President Buchanan's Course Foreshadowed

The new President had been informed of this decision before it was promulgated, and in his inaugural address he foreshadowed his own course in the treatment of the subject. Indeed, that decision was a chief topic of the discourse. He spoke of the measure as one that would "speedily and finally" settle the slavery questions, and he announced his intention to cheerfully submit to it, declaring that the question was wholly a judicial one, which only the Supreme Court of the Republic could settle, and that by its decision the admission or rejection of slavery in any Territory was to be determined by the legal votes of the people thereof. "The whole territorial question," he said, "was thus settled upon the principle of popular sovereignty--a principle as ancient as free government itself." He averred that "everything of a practical nature" had been settled, and he expressed a sincere hope that the long agitation of the subject of slavery was "approaching its end."

Alas! it was only the beginning of the dreadful scenes that marked its end. That decision and opinion of the Chief Justice rekindled the fire spoken of by the Georgian in debate in Congress on the admission of Missouri (see page 1324), which, he said, "all the waters of the ocean would not put out, and which only seas of blood could extinguish."

As we have observed, there was actual civil war in Kansas in the earlier portions of 1856. It assumed alarming aspects during the spring and summer of that year, as we have noticed. The actual settlers from free-labor States outnumbered emigrants from elsewhere; and a regiment of young men from Georgia and South Carolina, under Colonel Buford, fully armed, went into the Territory for the avowed purpose of making it a slave-labor State "at all hazards." They were joined by armed Missourians, and for several months they spread terror over the land. They sacked the town of Lawrence, and murdered and plundered individuals in various places. Steamboats ascending the Missouri River with emigrants from free-labor States were stopped, and the passengers were frequently robbed of their money; and persons of the same class, crossing the State of Missouri, were arrested and turned back. Lawlessness reigned supreme in all that region. Justice was bound, and there was general defiance of all mandates of right.

The civil war in Kansas, so begun, was more wasteful than bloody, and there was only one battle with any semblance of regularity fought there. That conflict took place on an open prairie. It was waged between twenty-eight emigrants, led by John Brown, of Ossawattamie, and fifty-six armed men under H. Clay Pate, of Virginia. Brown was the victor. Finally, John W. Geary, afterward a major-general, and Governor of Pennsylvania, who succeeded Shannon as chief magistrate of Kansas, by judicious administration of affairs there, smothered the flames of civil war, and both parties worked vigorously with moral forces for the admission of Kansas as a State of the Union, but with ends in view diametrically opposed.

In September, 1857, the friends of the slave-system met in convention at Lecompton, on the Kansas River, and then the Territorial capital, and adopted a State Constitution, in which it was declared that "the rights of property in slaves now in the Territory shall in no manner be interfered with," and it forbade any amendment of the instrument until 1864. It was submitted to the votes of the people in December following, but by the terms of the election law then in force, no person could vote against the Constitution. The ballots were endorsed: "For the Constitution with slavery" and "For the Constitution without slavery." In either case, a constitution that would foster and protect slavery would be voted for. The consequence was that a large portion of the friends of the free-labor system refused to vote, and the Lecompton Constitution was adopted by a very large majority.