The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 08, June 1858: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 08, June 1858: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
The Constitution, contrived by the wretches thus nefariously clothed
in the stolen sovereignty of the true inhabitants of Kansas, of
course made Slavery an integral part of the institutions of the State.
A code of laws was enacted absolutely without parallel in the history
of the world for insolent trampling down of rights and for bloody
cruelty of penalties,--laws so abominable as even to call down upon
them, from his place in the Senate, the emphatic condemnation of so
veteran a soldier in the service of Slavery as General Cass, now
Mr. Buchanan's Secretary of State. These Territorial laws, thus
infamously vile, thus made in defiance of the well-known will of the
great majority of the people of Kansas, Mr. Pierce hastened to
recognize as the authentic expression of the mind of the people there,
and exerted all the moral and all the physical force of the
government to maintain them in their authority. Since that magistrate
was kicked aside as no longer available for the uses of Slavery,
because of the very infamy he had won in its service, Mr. Buchanan,
unlessoned by his fate, has adopted his views and carried out his
policy.
We do not propose to follow this march of shameful events step by
step, nor to speak of them in their exact chronological order, nor
yet to specify to which of these magistrates the credit of any one
of them belongs, inasmuch as the philosophy and method of the policy
of the one and the other are absolutely identical. We have space
only to glance at unquestionable facts, and to trace them to their
necessary motives. To maintain the supremacy of this usurpation, and
the Draconic laws made under it, Mr. Pierce poured in the squadrons
of the Republic, to dragoon the rebellious freemen into obedience to
what their souls abhorred, and what their reason told them was of no
more just binding force upon them than an edict of the Emperor of
China. When the actual inhabitants of the Territory had met in
Convention and framed a Constitution excluding Slavery, and had
adopted it, and the legislature authorized by it met, its members
were dispersed by national soldiers, detailed to compel submission
to the behests of the Slavemastery of the Government and of the
nation. These troops have been kept on foot ever since, to intimidate
the people, to assist as special police in the arrest and detention
of political prisoners charged with crimes against the Usurpation,
and to sustain the Federal governors and judges in carrying out
their instructions for the Subjugation of the majority by legal
chicane or by military violence.
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