There is little question that at the moment a majority of the bona fide settlers in the Territory were pro-slavery, and would have elected the delegate to Congress without any outside aid, but the pro-slavery men in Kansas and Missouri had become excited by the rumors of the vast schemes in the East for planting anti-slavery military colonies in the Territories, and also in the slaveholding Commonwealths, and were in no state of mind to think quietly and act calmly. They felt that they must make sure of all of the elements of government in {417} Kansas at the outset. The Missourians consequently committed the fatal and unnecessary blunder of going over into Kansas, to the number of some seventeen hundred or more, and voting for the pro-slavery candidate for Congress, J. W. Whitfield, who was thus elected by a large majority. Without the vote of the Missourians, Whitfield had still a substantial majority, but this travesty of the principle of home rule in the Territories, this pollution of republican principles at the very fountain-head, roused the North to the highest pitch of indignation. [Sidenote: The indignation of the North.] This election took place on November 29th, 1854. Had it occurred before the Congressional elections of that year, it would most probably have caused a much more rapid development of the Republican party than happened, and the election of the Republican candidate for the presidency two years later. As it was, the struggle over the Kansas-Nebraska bill, and its final passage, had started the amalgamation of the Northern Whigs, the Free-soilers, and the Northern Democrats who opposed the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, into the Republican party, and had, in the Congressional elections of 1854, been the chief cause in changing a Democratic majority of more than eighty in the House of Representatives into a minority by more than seventy. [Sidenote: The Republican party.]