The people of Kansas, from this time forward, “left to manage their own affairs in their own way, without the presence of external influence,” found that they could decide this question of slavery by their own votes, and that the stimulus and the materials for fighting, which had been supplied to them from the Northern or the Southern States, were poor means in comparison with the ballot-box. The anti-slavery party were numerically the strongest; and having now given up all factious resistance to the Territorial government, they were able, under its auspices, to establish a free constitution, under which the State was admitted into the Union on the 29th of January, 1861. But the effect of this struggle, precipitated by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and carried on for a period of seven years, was most disastrous to the peace and harmony of the Union. It fixed the attention of both sections of the Union upon a subject of the most inflammatory nature. On the one hand, the Democratic party, which extended throughout all the States, slaveholding and non-slaveholding, and which had elected Mr. Buchanan by the votes of both free and slave States, no longer had a common bond of party union in a common principle of action on the question of slavery in Territories. A portion of the party, under the lead of Mr. Douglas, and known as “the Northern Democracy,” rejected the doctrine enunciated by the Judges of the Supreme Court, and still adhered to their principle of “popular sovereignty.” The residue of the party, calling themselves “the Old Democracy,” adhered to what they regarded as the decision of the court, maintained that the time for the people of a Territory to act on the subject of slavery was when forming and adopting a State constitution, and that in the previous period, the equal right of all the States in the common property of the Union could be respected only by confining the power of the people of a Territory to the time of adopting a constitution. On the other hand, the new party, to which these events had given birth, and into which were now consolidating all the elements of the anti-slavery feeling of the free States, rejected entirely the principle enunciated by a majority of the Supreme Court, maintained that the Southern slave-holder could have no right to hold as property in a Territory that which was property at all only under the local law of a slave-holding State, and proclaimed that Congress must, by positive statute, annul any such supposed right in regard to all existing and all future Territories. If these conflicting sectional feelings and interests could have been confined to the practical question of what was to be done in the Territories before they should become States, there might have been less danger resulting from their agitation. In the nature of things, however, they could not be so confined. They brought into renewed discussion the whole subject of slavery