To restore Kansas and Nebraska to the position of free territories; that as the Constitution of the United States vests in the States and not in Congress the power to legislate for the rendition of fugitives from labor, to repeal and entirely abrogate the fugitive slave law; to restrict slavery to those States in which it exists; to prohibit the admission of any more slave States; to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia; to exclude slavery from all territories over which the general Government has exclusive jurisdiction, and finally to resist the acquirement of any more territories unless slavery shall have been therein forever prohibited.] [Relocated Footnote (2): "In the meantime our friends, with a view of detaining our expected bolters, had been turning from me to Trumbull till he had risen to 35 and I had been reduced to 15. These would never desert me except by my direction; but I became satisfied that if we could prevent Matteson's election one or two ballots more, we could not possibly do so a single ballot after my friends should begin to return to me from Trumbull. So I determined to strike at once; and accordingly advised my remaining friends to go for him, which they did, and elected him on that, the tenth ballot. Such is the way the thing was done. I think you would have done the same under the circumstances, though Judge Davis, who came down this morning, declares he never would have consented to the 47 [opposition] men being controlled by the five. I regret my defeat moderately, but am not nervous about it."--Lincoln to Washburne, February 9, 1855. MS.] CHAPTER XXII THE BORDER RUFFIANS [Sidenote: May 30, 1854.] The passage of the Nebraska bill and the hurried extinction of the Indian title opened nearly fifteen million acres of public lands to settlement and purchase. The whole of this vast area was yet practically tenantless. In all of Kansas there were only three military posts, eight or ten missions or schools attached to Indian reservations, and some scores of roving hunters and traders or squatters in the vicinity of a few well-known camping stations on the two principal emigrant and trading routes, one leading southward to New Mexico, the other northward towards Oregon. But such had been the interest created by the political excitement, and so favorable were the newspaper reports of the location, soil, and climate of the new country, that a few months sufficed to change Kansas from a closed and prohibited Indian reserve to the emigrant's land of promise.