7 disarmed the Free State emigrants who had now learned the necessity of being prepared for self- defence, on the borders of the Territory, and on the distant roads and rivers which led into it. They destroyed a bridge that free-labor men used in their way to the seat of Government, sacked a hotel where they lodged, and broke up and cast into the river a press which was the organ of their cause. The people of Kansas, thus deprived, not merely of self-government, but even of peace, tranquillity, and security, fell back on the inalienable revolutionary right of voluntary reorganization. They determined, however, with admirable temper, judgment, and loyalty, to conduct their proceedings for this purpose in deference and subordination to the authority of the Federal Union, and according to the line of safe precedents. After due elections, open to all the inhabitants of the Territory, they organized provisionally a State Government at Topeka ; and by the hands of provisional Senators, and a provisional Representative, they submitted their Constitution to Congress, and prayed to be admitted as a free State into the Federal Union. The Federal authorities lent no aid to this movement, but, on the contrary, the President and Senate contemptuously rejected it, and denounced it as treason, and all its actors and abettors as disloyal to the Union. An army was dispatched into the Territory, intended indeed to preserve peace, but at the same time to obey and sustain the usurpation. The provisional Legislature, which had met to confer, and to adopt further means to urge the prayers of the people upon Congress, were dispersed by the army, and the State officers provisionally elected, who had committed no criminal act, were arrested, indicted, and held in the Federal camp as State prisoners. Nevertheless, the people of Kansas did not acquiesce. The usurpation remained a barren authority, defied, derided, and despised. A national election was now approaching. Excitement 'within and sympathies’ without the Territory must be allayed. Governor Shannon was removed, and Mr. Geary was appointed his successor. He exacted submission to the statutes of the usurpation, but promised equality in their administration. He induced a repeal of some of those statutes which were most obviously unconstitutional, and declared an amnesty for political offences. He persuaded the Legislature of the usurpation to ordain,a call for a Convention at Lecompton, to form a Constitution, if the measure should be approved by a popular vote at an election to be held for that purpose. To vote at such an election was to recognise and tolerate the usurpation, as well as to submit to disfranchising laws, and to hazard a renewal of the frauds and violence by which the usurpation had been established. On no account would the Legislature agree that the projected Constitution should be submitted to the people, after it should have been perfected by the Convention. The refusal of this just measure, so accessary to the public security in case of surprise and fraud, was a confession of the purpose on the part of the usurpation to carry a Consti- I tution into effect by surprise and fraud. The Governor insisted on this provision, and demanded of the President of the United States the removal of a partial and tyrannical judge. He failed to gain either measure, and incurred the displeasure of the usurpation by seeking them. Fie fled from the Territory. The Free State party stood aloof from the polls, and a canvass showed that some 2,300, less than a third of the people of the Territory, bud sanctioned the call of a Convention, while the presence of the army alone held the Territory under a forced truce. At this juncture, the new Federal Administration came in, under a President who had obtained success by the intervention at the polls of a third party—an ephemeral organization, built upon a foreign and frivolous issue, which had just strength enough a®d life enough to give to a ProSlavery party the aid required to produce that untoward result. The new President, under a show of moderation, masked a more effectual intervention than that of his predecessor, in favor of slave labor and a slave State. Before coming into office, he approached or was approached by the Supreme Court of the United States. On their docket was, through some chance or design, an action which an obscure negro man in Missouri had brought for his freedom against his reputed master. The Court had arrived at the conclusion, on solemn argument, that insomuch as this unfortunate negro had, through some ignorance or chicane in special pleading, admitted what could not have been proved, that he had descended from some African who had once been held in bondage, that therefore he was not, in view of the Constitution, a citizen of the United States, and therefore dould not implead the reputed master in the Federal courts; and on this ground the Supreme Court were prepared to dismiss the action, for want of jurisdiction over the suitor’s person. This decision, certainly as repugnant to the Declaratjon of Independence and to the spirit of the Constitution, as to the instincts of humanity, nevertheless would be one which would exhaust all the power of the tribunal, and exclude consideration of all other questions that had been raised upon the record. The counsel who had appeared for the negro had volunteered from motives of charity, and, ignorant of course of the -disposition which was to be made of the Cause, had argued that his client had been freed from Slavery by operation -of the Missouri prohibition of 1820. The opposing counsel, paid by the -defending slaveholder, -had insisted, in reply, that that famous statute was unconstitutional. The mock debate had been heard in the Chamber of the Court in the basement of the Capitol, in the presence of the curious visiters at the seat of Government, whom the dullness of a judicial investigation could not disgust. The Court did not hesitate to please the incoming President, by seizing this extraneous and idle forensic discussion, and converting it into an occasion for pronouncing an opinion that the Missouri prohibition was void, and that, by force of the Constitution, Slavery existed, with all the elements of property in man over man, in all the Territories
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