destruction of property were repeated. The whole matter was finally disposed of in the year 1859, when a constitutional convention met at Wyandotte and adopted what is known as the Wyandotte constitution. On the 16th of October, 1859, this constitution was ratified by the people of the territory, and under it Kansas two years later became a free state. "Squatter sovereignty" in Kansas had been a costly experiment. Two million dollars' worth of property had been destroyed, many human lives had been lost, and the bitterest animosities engendered. For five years the Kansas struggle had been a national issue, which stirred the nation to its very depths. No doubt much wrong had been committed by irresponsible parties on both sides in the frontier struggle; but it all ended in the interest of human liberty; freedom had been victorious, the moral sentiment of the north had prevailed.

470. The Lincoln-Douglas Debates.-The year 1858 was made memorable by a contest in Illinois between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas for the United States senatorship from that state. Lincoln had become prominent in the west because of his opposition to Douglas's KansasNebraska act. On account of his leadership of the Republican party in Illinois, he became the logical candidate of that party against Douglas, the Democratic nominee. Douglas was a man of national reputation, and for years had been the recognized leader of his party in the senate. He was a mag

netic speaker, and was recognized as a debater of unusual ability. Lincoln, though he had served one term in congress as a Whig member, was not prominent in national politics; indeed, his reputation may be said to date from the year of this senatorial contest. During the progress of the contest a series of seven joint debates was arranged between Lincoln and Douglas, which took place at various places throughout the state. In these debates the political questions which were then agitating the country were argued by both debaters with such skill and eloquence as to attract at once the attention

of the entire country and bring the name of Lincoln into such national prominence as to signal him out as one of the ablest leaders of the new Republican party. In this campaign Lincoln lost, but with a political foresight which has seldom been surpassed, he so embarrassed Douglas by the questions which he forced him to answer that he made it impossible for the Democratic party of the south to consider his name in connection with the coming presidential contest.

In accepting the nomination for the senatorship, at the hands of the state Republican convention at Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln responded in his now famous speech opening with these words:

666

"A house divided against itself can not stand.' I believe that this government can not endure permanently half slave and half free; I do not expect the union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new, north as well as south."

Many of his friends urged him to omit these words from his speech, insisting that he would lose the election if he did not, whereupon his law partner, William H. Herndon, exclaimed: "Lincoln, deliver that speech as written, and it will make you president!"

471. John Brown's Raid at Harper's Ferry-1859.-On the morning of October 17, 1859, the whole country was startled by the intelligence that a band of insurgents had seized the United States arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, captured the town, and taken a number of prominent citizens prisoners. It soon became known that the leader of the band was Captain John Brown, who had become known throughout the country in connection with the free-state struggle in

Kansas. Virginia sent state troops flying to Harper's Ferry, but their ill-planned and feeble efforts could not dislodge the insurgents. On the evening of the day of the alarm a company of United States marines, under command of Colonel Robert E. Lee, arrived upon the scene and immediately

relieved the excited militia. The marines, with sledge hammers and battering ram, soon forced an entrance into the arsenal, where they found Brown on his knees, dazed and bleeding, with two of his sons dead by his side. Of the nineteen raiders, two had escaped, seven were taken prisoners, and ten were found dead within the fort. Brown and his fellow prisoners were placed in chains and taken to Charleston, Virginia, where they were tried for treason and for inciting insurrection. Brown's trial was a notable one, and excited the greatest interest throughout the country. He candidly and boldly declared to the court that he had planned to march into the slave districts, set up an antislavery government, and spread such terror among the slave

holders of the south, that they would either emancipate their slaves or surrender them for a money consideration. In this way he had hoped to bring about a revolution which would ultimately lead to the abolition of slavery.

Although Brown was found guilty and executed on the gallows, still there were thousands in the north who excused his raid as the logical outcome of the squatter sovereignty war and the Dred Scott decision. But the event threw the south into a frenzy of excitement. The cry went up that the insurrection had been planned at the instigation of the antislavery leaders in the north, and the breach between the opposing sections was widened.

472. Mrs. Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and Helper's "Impending Crisis."-In 1852 Harriet Beecher, Stowe, sister to the great Brooklyn preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, published a novel entitled "Uncle Tom's Cabin, or, Life among the Lowly." It was called forth as a protest against the Fugitive Slave Law, and was full of burning indignation against the wrongs of the slaves in the south. Its sales soon ran into the thousands. By the second year of Buchanan's administration 500,000 copies had been scattered throughout the free states. The sale of the book was prohibited in many localities in the south, where it was claimed that the novel was overdrawn, ‘imaginative, and misleading, and that the condition of the slave was much better than Mrs. Stowe's portrayal indicated. The circulation of the book was encouraged by the abolition and antislavery societies of the north, where it stirred the minds of the people to the profoundest depths, and aroused a stronger opposition than ever before-not only against the further extension of slavery, but also against its continued existence in the United States.

In 1857 a second book appeared, which, if anything, produced more indignation in the south than "Uncle Tom's Cabin." This book was Hinton R. Helper's "Impending Crisis in the South: How to Meet It." Helper was a representative of the nonslaveholding element in the south,—

an element which at that time represented about seven-tenths of the white population of that section. The "poor whites" in the south had never been able to make much progress owing to the fact that their farms were small and that they were forced at all times to put their free labor against slave labor. Their communities were poorly provided with schools, and in every way their growth and prospects had been retarded on account of slavery. The "poor white" usually had no love for the African,-if anything, his feeling against him was far more bitter than that of the slaveholder. He felt that he was unjustly thrown into competition with the slave, and therefore deprived of his just rights as a free laborer. Helper in his book pleaded strongly for the nonslaveholding whites in the south, who, he declared, longed to see the day arrive when all slaves should be removed from the United States and their places filled by white men. His method of thus settling the slavery question by deportation, and his sound argument in defence of free labor in the south, were endorsed by many of the ablest men of the day. The indignation of the southerners, however, found some justification in the violence of Helper's language and the undisguised threat of using force to put down the slaveholders. The book had an immense sale. Whole sections of it were printed and circulated free by the New England Abolition Society, and the Republican party used it as a campaign document in 1860.

473. The Presidential Election of 1860.-The Democratic convention met at Charleston, South Carolina, on the 23d of April, 1860, where it proceeded to the adoption of a platform before placing in nomination its candidate for the presidency. After a week's struggle over the question of slavery, in which the delegates from the northern states refused to endorse the extreme views advocated by the southern leaders, the convention was rent in twain. A number of the southern states dramatically withdrew their entire delegations from the convention. The remaining delegates, unable to agree upon a