6States from which they had come, to sell their new acquisitions, or to return and resume them, as circumstances should render one course or the other expedient. They left armed men in the Territory to keep watch and guard, and to summon external aid, either to vote or to fight, as should be found necessary. They were fortified by the favor of the Administration, and assumed to act with its authority. Intolerant of debate, and defiant, they hurried on the elections which were to be so perverted that an usurpation should be established. They rang out their summons when the appointed time came, and armed bands of partisans, from States near and remote, invaded and entered the Territory, with banners, ammunition, provisions, and forage, and encamped around the polls. They seized the ballot-boxes, replaced the judges of elections with partisans of their own, drove away their opponents, filled the boxes with as many votes as the exigencies demanded, and, leaving the results to be returned by reliable hands, they marched back again to their distant homes, to celebrate the conquest, and exult in the prospect of the establishment of Slavery upon the soil so long consecrated to Freedom. Thus, in a single day, they became parents of a State without affection for it, and childless again without bereavement. In this first hour of trial, the new system of popular sovereignty signally failed— failed because it is impossible to organize, by one single act, in one day, a community perfectly free, perfectly sovereign, and perfectly constituted, out of elements unassimilated, unarranged, and uncomposed. Free labor rightfully won the day. Slave labor wrested the victory to itself by fraud and violence. Instead of a free republican Government in the Territory, such as popular sovereignty had promised, there was then and thenceforth a hateful usurpation. This usurpation proceeded without delay and without compunction to disfranchise the people. It transferred the slave code of Missouri to Kansas, without stopping in all cases to substitute the name of the new Territory for that of the old State. It practically suspended popular elections for three years — the usurping Legislature assigning that term for its own members, while it committed all subordinate trusts to agents appointed by itself. It barred the courts and the juries to its adversaries by test oaths, and made it a crime to think what'one pleased, tend to write and print what one thought. It borrowed all the enginery of tyranny, but the torture, from the practice of the Stuarts. The party of free labor appealed to the Governor (Reeder) to correct the false election returns. He intervened, but ineffectually, and yet even for that intervention was denounced by the Administration organs, and, after long and unacceptable explanations, he was removed from office by the President. The new Governor (Shannon) sustained for a while the usurpation, but failed to effect the subjugation of the people, although he organized as a militia an armed partisan band of adventurers who had intruded themselves into the Territory to force Slavery upon the people. With the active cooperation of this band, the. party of slave labor one) was accessible to the slave States, bordered on one of them, and was regarded as containing a region inviting to slaveholders. So it might be settled by them, and become one or more slave States. Thus indirectly a further compromise might be effected, if the Missouri prohibition of 1820 should be abrogated. Congress abrogated it, with the special and effective co-operation of the President, and thus the National Government directly intervened in favor of slave labor? Loud remonstrances against the measure on the ground of its violation of the national faith were silenced by clamorous avowals of a discovery that Congress had never had any right to intervene in the Territories for or against Slavery, but that the citizens of the United States residing within a Territory had, like the people of every State, exclusive authority and jurisdiction over Slavery, as one of the domestic relations. The Kansas- Nebraska act only recognised and affirmed this right, as it was said. The theory was not indeed new, but a vagrant one, which had for some time gone about seeking among political parties the charity of adoption, under the name of Squatter Sovereignty. It was now brought to the font, and baptized with the more attractive appellation ofPopular Sovereignty. It was idle for a time to say that, under the Missouri prohibition, freemen in the Territory had all the rights which freemen could desire — perfect freedom to do everything but establish Slavery. Popular Sovereignty offered the indulgence of a taste of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of evil as well as of good—a more perfect freedom. Insomuch as the proposition seemed to come from a free State, the slave States could not resist its seductions, although sagacious men saw that they were delusive. Consequently, a small and ineffectual stream of slave labor was at once forced into Kansas, engineered by a large number of politicians, advocates at once of Slavery and of the Federal Administration, who proceeded with great haste to prepare the means so to carry the first elections as to obtain the laws necessary for the protection of Slavery. It is one thing, however, to expunge statutes from a national code, and quite another to subvert a national institution, even though it be only a monument of Freedom located in the desert. Nebraska was resigned to free labor without a struggle, and Kansas became a theatre of the first actual national conflict between slaveholding and free-labor immigrants, met face to face, to organize, through the ma- chineryof republican action, a civil Community. The parties differed as widely in their appointments, conduct, and bearing, as in their principles. The free laborers came into the Territory with money, horses, cattle, implements, and engines, with energies concentrated by associations and strengthened by the recognition of some of the States. They marked out farms, and sites for mills, towns, and cities, and proceeded at once to build, to plough, and to sow. They proposed to debate, to discuss, to organize peacefully, and to vote, and to abide the canvass. The slave-labor party entered the Territory irregularly, staked out possessions, marked them, j and then, in most instances, withdrew to the !
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