Hereafter, if this decision shall stand for law, slavery, instead of being what the people of the slave States have hitherto called it, their peculiar institution, is a Federal institution, the common patrimony and shame of all the States, those which flaunt the title of free, as well as those which accept the stigma of being the Land of Bondage; hereafter, wherever our jurisdiction extends, it carries with it the chain and the scourge--wherever our flag floats, it is the flag of slavery. If so, that flag should have the light of the stars and the streaks of running red erased from it; it should be dyed black, and its device should be the whip and the fetter. Are we to accept, without question, these new readings of the Constitution--to sit down contentedly under this disgrace--to admit that the Constitution was never before rightly understood, even by those who framed it--to consent that hereafter it shall be the slaveholders’ instead of the freemen’s Constitution? Never! Never! We hold that the provisions of the Constitution, so far as they regard slavery, are now just what they were when it was framed, and that no trick of interpretation can change them. The people of the free States will insist on the old impartial construction of the Constitution, adopted in calmer times--the construction given it by Washington and his contemporaries, instead of that invented by modern politicians in Congress and adopted by modern politicians on the bench. But in the territory of Kansas the decision for freedom was already being made by force of arms. Bryant and Bigelow had never ceased urging the dispatch of Northern settlers and breech-loading rifles to the Western plains. The poet had written his brother (Feb. 15, 1856) that the city was alive with the excitement of the Kansas news, and subscribing liberally to the Emigrants’ Aid Society. “The companies of emigrants will be sent forward as soon as the rivers and lakes are opened--in March, if possible--and by the first of May there will be several thousand more free-state settlers in Kansas than there now are. Of course they will go well armed.” After election day that fall he had proposed that the Republican campaign organization be kept functioning to speed the flow of settlers. The _Tribune_ was simultaneously declaring that “The duty of the people of the free States is to send more true men, more Sharpe’s rifles, and more howitzers to Kansas.” Henry Ward Beecher, attending a meeting at which a deacon asked arms for seventy-nine men, declared that a Sharpe’s rifle was a greater moral agency than the Bible, and that Plymouth Church would furnish half the guns required; whence the familiar nickname, “Beecher’s Bibles.” Even Henry J. Raymond and the _Times_, in spite of their policy of not hurting Southern sensibilities, saw that the issue on the Platte must be fought out.