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elections of 1854 and 1855. In his testimony before the House committee of three, which was sent to Kansas in 1856, he said:

I was present at the election of March 30, 1855 in Burr Oak precinct in the 14th district, in this Territory. I saw many Missourians there. There had been a good deal of talk about the settlement of Kansas, in the interference of eastern people in the settlement of that territory, since the passage of the KansasNebraska bill. It was but a short time after the passage of that act that we learned through the papers about the forming of a society in the east for the purpose of promoting the settlement of Kansas Territory, with the view of making it a free State. . . . [The Missourians] were excited upon that subject, and have been ever since. This rumor and excitement extended all over the State, and more particularly in the borders. . . . The people of the south have always thought they have always been interfered with by the north, and the people of Missouri considered this the most open and bold movement the northern and eastern societies ever made. . . .

Immediately preceding the election [1855], and even before the opening of navigation, we had rumors that hundreds of eastern people were in St. Louis, waiting for the navigation of the river to be opened, that they might get up to the Territory in time for the election, and the truth of these rumors was established by the accounts steamboat officers afterwards brought up of the emigrants they had landed at different places in and near the Territory, who had no families, and very little property, except little oil cloth carpet sacks. . . .

It was determined by the Missourians that if the eastern emigrants were allowed to vote, we would vote also, or we would destroy the poll books and break up the elections; and the determination is that eastern people shall not be allowed to interfere and control the domestic institutions of Kansas, if the Union is dissolved in preventing it, though we are willing that all honest, well-meaning settlers shall come and be admitted to all the equality of other citizens. . . . The avowed object of making a free State by persons living remote from the Territory,

and having no interest in it, and the raising of money and means for that purpose, is the obnoxious feature of these emigrant aid societies. I think it is a new thing for free States to get up societies for making free States out of Territories. . . .

I think it is the general expression, and I know it is the ardent hope of every man in Missouri that I have heard express himself, that if the north would cease operating by these societies, Missouri would also cease to use those she has established. All that Missourians asked was that the principles of the KansasNebraska Act should be carried out, and the actual settlers of the Territory allowed to manage their own domestic institutions for themselves.

The press, of course, North and South, abounded in violent and defiant comment on the Kansas situation. A typical editorial from the New York Tribune of May 14, 1855, says:

It is abundantly demonstrated, from what we have published on the Kansas election, that a more stupendous fraud was never perpetrated since the invention of the ballot-box. The crew who will assemble under the title of the Kansas Territorial Legislature, by virtue of this outrage, will be a body of men to whose acts no more respect will be due, and should no more be entitled to the weight of authority, than a Legislature chosen by a tribe of wandering Arabs, who should pitch their tents and extemporize an election on the prairies of that Territory. . . .

We are not prepared either to say to what these proceedings are likely to lead. They seem, however, pregnant with the seeds of great good or evil. They sound in our ears like the distant roar of the coming tempest. Events of startling character and magnitude may stand in fearful proximity behind that dim and shadowy veil which divides the present from the future. There is Kansas. Her territory is free soil. It was never stained by the tread of a slave. Her plains never echoed to the lash of the slave-driver's whip, nor the groans of the enchained bondmen. The millions of the free States have thundered out the declaration that they never shall. On one side, the slave power

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has risen in its might and declared its purpose to subjugate that
Territory, and plant slavery there in defiance of the North..
It has armed its myrmidons, marshalled and sent them forth to
execute its purposes. . . . The appeal is now made to arms. By
the sword, they declare, shall Kansas be gained to slavery. . . .
The first step taken has been to put beneath their heel the real
residents and occupants of the soil. The next is to depose the
Governor, and pronounce another in his place. A third is to
declare war against all who dare oppose their plans. . . .

On the other [side] stands a little band of the sons of freedom, just now borne down by numbers, but resolute in purpose, and ready to do their part in repelling the barbarian invaders. The question is whether they are to be seconded by the people of the North. Is there a genuine spirit of freedom in the country, ready to do something against the atrocious strides of the slave power to continental dominion? Are there those who are willing to migrate to Kansas to aid in maintaining the freedom of Kansas at the cost of such perils as may arise? Do the northern people mean that Kansas shall be free? If they do, that is enough. The force that shall drive out hordes of land pirates who have made their descent upon Kansas will not be long in forming. Swayed and inspired by the sentiments of freedom, they will scatter its enemies like chaff. . . . If it be otherwise, their degradation is unspeakable, and they are fit only to live as the slaves of slaves.

"A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF "

Dred Scott

March 6,

The famous case of Dred Scott, Plaintiff in Error vs. 86. The John F. A. Sandford fills two hundred and forty pages in gist of the the Reports of cases argued before the Supreme Court of decision, the United States. The possibility of reconciling the Court's 1857 elaborate decision with the doctrine of squatter sovereignty [396] was the general subject of the great series of debates between Lincoln and Douglas for the Illinois senatorship in the summer of 1858. A year later Lincoln referring to

those debates in a speech at Columbus, Ohio, said: "What is that Dred Scott decision? Judge Douglas labors to show that it is one thing, while I think it is altogether different. It is a long opinion, but it is all embodied in this short statement: The Constitution of the United States forbids Congress to deprive a man of his property, without due process of law; the right of property in slaves is distinctly and expressly affirmed in that Constitution; therefore if Congress shall undertake to say that a man's slave is no longer his slave, when he crosses a certain line into a Territory, that is depriving him of his property without due process of law, and is unconstitutional. There is the whole Dred Scott decision."1 The text of the opinion of the Court on this question, as delivered by Chief Justice Taney, reads as follows:

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The words "people of the United States" [Preamble to the Constitution] and "citizens " are synonymous terms, and mean the same thing. They both describe the political body who, according to our Republican institutions, form the sovereignty, and who hold the power and conduct the Government through their representatives. . . . The question before us is, whether the class of persons described in the plea [negroes] compose a portion of this people, and are constituent members of this sovereignty? We think that they are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word "citizens" in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such

1 Political Debates between Lincoln and Douglas, Columbus, 1860, p. 251.

as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them. . . .

It is difficult at this day to realize the state of public opinion in relation to that unfortunate race, which prevailed in the civilized and enlightened portions of the world at the time of the Declaration of Independence, and when the Constitution of the United States was framed and adopted. But the public history of every European nation displays it in a manner too plain to be mistaken.

They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it. . . .

The opinion thus entertained and acted upon in England was naturally impressed upon the Colonies they founded on this side. of the Atlantic. And, according, a negro of the African race was regarded by them as an article of property, and held and bought and sold as such in every one of the thirteen Colonies which united in the Declaration of Independence and afterwards formed the Constitution of the United States. . . .

The Territory being a part of the United States, the Government and the citizen both enter it under the authority of the Constitution, with their respective rights defined and marked out; and the Federal Government can exercise no power over his person or property beyond what that instrument confers, nor lawfully deny any right which it has reserved. . . . And if the Constitution recognizes the right of property of the master in a slave, and makes no distinction between that description of property and other property owned by a citizen, no tribunal, acting under the authority of the United States, whether it be legislative, executive, or judicial, has a right to draw such a distinction. . . .

Now, as we have already said in an earlier part of this opinion, . . . the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution. The right to traffic in it,

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