1854. MASSACHUSETTS AND PERSONAL LIBERTY. 319 bondage. And the movement now commenced here in earnest, to be renewed every year until its end was accomplished, for the removal of Loring, the commissioner who had returned Anthony Burns to slavery, from his judgeship of probate. Upon the address of both houses of the legislature, the Governor had summary power to remove a State judge, and the personal liberty act forbade for the future that those concerned with fugitive-slave process should hold a Massachusetts office besides. Loring clung to his post; nor was Gardner, the Know-Nothing Governor, disposed to conform to the wishes of the legislature by striking at judicial independence. Garrison abolitionists, headed by Wendell Phillips, aided the Free Soil sentiment of Massachusetts in compassing this obstruction of the fugitive-slave law and the removal. of Judge Loring. But their eccentric course on matters of national concern made even the radical among Massachusetts Free Soilers sensitive at being classed with them, - their own means being constitutional, and their end the salvation of the Union. At a recent Independence-day celebration in the woods of Framingham, where 1854, Thoreau read a disturbing address, Garrison had July 4. emphasized his customary Catonian utterance, "the Union must be destroyed," by burning publicly a copy of the Federal Constitution. The passage by Congress of the Kansas-Nebraska bill he hailed as a new impulse to secession. His nature did not flinch from consequences. "There is," said the "Liberator," "but one honest, straightforward course to pursue if we would see the slave power overthrown; the Union must be dissolved!"* And such was the general tenor of anniversary speeches and resolutions through the next six years, whenever and wherever meetings were held of our anti-slavery societies. So strenuous, indeed, was Garrison to stand upon the high platform. of moral assertion, as one who kept truth clear of the contamination of free discussion, that he scornfully refused to take any part in a course of anti-slavery lectures at 3 W. L. Garrison's Life, 414. Boston, where Southern men had been invited by the committee to present their personal opinions of slavery. As well, he wrote indignantly, might robbers be asked to state their views of robbery.* Kansas now becomes the foreground of public interest, the battle-field where freedom and slavery gird up their loins and contend for the mastery. Of the two territories, Kansas and Nebraska, both of which were set apart for the new experiment of popular sovereignty, desecrated and driven from the sanctuary of that former decree which prohibited slavery altogether, Kansas was the more southerly, and from its situation the more suitable for planting institutions of bondage. It occupied nearly the same parallels as Virginia, and lay due west of the slave State of Missouri, whose boundaries were next adjacent. This whole interior region of Kansas and Nebraska 1854. had hitherto remained practically unsettled and little known; but its invitation was to agriculture, and peaceful rivers meandered through its soft scenery.† Kansas presented a tame and uniform aspect of gently undulating ridges and valleys; its territory, as now defined, extending northward from our Indian reservations to the fortieth parallel of latitude, and west from the State of Missouri to the Rocky Mountains. In this broad parallelogram was embraced an area reckoned at about 126,000 square miles. At the passage of the Douglas bill, Kansas was an Indian reservation; and the fact that Indians would be despoiled of their rightful domains by erecting this territory was urged very strongly in debate by Everett, Bell, Houston, and others, who, timorous on the main issue involved in the bill, laid strong hold upon secondary objections. About some scattered missions here of the * Newspapers. The Indian name, "Nebraska," signified "shallow water;" and "Kansas" meant "smoky water." Each name was applied to a river. In Nebraska, whose settlement awaited chiefly the issue of the Kansas experiment, was speedily laid out the promising town of Omaha as the chief centre of population. Supra, p. 283. 1854. KANSAS A BATTLE-FIELD. 321 Southern Methodist church, and on the farms of a few capricious squatters, slaves appear to have been worked. for several years previously. Had Congress passed the territorial act anticipated, in compliance with the restrictions of 1820, that abuse would have been easily expelled. But now this compromise was rescinded, and Kansas might be admitted as a State, "with or without slavery," according to the option of its inhabitants hereafter. Missouri was admitted a slave State in 1821, and Arkansas in 1836, in fulfilment of those compromise conditions of which the North was now denied its full equivalent. From the steps of the St. Louis court house, men and women, black, yellow, and light, were sold regularly to the highest bidder. Free-born negroes, who arrived at that flourishing city on the river steamers, were arrested, cooped up without a hearing, and auctioned off to pay the expenses of their detention. Slavery, however, was gradually growing uncongenial to that vicinity, for St. Louis gained rapidly in wealth and numbers, and among its population were many of German birth. Benton, though stranded by politics in his old age, partook somewhat of this liberal and progressive spirit. But reactionary leaders were at this time at the head of affairs, no one of them more strongly nor more passionately bent on slavery's new crusade than David R. Atchison, a Kentuckian by birth, who for some twelve years previous to 1855, when he resigned his seat, had served Missouri in the Senate of the United States. A man of good presence and approachable, Atchison rounded his career in national life as President pro tem. of the Senate, chosen by his compeers at a time when a pistol-shot or the stroke of sudden death at the White House would have installed him chief magistrate by succession. Most unfit would he have been for so solemn a contingency, for his talents were of coarse fibre; he was a strong partisan, and, though a ready stump orator, he had none of the higher pretensions to a statesman. Identified with Missouri's western frontier rather than St. Louis, Atchison, while yet a Senator, had gone beyond 1854. most slaveholders in trying to break down the barriers of honor which hedged his State about with free labor. Indeed, in a boastful speech to his constituents soon after the session of the Kansas-Nebraska measure, he gave himself the credit of originating that Missouri compromise repeal which Douglas in his memorable bill adopted.* The truth was that the region of Missouri to which Atchison belonged had long been uneasy and apprehensive over the prospect of an adjoining free State. A horde of savages they thought less dangerous neighbors than a race of free farmers. On this Missouri border abounded a medley and explosive population, typical of pro-slavery life in its ruder aspects. Mingled among the generous, hospitable, and moderately educated, were bravos and desperadoes, ready to die in their boots, -whiskey-drinking and trigger-pulling ruffians, not without amiable traits, but blindly led by inclination and habit, and full of that contempt of human suffering which human ownership engenders. White gentlemen and white trash here combined to push slavery together into Kansas the moment the Douglas measure gave legal opportunity for doing so. No sooner had President Pierce signed the fateful act which gave slave property a legal recognition than companies of these Missouri roisterers hastened over the borders and seized upon extensive tracts of the best lands for themselves. Several pro-slavery towns sprang up in the new territory, situated chiefly on the Missouri river just where it breaks the Kansas parallelogram on the northeast corner. Here was Kickapoo, blighted in the bud; Atchison, perpetuating to-day under brighter auspices the name of that bigoted colonizer for whom it was christened; Leavenworth, the prairie rose; and Lecompton, somewhat inland, which still droops under the weight of historical infamy. This sort of ferry immigration the Missourians thought would couple Kansas forever with the train of pro-slavery States. And so easy seemed their colonizing expedient that a large part of these first-comers Newspapers, October, 1854. 1854. COI ONIZING THE NEW TERRITORY. 323 chose to retain their Missouri homes as before, prepared to cross and recross, and to rally reserves by the boat-load from all the neighboring counties whenever voting or fighting could aid the cause.* 1854. While in the remote free States all was despondency, while the dark-lantern imposture, with its grips and mysterious passwords, hindered the political combination of those opposed to the administration and its policy on the one really vital issue of the hour, while abolitionists could contribute nothing to the Northern cause but that same panacea of secession which the Calhounists, high-priests of slavery, had offered from their Southern point of view, and which the great mass of the people abhorred, and while timorous Whigs and revolting Democrats, obedient to the call of duty, felt sorely perplexed over re-establishing the line of compromise already sinirched as unconstitutional, a Northern, and a Massachusetts man, with clear insight of the coming struggle, pointed the way to a solution of the problem in the territories. This was Eli Thayer, of Worcester, a veritable Yankee, shrewd, sharp-tongued, and pertinacious, not overburdened with sentiment, but ingenious in his methods and eminently practical. His plan was to meet Douglas and the slave oligarchy upon their own ground, and, taking the equal chance offered for erecting the new territories into free States, proceed at once to colonize them with Northern laborers. To this cause there were strong and hopeful inducements. The North was vastly superior in the sinews of wealth and population, in facilities for transporting and distributing, and in the constant flux of hardy and intelligent immigrants. Slavery could contaminate, but it colonized very slowly by comparison; the impulse of free labor was needful to bring thrift and nimble enterprise into a wilderness where * See Spring's Kansas, es. 2. 3. ↑ Prominent Southern men have given Thayer full credit for frus trating the hopes which slavery cherished under the Kansas-Nebraska bill. See Wise's Decades, 243. |