Personal Recollections of Pardee ButlerButler, Pardee
Religion
Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler
Butler, Pardee
Kansas -- History -- 1854-1861
Judge Tutt, of St. Joseph, Mo., had said to the South Carolinians: "I
was born in Virginia, and have lived forty years in Missouri. I am a
slave-holder, and a Pro-slavery man; and I desire Kansas to be made a
slave State, _if it can be done by honorable means_. But you will
break down the cause you are seeking to build up." And Judge Tutt
voiced the sentiments of a large number of Pro-slavery men and
slave-holders in Kansas.
The city of Atchison gave a majority of votes against the Lecompton
Constitution; and Atchison county gave a majority of almost three to
one against it; and Leavenworth city, which two years before had been
the theater of such murders, riots and robberies, gave a majority
against the proposition of the English bill of more than ten to one,
notwithstanding the huge bribe offered if the people would accept it.
We are writing these "Recollections" for posterity as well as for
the present generation. It is only the verdict of posterity that will
justly estimate the men and the influences that went to make up the
final result of the early Kansas struggle. Up to the present time the
writers that have written on this subject have been too near the
battle, and themselves too much a party in it, to write with perfect
impartiality. Southern and Pro-slavery writers and speakers have not
been able to admit that Southern men were the original wrong-doers;
while Northern and Free State writers have not been able to rise to
the level of such fair dealing, as to admit that when the decisive
vote was cast that determined the question of freedom and slavery in
Kansas, as absolutely as it had already been determined in Ohio,
Indiana and Illinois, the Free State people were indebted to the
nobility of heart and elevation of mind, displayed by Southern and
Pro-slavery men in making the vote so overwhelming as to put the
question beyond the possibility of controversy forever; yet this was
done in the unprecedented vote of six to one, cast in condemnation of
the Lecompton Constitution.
From this time forward the two parties that had been struggling with
each other for four years in such fierce antagonism were dead; and in
their place have appeared the two political parties that are found
throughout the United States; and the lines of difference between the
men of the South and the men of the North have been as completely
obliterated in thirty years, as they were obliterated in Old England,
between Saxon and Norman, after 500 years of savage strife and
turmoil.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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