Political Recollections: 1840 to 1872Julian, George Washington
History
Political Recollections: 1840 to 1872
Julian, George Washington
Republican Party (U.S. : 1854- ) -- History; United States -- Politics and government
But the Dred Scott iniquity did not stand alone. It had been
procured for the purpose of fastening slavery upon all the Territories,
and it had, of course, a special meaning when applied to the
desperate struggle then in progress to make Kansas a slave State.
The conduct of the Administration during this year, in its treatment
of the free State men of that Territory, forms one of the blackest
pages in the history of slavery. The facts respecting their labors,
trials, and sufferings, and the methods employed to force upon them
the Lecompton Constitution, including wholesale ballot-stuffing
and every form of ruffianism, pillage, and murder, need not be
recalled; but all these were but the outcroppings and counterpart
of the Dred Scott decision, and the horrid travesty of the principle
of popular sovereignty in the Territories. The whole power of the
Administration, acting as the hired man of slavery, was ruthlessly
employed for the purpose of spreading the curse over Kansas, and
establishing it there as an irreversible fact; and all the departments
of the Government now stood as a unit on the side of this devilish
conspiracy. Everybody knew the Lecompton constitution was the work
of outside ruffians, and not of the people of the Territory, whose
Legislature in February, 1858, solemnly protested against their
admission under that Constitution, and whose protest was totally
unheeded. The Congressional debates during this period greatly
contributed to the anti-slavery education of the people, by more
clearly unmasking the real spirit and designs of the slaveholders.
We were treated to the kind of talk then becoming current about
"Northern mud-sills," "filthy operatives," the "ownership of labor
by capital," and the beauties and beatitudes of slavery. Such
maddened extremists as Hammond and Keitt of South Carolina, and such
blatant doughfaces as Petit of Indiana, became capital missionaries
in the cause of freedom. Their words were caught up by the press
of the free States, and added their beneficent help to the work so
splendidly going forward through the providential agency of "Uncle
Tom's Cabin."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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