CHAPTER XXXI

PIERCE'S ADMINISTRATION: THE STRUGGLE FOR KANSAS

1853-1857

302. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill. President Franklin Pierce, who was the nominee of the Democrats, became President in March, 1853.1 In his inaugural address he promised that the Compromise of 1850 should be strictly enforced. But in a few months the old quarrel was again being waged as fiercely as ever. In January, 1854, Stephen A. Douglas, one of the United States Senators from Illinois, introduced in Congress a bill to create two new Territories, Kansas and Nebraska, from that part of the Louisiana Purchase lying west of Missouri and Iowa. The bill provided that the people of Kansas and Nebraska were to decide whether they should enter the Union with or without slavery. This proposed right was commonly called "popular sovereignty" or "squatter sovereignty."2

This was a violation of the Missouri Compromise, which provided for freedom in all of the new States that might be formed west or north of Missouri.3 But Douglas said that the Compromise of 1850, with its popular sovereignty clause, had taken the place of the Missouri Compromise. His proposition aroused a storm of indignation throughout the North. Whenever, in that section, he appeared in public, he was hissed and hooted, and denounced as a public

1 Pierce was born in New Hampshire in 1804, and died in that State in 1869. Like most of his predecessors he was a lawyer; but served in the Mexican War as a brigadier-general in the regular army.

2 "Squatters" were those settlers in the West who did not go to the expense of buying their land from the Federal Government, under the "preëmption laws, but simply settled on it without leave. If undisturbed for a certain number of years they might then hold it as their own, the same as if they had preempted it.

That is, north of the parallel of 36° 30′.

enemy. Rude effigies composed of men's clothes stuffed with straw, and labeled " Douglas the Traitor," were burned amid the cheers and groans of excited crowds. The "Little Giant" 1 himself declared that he might travel between Chicago and Washington and have his path lighted the whole way by the blaze of these bonfires. He now knew that he had seriously blundered; for although he had won the applause of the South, he had lost the esteem of his Northern friends.

STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS

After a long and bitter fight in Congress, the slaveholders won, and the Kansas-Nebraska Bill became a law on May 30, 1854. Throughout the North church bells were tolled on that day, as if mourning the death of freedom. In the South there was great rejoicing. The result was announced to the people of Washington by the booming of cannon. Two of the leading anti-slavery Senators, Salmon P. Chase, of Ohio, and Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts, met on the steps of the Capitol and listened to the guns. "They celebrate a present victory," said Chase," but the echoes they awake will never rest until slavery itself shall die."

303. The struggle for Kansas. The Southerners were willing to allow Nebraska to become a free State; but they said that Kansas, the southernmost of the two, properly belonged to them. The anti-slavery men, however, were determined that it should remain free. There now began a desperate and often bloody struggle, lasting through the next summer, autumn, and winter, to see which side could

1 Douglas was so called by his friends because of his short stature and his great ability as an orator and statesman.

2 Nebraska and Kansas Territories were very much larger than the present States of those names. The two extended westward to the Rocky Mountains, and included parts of what are now Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and South Dakota.

pour into Kansas the largest number of settlers, before the vote should be taken for or against slavery. In March, 1855, there was an election for members of the Territorial Legislature, and in this the slavery men won; although the anti-slavery people claimed that they had been cheated in the count of the ballots, and really had twice as many voters on their side. This legislature passed laws not only permitting slavery in the Territory, but providing heavy penalties for aiding slaves to escape, or even for saying anything against human bondage. Thereupon the antislavery men elected a rival legislature of their own, which asked Congress to admit Kansas as a free State. But the President declared that this second body was not lawful; so he ordered it to be dispersed by Federal soldiers.

By this time Kansas was in a condition of civil war. Each party was struggling fiercely to gain control by killing or driving out the other. Gangs of lawless men marched up and down the country, raiding the farms and villages of their opponents, setting fire to houses, whipping and otherwise misusing persons whom they did not like, and now and then murdering them. The region was everywhere, and rightly, known as "Bleeding Kansas."1 In the end, however, when the power of the slaveholders was broken, the wish of a large majority of her people was granted; in 1861 she was admitted to the Union as a free State.2

304. Formation of the Republican party. The managers of the Whig party had taken a neutral position in regard to slavery, and thus had pleased neither the South nor the North. Those Whigs who opposed slavery now joined a new political organization, formed in 1854 and calling itself

1 Charles Sumner, United States Senator from Massachusetts, made a bitter speech on "the crime against Kansas." In this he spoke harshly against Senator Butler of South Carolina. Congressman Preston Brooks, a relative of Butler, savagely attacked Sumner, as the latter sat at his desk in the Senate, and with a stout walking-cane rained blow after blow on his head. Sumner's injuries were very severe. The incident created intense excitement in the North, and Sumner's assailant and his friends were bitterly denounced.

2 Minnesota had been admitted in 1858 and Oregon in 1859, both of them free States.