In spite of all efforts to the contrary, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was effected in September of 1854, and the battle which had been fought in Congress and lost by the free States was at once transferred to the newly-admitted Territory, and was there waged with a fierceness and persistence that cannot be understood or appreciated, unless it be remembered that Kansas had become the strategic point of the whole great conflict. Given Kansas, slavery would have not only additional territory, but, what was even more important to its purposes, a majority in the United States Senate that should for ever, as it hoped, prevent the admission of more free than slave States, or the following of any course which should be prejudicial to its interests. In this new field the North at first labored under great disadvantage. The peculiar institution had already been planted and had taken root. The eastern border of Kansas was upon Missouri, a slave State which was fully aware of the advantage that broader fields would furnish the labor of her increasing slave population, and containing enough of a rough and wild frontier element to carry through any plan that desperation or villany might devise. The President of the United States Senate and acting Vice-President of the United States, David R. Atchison, was on the ground, and for months had been organizing Blue Lodges and other secret bodies, with the intent to take possession of the Territory, or at least of its polling-places, and secure it for slavery. The officers appointed by the President—a governor, three judges, a secretary, a marshal, and an attorney—were, of course, all favorable to the policy of the Administration, a policy which was all that the most radical pro-slavery advocate could desire. The party thus happily situated did not hesitate to avail itself of its advantages. Its members swarmed across the borders at the election of a delegate to Congress, took possession of the ballot-boxes, appointed judges of election from their own number, elected their man by an overwhelming majority, and then for the most part returned to their homes in Missouri.