1856. CIVIL WAR IN KANSAS. 359 parties, made, in August, a treaty at Lawrence for the mutual suspension of hostilities; and thereupon laid down his office, glad to get with a whole skin out of the territory which he found was as hard to govern in these times (to use his own colloquial expression) as "the devil in hell."* John W. Geary, of Pennsylvania, appointed as Shannon's successor, assumed the governorship at SeptemberLecompton on the 11th of September, stalking November. into the ring with superb self-confidence, physical giant that he was. He began by disbanding the pro-slavery militia, under Atchison's command, which had been put into teasing activity after Shannon's departure, and by ordering all irregular bodies to lay down their arms and quit the territory. He then enrolled a local militia under his own official direction, and set to relieving the territorial courts of their long paralysis. For a time Geary brought affairs to comparative order. In consequence of orders from Washington, Robinson and the other treason prisoners had been released on bail upon his arrival. Prosecutions for criminal offences followed, and free-State prisoners truly felt that the law was partial in their disfavor. This fact, which was true enough, brought the courts and the new governor into collision. The Chief Justice and marshal shielded a pro-slavery murderer whom the governor had apprehended with great difficulty. The marshal was forced to resign, and on Geary's representation Lecompte was removed by the President from the Chief Justiceship about the middle of December. There seemed at last a really bright and hopeful state of things, which Geary and General Smith both believed would last. All through these exciting disorders, Kansas had been the recipient of charity; and many thousand dollars were sent, mainly in small sums, for the relief of those who in the face of bitter obstacles were trying to mould this territory into a free State.† Congress met on the first day of December in final ses sion, brimming with excitement over the election returns. Those returns brought to the retiring President December. neither penitence nor equanimity. Addressing legislature and people upon the last appropriate occasion, his official message sounded a superfluous alarm against the evil of sectional and geographical parties; and recreant to historical truth and the reluctant opinion of his native New England, he charged the North with exasperating aggressions upon the South under pretence of seeking only to prevent the extension of slavery beyond existing limits. He denied that the annulment of the Missouri compromise involved any breach of good faith, or was meant to extend the area of slave labor. The Kansas disorders, he said, had been grossly exaggerated for political effect; and the cry from the North against reputed Southern encroachments sprang in reality from their own spirit of revolutionary assault upon the South's domestic institutions.* This angry and incendiary tirade evoked some spirited criticism in Congress on the anti-administration side. In the Senate, Trumbull, Hale, and Wilson, as soon as the message had been read, denied with emphasis that the Republicans were unfaithful to the Constitution, as alleged, or meant to interfere with slavery in the States where it already existed. But slaveholders were incredulous. "Those voting for Fremont," said Brown, of Mississippi, "meant to abolish slavery everywhere." "And if Fremont had succeeded," added James M. Mason, of Virginia, with an ominous gesture, "the Union would have been immediately dissolved."† November Pierce's one-sided arraignment of the spirit of sectional 1856, encroachment tallied little with official utterances in South Carolina. "I fear that the triumph will 1857, January. be a barren one," said Governor Adams, of this State, in a message commenting upon Buchanan's election, "and the South will act wisely to employ the interval *President's message, Dec. 2, 1856. 1856-57. SOUTHERN PORTENTS OF DISUNION. 361 of repose thus secured in earnest preparation for the inevitable conflict." And pressing zealously the importance of keeping the Southern monopoly of the cotton plant against the strenuous exertions which Europe was making to extend its cultivation in the East Indies, Egypt, Algeria, and Brazil, an object to be attained only by keeping up cheap labor, he argued in favor of reopening the African slave trade. And Allston, the new governor of South Carolina, soon after, in his inaugural address, admitted clearly that the point at issue with the North was not to keep slavery where it already existed, but to carry it rightfully into new States, so as to give the Southern section "of the Confederacy" increased political strength. Nor were signs wanting of Southern preparation to dissolve the Union. A convention which assembled at Savannah on the 8th of December, with the object of "encouraging Southern industry and trade," advised the establishment of Southern foundries for casting cannon and small arms, and that the South should see that its armories were replenished, and its forts and harbors put by Congress into a proper state of defence. The Governor of Mississippi recommended a convention of Southern States to concert plans of action, and set forth a list of contingencies which would justify the South in sundering the ties of the Union.* December 1857, This was a winter to be long remembered for its icy severity, following upon a season of rude autum- 1856, nal gales. Railroad travel was seriously blocked by snow as far south as Virginia, while an arctic March. temperature prevailed at the North and East and on the Western prairies. Among the lesser incidents of the season was the failure of Wisconsin's electors, by reason of a storm, to meet for casting their vote on the day assigned by law. When the ice broke up in February, flood and freshet occasioned great loss. Kansas came up promptly, once more, before the House. *Newspapers of the day. The contested seat of delegate from the territory was refused to Whitfield on the first day, but given him a few days after upon reconsideration. A new effort was made to abrogate the code of the Shawnee Mission legislature, with its arbitrary and barbarous provisions; and the House committee on territories reported a bill to that effect, which ordered furthermore a new election. By a strong Northern vote the bill passed the House on the 17th of February,* - not one Southern member supporting it, — and the Senate on the 19th laid it on the table. With hopefulness on either side, the disposition developed to pass Kansas over to the mercies of the next administration. It was no good portent, however, that every effort to bastardize the hideous code was baffled or put down; though President Pierce himself had been forced to express the hope that, by some means or another, such parts of it as violated the organic act of Congress would be blotted out. Governor Geary, in the meantime, as we have seen, had induced the President to remove the unsavory Lecompte from his post as Chief Justice; yet pro-slavery influence prevented Pierce's nominee as successor from being confirmed, so that the final adjournment of Congress left Lecompte as before. On the 6th of January, 1857, the free-State legislature met at Topeka under the Constitution now denounced as revolutionary. Neither governor nor lieutenant-governor was present; and, under the direction of Judge Cato, a fit associate of Lecompte, the marshal and his posse arrested members enough to deprive that body of a quorum. Soon after this, the territorial and pro-slavery legislature met at Lecompton, and showed its teeth at Governor Geary, who could not be fair without becoming obnoxious to it. Not only did this legislature refuse to repeal the foul acts of its fraudulent predecessor, but it upheld Lecompte in his quarrel with the governor, and passed various objectionable acts over the latter's veto.† The most important of this legislation was an act calling a convention to frame a State Constitution at Lecompton *The vote stood 98 to 79. † Spring's Kansas, c. 9. 1856-57. NEW STATES AND THE TARIFF. 363 in the following September. A census, notoriously partial, was to be made up in the meantime; and another act provided for electing a new territorial legislature in October. Geary, finding himself abandoned and his life in danger, left the territory secretly and sped to Washington to test his chances with the incoming administration. There was hope felt, after all, among Republicans, that Kansas would work out her salvation, and enter the Union a free State. True, the anti-slavery and pro-slavery settlers still refused to mingle or vote together; but if the Topeka legislature was revolutionary, that at Lecompton sprang from fraud and violence; neither, in any just sense, legitimately represented the whole people, and a fair administration should not take sides. Yet, aside from Kansas, there were signs in the sky that the old equipoise between freedom and slavery was forever broken. Minnesota and Oregon, territories each with a thriving Northern population, were in ripe condition for Statehood, and slavery had no daughters to match them. The census roll of Minnesota was a credential indisputable; and so, not without some smothered reluctance, Congress passed the usual act which authorized the first steps to be taken preliminary to admission. In all the virgin soil which compromise still portioned out to slavery, not one energetic new colony had been planted, nor had effort been made to subdivide Texas. Little else transpired to mark the annals of this Congress. The most important legislation of a session given largely to rambling debate was the act which recast to some extent the Polk tariff of 1846,† for the sake of diminishing the revenue. Under Campbell's inspiration, an opposition House passed a bill framed in the interest of manufacturers; the Democratic Senate substituted a bill of its own which made a horizontal reduction of existing duties. By one of those eleventh-hour bargains which no honest government likes to multiply, each side to the controversy gained something. Rates on fabrics of iron, * Act Feb. 26, 1857. † Vol. iv. p. 515. |