The Life of Lyman Trumbull - Horace White

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of the legislature of that state, although the constitution of New York disqualified him and all other members from such election. Tallmadge was nevertheless admitted to the Senate and served his full term. Trumbull's right to his seat was decided in accordance with that precedent by a vote of 35 to 8, on the 5th of March, 1856. Senator Douglas did not vote on this question, nor did he take part in the argument on it.

      The subject of burning interest in Congress was the condition of affairs in Kansas Territory. When the bill repealing the Missouri Compromise was pending, the opinion had been generally expressed by its supporters that slavery never would or could go into that region. Several Southern Senators and most of the Northern Democrats had held this view. Hunter, of Virginia, considered it utterly hopeless to expect that either Kansas or Nebraska would ever be a slaveholding state. Badger, of North Carolina, said that he had no more idea of seeing a slave population in either of them than he had of seeing it in Massachusetts. Dixon, of Kentucky, held a similar view. Nor is there any reason to doubt the sincerity of these men. Apparently the only Southern Senator who then cherished a different belief was Atchison, of Missouri, whose home was on the border of Kansas and whose opinions were based upon personal knowledge and backed by self-interest.

      President Pierce appointed Andrew H. Reeder, of Pennsylvania, governor of Kansas Territory. Reeder was not unwilling to coöperate with the South in establishing slavery in an orderly way, but was quite unprepared for the tactics which had been planned by others to expedite his movements. He called an election for a delegate in Congress to be held on the 29th of November, 1854. An organized army of Missourians marched over the Kansas border, seized the polling-places, and cast 1749 fraudulent votes for a pro-slavery man named Whitfield. This was a gratuitous and unnecessary act of violence, since the bona-fide settlers from Missouri outnumbered the Free State men and the latter were, as yet, unorganized and unprepared. Governor Reeder confirmed the election and thus gave encouragement to the invaders for their next attempt.

      A few immigrants had already gone into the territory from the New England States, moved by the desire of bettering their condition in life. Some of them had been assisted by the Emigrant Aid Company of Worcester, Massachusetts, a society started by Eli Thayer for the purpose of furnishing capital, by loans, to such persons for traveling expenses and for the building of hotels, sawmills, private dwellings, etc. These settlers from the East were as little prepared as Reeder himself for the sudden swoop of Missourians, and although they wrote letters to Northern Congressmen and newspapers protesting against the election of Whitfield as an act of invasion and a barefaced fraud, nothing was done to prevent him from taking his seat.

      The next election (for members of the territorial legislature) was fixed for the 30th of March, 1855. What kind of preparations for it had been made in the mean time in Missouri was plainly indicated by the following letter, dated Brunswick, Missouri, April 20, 1855, published in the New York Herald:

      From five to seven thousand men started from Missouri to attend the election, some to remove, but most to return to their families with an intention, if they liked the territory, to make it their permanent home at the earliest moment practicable. But they intended to vote. The Missourians were many of them Douglas men. There were one hundred and fifty voters from this county, one hundred and seventy-five from Howard, one hundred from Cooper. Indeed, every county furnished its quota, and when they set out it looked like an army. They were armed. And as there were no houses in the territory they carried tents. Their mission was a peaceable one—to vote, and to drive down stakes for their future homes.

      After the election some 1500 of the voters sent a committee to Mr. Reeder to ascertain if it was his purpose to ratify the election. He answered that it was, and said that the majority at an election must carry the day. But it is not to be denied that the 1500, apprehending that the governor might attempt to play the tyrant, since his conduct had already been insidious and unjust, wore on their hats bunches of hemp. They were resolved, if a tyrant attempted to trample on the rights of the sovereign people, to hang him.

      It was not conscious brigandage that prompted this movement, but the simplicity of minds tutored on the frontier and fashioned in the environment of slavery. The fifteen hundred Missourians, who gave Governor Reeder to understand that they would hang him on the nearest tree if he did not ratify their invasion of Kansas, had homes, farms, and families. They supported churches and schools of a certain kind and considered themselves qualified to civilize Africans. They were types of the best society that they had any conception of. Far from concealing anything that they had done, they boasted of it openly in their newspaper organ, the Squatter Sovereign, which published the following under the date of April 1:

      This invasion was as needless as the former one, since the Free State men were still in the minority, counting actual settlers only; but the pro-slavery party were determined to leave nothing to chance. Senator Atchison, in a speech at Weston, Missouri, on the 9th of November, 1854, had told his constituents how to secure the prize:

      A little later we find him writing letters like the following to a friend in Atlanta, Georgia:

      Let your young men come forth to Missouri and Kansas. Let them come well armed, with money enough to support them for twelve months and determined to see this thing out! I do not see how we are to avoid a civil war;—come it will. Twelve months will not elapse before war—civil war of the fiercest kind—will be upon us. We are arming and preparing for it.

      Atchison was constantly spurring others to deeds of lawlessness and violence, but he always stopped short of committing any himself. He was probably restrained by the fear of losing influence at Washington. It was by no means certain that President Pierce would tolerate everything. The sad fate of one of the companies recruited in the South for immigration to Kansas is narrated in the following letter, addressed to Senator Trumbull by John C. Underwood, of Culpeper Court House, Virginia:

      Soon after the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854, in the neighborhood of Winchester and Harper's Ferry the project of sending a company of young men to Kansas to make it a slave state was much agitated. Subscriptions for that purpose were asked, and the duty of strengthening our sectional interest of slavery by adding two friendly Senators to your honorable body, was urged with great zeal upon my neighbors. This was long before I had heard of any movement of the New England Aid Co., or of anybody on the part of freedom. It was my understanding at the time that Senator Mason was the main adviser in the project. This may not have been the case. The history of this company will not be soon forgotten. Its taking the train on the Baltimore and Ohio R. R. at Harper's Ferry, its exploits in Kansas up to the fall of its leader (Sharrard) at the hands of Jones, the friend of the Democratic Gov. Geary, are all still well remembered. The return of the company with the dead body of their leader, and the blasted hopes of its sanguine originators, was a gloomy day in our beautiful valley, and created a sensation throughout the country.

      Another letter among the Trumbull papers deserves a place here, the author of which was Isaac T. Dement, who (writing from Hudson, Illinois, January 10, 1857) says that he was living in Kansas the previous year and had filed his intention

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