through the forms of assembling, and although Governor Walker was present in Topeka, there were no proclamations, no dragoons, no cannon, because the cabal was for the moment defeated and disconcerted and bent upon other and still more desperate schemes. The Topeka Constitution was never received nor legalized; its officers never became clothed with official authority; its scrip was never redeemed; yet in the fate of Kansas and in the annals of the Union at large it was a vital and pivotal transaction, without which the great conflict between freedom and slavery, though perhaps neither avoided nor delayed, might have assumed altogether different phases of development. [Relocated Footnote (1): Later, on April 7, General Cass presented to the Senate another petition, purporting to be the Topeka Constitution, which had been handed him by J. H. Lane, president of the convention which framed it and Senator-elect under it ("Cong. Globe," 1856; April 7, p. 826). This paper proved to be a clerk's copy, with erasures and interlineations and signatures in one handwriting, which being questioned as probably spurious, Lane afterwards supplied the original draft prepared by the committee and adopted by the convention, though without signatures; also adding his explanatory affidavit ("Cong. Globe," App. 1856, pp. 378-9), to the effect that, the committee had devolved upon him the preparation of the formal copy, but that the original signatures had been mislaid. The official action of the Senate appears to have concerned itself exclusively with the copy presented by General Cass on March 24. Lane's copies served only as text for angry debate. As the Topeka Constitution had no legal origin or quality, technical defeats were of little consequence, especially in view of the action by the free-State voters of Kansas at their voluntary elections for delegates on October 9, and to ratify it on December 15, 1856.] [Relocated Footnote (2): Nevertheless, the efforts of the free-State party tinder this combination were not wholly barren. The contest between Whitfield and Reeder for a seat in the House as territorial delegate not only provoked searching discussion, but furnished the occasion for sending an investigating committee to Kansas, attended by the contestants in person. This committee with a fearless diligence collected in the Territory, as well as from the border counties of Missouri, a mass of sworn testimony amounting to some 1200 printed pages, and which exposed the Border Ruffian invasions and the Missouri usurpation in all their monstrous iniquity, and officially revealed to the astounded North, for the first time and nearly two years after its beginning, the full proportions of the conspiracy which held sway in Kansas.] CHAPTER XXV CIVIL WAR IN KANSAS