Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
In consequence of these and other incidents, many acts of disorder, it is
undeniable, have been perpetrated in Kansas, to the occasional interruption
rather than the permanent suspension of regular government. Aggressive and
most reprehensible incursions into the Territory were undertaken both in
the North and the South, and entered it on its northern border by the way
of Iowa, as well as on the eastern by way of Missouri; and there has
existed within it a state of insurrection against the constituted
authorities, not without countenance from inconsiderate persons in each of
the great sections of the Union. But the difficulties in that Territory
have been extravagantly exaggerated for purposes of political agitation
elsewhere. The number and gravity of the acts of violence have been
magnified partly by statements entirely untrue and partly by reiterated
accounts of the same rumors or facts. Thus the Territory has been seemingly
filled with extreme violence, when the whole amount of such acts has not
been greater than what occasionally passes before us in single cities to
the regret of all good citizens, but without being regarded as of general
or permanent political consequence.
Imputed irregularities in the elections had in Kansas, like occasional
irregularities of the same description in the States, were beyond the
sphere of action of the Executive. But incidents of actual violence or of
organized obstruction of law, pertinaciously renewed from time to time,
have been met as they occurred by such means as were available and as the
circumstances required, and nothing of this character now remains to affect
the general peace of the Union. The attempt of a part of the inhabitants of
the Territory to erect a revolutionary government, though sedulously
encouraged and supplied with pecuniary aid from active agents of disorder
in some of the States, has completely failed. Bodies of armed men, foreign
to the Territory, have been prevented from entering or compelled to leave
it; predatory bands, engaged in acts of rapine under cover of the existing
political disturbances, have been arrested or dispersed, and every
well-disposed person is now enabled once more to devote himself in peace to
the pursuits of prosperous industry, for the prosecution of which he
undertook to participate in the settlement of the Territory.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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