the gestures." He charged Sumner with perjury in taking the senatorial oath to his personal grievance and complained that he had been burned and hung in effigy under the advice of Sumner and his brother agitators because of his unswerving devotion to the Constitution.
"I wish," he said, "the Senate to bear in mind that in the many controversies in which I have been engaged since I have been a member of this body, I never had one in which I was not first assailed. I have always stood on the defensive. You arrange it on the opposite side of the house to set your hounds after me and then complain when I cuff them over the head and send them back yelping. I never made an attack on any Senator; I have only repelled attacks." He warned Sumner that Butler, who was absent during the speech, would return to speak and act for himself.
Sumner briefly replied, defending himself against the charge of disloyalty to the Constitution in his unwillingness to support its fugitive slave clause, by quoting Jackson's famous dictum that each man swears to support the Constitution as he understands it. He then turned on Douglas with bitter scorn. He rebuked him for his coarse personalities unbecoming a Senator and a gentleman.