1. The Lecompton constitution was republican in form, and it had been framed and voted upon in a free and open ballot, which the convention had directed to be taken on the all-important question of slavery. 2. The question of slavery was thus localized, confined to the people whom it immediately concerned, and banished from the halls of Congress, where it had been always exerting a baneful influence upon the country at large. 3. If Congress, for the sake of those who had refused to exercise their power of excluding slavery from the constitution of Kansas, should now reject it because slavery remained in it, the agitation would be renewed everywhere in a more alarming form than it had yet assumed. 4. After the admission of the State, its people would be sovereign over this and every other domestic question; they could mould their institutions as they should see fit, and if, as the President had every reason to believe, a majority of the people were opposed to slavery, the legislature already elected under this constitution could at once provide for amending it in the proper manner. 5. If this constitution should be sent back by Congress because it sanctioned slavery, a second constitution would have to be framed and sent to Congress, and there would be a revival of the slavery agitation, both in Congress and throughout the Union. 6. The speedy admission of Kansas, which would restore peace and harmony to the whole country, was of infinitely greater consequence than the small difference of time that would be required for the people to exercise their own sovereign power over the whole subject after they had become a State, compared with the process of a new convention to be held under the auspices of the Territorial government.[35] Footnote 35: See the President’s message of February 28, 1858, submitting the Lecompton constitution. In describing the President’s views on this subject I have not only relied upon his messages and other official papers, but I have drawn them also from an elaborate private paper in his hand-writing, which is of too great length to be inserted textually in this work. It relates to the construction of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, a construction which he felt bound to adopt in consequence of the views taken of the subject of slavery in Territories by the Supreme Court, as he said in his inaugural address that he should do. In this MS., he speaks of “The infamous and unfounded assertion of Mr. ——, that in a conversation with Chief Justice Taney, he [the Chief Justice] had informed him in advance of the inaugural what the opinion [of the court] would be.”