of slavery; he considered that, under the organic act, the Convention was bound to submit the all-important question of slavery to the people; he added, that it was never his opinion, however, that, independently of this act, the Convention would be bound to submit any portion of the Constitution to a popular vote, in order to give it validity; and he argued the fallacy and unreasonableness of such an opinion, by insisting that it was in opposition to the principle which pervaded our institutions, and which was every day carried into practice, to the effect that the people had the right to delegate to representatives, chosen by themselves, sovereign power to frame Constitutions, enact laws, and perform many other important acts, without the necessity of testing the validity of their work by popular approbation. The Topeka Constitution Mr. Buchanan denounced as the work of treason and insurrection.

It is certain that Mr. Buchanan would have succeeded in effecting the admission of Kansas under the Lecompton Constitution, if he could have secured to the measure the support of all the Northern Democrats who had contributed to his election. These, however, had become disaffected; they opposed and assailed the measure of the Administration, acting under the lead of Mr. Douglas; and the long-continued and bitter discussion which ensued, perfectly accomplished the division of the Democratic party into two great factions, mustered under the names of "Lecompton" and "Anti-Lecompton."

The latter faction founded their opposition to the Administration on the grounds, that the Lecompton Constitution was not the act of the people of Kansas, and did not express their will; that only half of the counties of the Territory were represented in the Convention that framed it, the other half being disfranchised, for no fault of their own, but from failure of the officers to register the voters, and entitle them to vote for delegates; and that the mode of submitting the Constitution to the people for "ratification or rejection" was unfair, embarrassing, and proscriptive.

In reply, the friends of the Administration urged that twenty-one out of the thirty-four organized counties of Kansas were embraced in the apportionment of representation; that, of the thirteen counties not embraced, nine had but a small population, as shown by the fact that, in a succeeding election, to which

the Anti-Lecomptonites had referred as an indication of public sentiment in Kansas, they polled but ninety votes in the aggregate; that, in the remaining four counties, the failure to register the voters, and the consequent loss of their representation, were due to the Abolitionists themselves, who refused to recognize all legal authority in the Territory; and that the submission of the Constitution, as provided by the Lecompton Convention, afforded a complete expression of the popular will, as the slavery question was the only one about which there was any controversy in Kansas.

The bill for the admission of Kansas under the Lecompton Constitution, was passed by the Senate. In the House, an amendment, offered by Mr. Montgomery, of Pennsylvania, was adopted, to the effect that, as it was a disputed point whether the Constitution framed at Lecompton was fairly made, or expressed the will of the people of Kansas, her admission into the Union as a State was declared to be upon the fundamental condition precedent, that the said constitutional instrument should first be submitted to a vote of the people of Kansas, and assented to by them, or by a majority of the voters, at an election to be held for the purpose of determining the question of the ratification or rejection of the instrument.

The Senate insisted upon its bill; the House adhered to its amendment; and a committee of conference was appointed. The result of the conference was the report of a bill for the admission of Kansas, which became a law in June, 1858, and substantially secured nearly all that the North had claimed in the controversy.

The bill, as passed, rejected the Land Ordinance contained in the Lecompton Constitution, and proposed a substitute. Kansas was to be admitted into the Union on an equal footing, in all respects, with the original States, but upon the fundamental condition precedent, that the question of admission, along with that of the Land substitute, be submitted to a vote of the people; that, if a majority of the vote should be against the proposition tendered by Congress, it should be concluded that Kansas did not desire admission under the Lecompton Constitution, with the condition attached to it; and that, in such event, the people were authorized to form for themselves a Constitution and State government, and might

elect delegates for that purpose, after a census taken to demonstrate the fact, that the population of the Territory equalled or exceeded the ratio of representation for a member of the House of Representatives.

Thus ended the six months' discussion of the Kansas question in Congress in 1858. The substitute to the Land Ordinance was rejected by the voters of the Territory; and Kansas did not come into the Union until nearly three years afterwards-just as the Southern States were going out of it. She came in under an anti-slavery constitution, and Mr. Buchanan signed the bill of admission.

The discussions of the Kansas question, as summed in the preceding pages, had materially weakened the Union. The spirit of those discussions, and the result itself of the controversy, fairly indicated that the South could hardly expect, under any circumstances, the addition of another Slave State to the Union. The Southern mind was awakened; the sentimental reverences of more than half a century were decried; and men began to calculate the precise value of a Union which, by its mere name and the paraphrases of demagogues, had long governed their affections.

Some of these calculations, as they appeared in the newspaper presses of the times, were curious, and soon commenced to interest the Southern people. It was demonstrated to them that their section had been used to contribute the bulk of the revenues of the Government; that the North derived forty to fifty millions of annual revenue from the South, through the operations of the tariff; and that the aggregate of the trade of the South in Northern markets was four hundred millions of dollars a year. It was calculated by a Northern writer, that the harvest of gain reaped by the North from the Union, from unequal taxations and the courses of trade as between the two sections, exceeded two hundred millions of dollars per year.

These calculations of the commercial cost of the "glorious Union" to the South, only presented the question in a single aspect, however striking that was. There were other aspects no less important and no less painful, in which it was to be regarded. The swollen and insolent power of Abolitionism threatened to carry every thing before it; it had already bro

ken the vital principle of the Constitution-that of the equality of its parts; and to injuries already accomplished, it added the bitterest threats and the most insufferable insolence.

While the anti-slavery power threatened never to relax its efforts until, in the language of Mr. Seward, a senator from New York, the "irrepressible conflict" between slavery and freedom was accomplished, and the soil of the Carolinas dedicated to the institutions of New England, it affected the insolent impertinence of regarding the Union as a concession on the part of the North, and of taunting the South with the disgrace which her association in the Union inflicted upon the superior and more virtuous people of the Northern States. The excesses of this conceit are ridiculous, seen in the light of subsequent events. It was said that the South was an inferior part of the country; that she was a spotted and degraded section; that the national fame abroad was compromised by the association of the South in the Union; and that a New England traveller in Europe blushed to confess himself an American, because half of the nation of that name were slaveholders. Many of the Abolitionists made a pretence of praying that the Union might be dissolved, that they might be cleared, by the separation of North and South, of any implication in the crime of slavery. Even that portion of the party calling themselves "Republicans" affected that the Union stood in the way of the North. Mr. Banks, of Massachusetts, who had been elected Speaker of the House in the Thirty-first Congress, had declared that the designs of his party were not to be baffled, and was the author of the coarse jeer-"Let the Union slide." The New York Tribune had complained that the South "could not be kicked out of the Union." Mr. Seward, the great Republican leader, had spread the evangely of a natural, essential, and irrepressible hostility between the two sections; and the North prepared to act on a suggestion, the only practical result of which could be to cleave the Union apart, and to inaugurate the horrors of civil war.

The raid into Virginia of John Brown, a notorious Aboli tionist, whose occupations in Kansas had been those of a horsethief and assassin, and his murder of peaceful and unsuspect ing citizens at Harper's Ferry in the month of October, 1859 was a practical illustration of the lessons of the Northern Re

publicans, and of their inevitable and, in fact, logical conclusion in civil war. Professed conservatives in the North predicted that this outrage would be productive of real good in their section, in opening the eyes of the people to what were well characterized as "Black Republican" doctrines. This prediction was not verified by succeeding events. The Northern elections of the next month showed no diminution in the Black Republican vote. The manifestations of sympathy for John Brown, who had expiated his crime on a gallows in Virginia, were unequivocal in all parts of the North, though comparatively few openly justified the outrage. Bells were tolled in various towns of New England on the day of his execution, with the knowledge of the local authorities, and in some instances, through their co-operation; and not a few preachers from the pulpit alloted him an apotheosis, and consigned his example to emulation, as one not only of public virtue, but of particular service to God.

The attachment of the South to the Union was steadily weakening in the historical succession of events. The nomination in December, 1859, to the Speakership of the House of Representatives of Mr. Sherman, of Ohio, who had made himself especially odious to the South by publicly recommending, in connection with sixty-eight other Republican members, a fanatical document popularly known as "Helper's Book,"*

* The tone of this book was violent in the extreme. We add a few extracts, which will enable the reader to form a correct opinion of the character and object of the work

"Slavery is a great moral, social, civil, and political evil, to be got rid of at the earliest practical period.”—(Page 168.)

"Three-quarters of a century hence, if the South retains slavery, which God forbid! she will be to the North what Poland is to Russia, Cuba to Spain, and Ireland to England."-(P. 163.)

"Our own banner is inscribed-No co-operation with slaveholders in politics; no fellowship with them in religion; no affiliation with them in society; no recognition of pro-slavery men, except as ruffians, outlaws, and criminals."-P 156.)

We believe it is as it ought to be, the desire, the determination, and the destiny of the Republican party to give the death-blow to slavery."-(P. 234.) "In any event, come what will, transpire what may, the institution of slavery must be abolished.”—(P. 180.)

We are determined to abolish slavery at all hazards-in defiance of all the opposition, of whatever nature, it is possible for the slaveocrats to bring