This "missing link," no less than the remaining portion of the journal printed in the proceedings of the investigating committee, is itself strong circumstantial proof of the imposture underlying the whole transaction. Many sections of the completed constitution are not even mentioned in the journal; it does not contain the submission clause of the schedule, and the authenticity of the document rests upon the signature and the certificate of John Calhoun without other verification. [10] "Dr. Tebbs and General Whitfield a month since left very strong letters for publication with the editor of the 'Union' which he promised to publish. His breach of this promise is a gross outrage. If not published immediately our success in convention materially depends on my getting an immediate copy at Lecompton. My friends here all regard now the 'Union' as an enemy and encouraging by its neutrality the fire-eaters not to submit the constitution. Very well, the facts are so clear that I can get along without the 'Union,' but he had no right to suppress Dr. Tebbs's letter. I shall in due time expose that transaction."--Extract from a letter of Robert J. Walker to James Buchanan, dated October, 1857. [11] For this autograph letter and other interesting manuscripts, we are indebted to General Duncan S. Walker, a son of the Governor, now residing in Washington, D.C. [12] Under an Act of Congress popularly known as the "English Bill," this same Lecompton Constitution was once more voted upon by the people of Kansas on August 2, 1858, with the following result: for the proposition, 1788; against it, 11,300.--Wilder, "Annals of Kansas," pp. 186-8. [13] Walker to Cass, Dec. 16, 1857. Senate Ex. Doc. No. 8, 1st Sess., 35th Cong. Vol. I., pp. 131, 130. CHAPTER VII THE REVOLT OF DOUGLAS The language of President Buchanan's annual message, the summary dismissal of Acting Governor Stanton, and the resignation of Governor Walker abruptly transferred the whole Lecompton question from Kansas to Washington; and even before the people of the Territory had practically decided it by the respective popular votes of December 21,1857, and January 4,1858, it had become the dominant political issue in the Thirty-fifth Congress, which convened on December 7, 1857. The attitude of Senator Douglas on the new question claimed universal attention. The Dred Scott decision, affirming constitutional sanction and inviolability for slave property in Territories, had rudely damaged his theory. But we have seen how in his Springfield speech he ingeniously sought to repair and rehabilitate "popular sovereignty" by the sophism that a master's abstract constitutional right to slave property in a Territory was a "barren and a worthless right unless sustained, protected, and enforced by appropriate police regulations," which could only be supplied by the local Territorial Legislatures; and that the people of Kansas thus still possessed the power of indirect prohibition.