resolution, although there was then scarcely an avowed Abolitionist among them. They professed to be in favor of protecting the slaveholder in his right of property, and yet de clared by their votes, as well as by their speeches, that the right of petition to rob him of his property was too sacred to be called in question.

The passage of the "Pinckney resolutions," as they were called, did not silence the anti-slavery agitation in the House. In the month of December, 1837, a remarkable scene was enacted in that body, during the proceedings on a motion of Mr. Slade, of Vermont, to refer two memorials praying the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia to a select committee. Mr. Slade, in urging his motion, was violent in his denunciations of slavery, and he spoke for a considerable time amid constant interruptions and calls to order. At length, Mr. Rhett, of South Carolina, called upon the entire delegation from all the slaveholding States to retire from the hall, and to meet in the room of the Committee on the District of Columbia. A large number of them did meet for consultation in the room designated. The meeting, however, resulted in nothing but an agreement upon the following resolution to be presented to the House:

"Resolved, That all petitions, memorials, and papers touching the abolition of slavery, or the buying, selling, or transferring of slaves in any State, Dis trict, or Territory of the United States, be laid on the table without being debated, printed, read, or referred, and that no further action whatever shall be had thereon."

This resolution was presented to the House by Mr. Patton, of Virginia, and was adopted by a vote of 122 to 74.

In the month of January, 1840, the House of Representatives, on motion of Mr. W. Cost Johnson, of Maryland, adopted what was known as the "Twenty-first Rule," which prohibited the reception of all Abolition petitions, memorials, and resolutions.

The Twenty-first Rule was rescinded in December, 1844, on motion of John Quincy Adams, by a vote of 108 to 80. Several efforts were afterwards made to restore it, but without success. The Northern people would not relinquish what they termed a "sacred right"—that of petitioning the government,

through their representatives in Congress, to deprive the Southern people of their property.

During the agitation in Congress upon the right of petition, there was, as before stated, but very few open and avowed Abolitionists in either House, and the declaration was repeatedly made by members that the party was contemptibly small in every free State in the Union. Mr. Pierce, of New Hampshire (afterwards President of the United States), declared, in 1837, in his place in Congress, that there were not two hundred Abolitionists in his State; and Mr. Webster, about the same time, represented their numbers in Massachusetts as quite insignificant. Mr. Calhoun, of South Carolina, with characteristic sagacity, replied to these representations, and predicted that "Mr. Webster and all Northern statesmen would, in a few years, yield to the storm of Abolition fanaticism and be overwhelmed by it." The prophecy was not more remarkable than the searching analysis of Northern "conservatism" with which the great South Carolinian accompanied his prediction. He argued that such a consequence was inevitable from the way in which the professed "conservatives" of the North had invited the aggressions of the Abolitionists, by courteously granting them the right of petition, which was indeed all they asked; that the fanaticism of the North was a disease which required a remedy, and that palliatives would not answer, as Mr. Webster and men like him would find to their cost.

In the Thirtieth Congress, that assembled in December, 1849, the professed Abolitionists numbered about a dozen members. They held the balance of power between the Democratic and Whig parties in the House, and delayed its organization for about a month. Both the Whig and Democratic parties then claimed to be conservative, and, of course, the opponents of the anti-slavery agitation.

In the Presidential canvass of 1852, both Pierce and Scott were brought cut by professed national parties, and were supported in each section of the Union. John P. Hale, who ran upon what was called the "straight-out" Abolition ticket, did not receive the vote of a single State, and but 175,296 of the popular vote of the Union. The triumphant election of Pierce, who was a favorite of the State Rights Democracy of the South, was hailed by the sanguine friends of the Union as

a fair indication of the purpose of the North to abide, in good faith, by the Compromise of 1850. But in this they were deceived, as the sequel demonstrated.

During the first session of the first Congress under Mr. Pierce's administration, the bill introduced to establish a territorial government for Nebraska, led to an agitation in Congress and the country, the consequences of which extended to the last period of the existence of the Union. The Committee on Territories in the Senate, of which Mr. Douglas, of Illinois, was chairman, reported the bill, which made two territoriesNebraska and Kansas-instead of one, and which declared that the Missouri Compromise act was superseded by the Compromise measures of 1850, and had thus become inoperative. The phraseology of the clause repealing the Missouri Compromise was drawn up by Mr. Douglas, and was not supposed at the time to be liable to misconstruction. It held, that the Missouri Compromise act, "being inconsistent with the principles of non-intervention by Congress with slavery in the States and Territories, as recognized by the legislation of 1850, commonly called the Compromise Measures, is hereby declared inoperative and void; it being the true intent and meaning of this act not to legislate slavery into any Territory or State, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people thereof 'perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States." The clause here quoted, as drawn up by Mr. Douglas, was incorporated into the Kansas-Nebraska bill in the Senate on the 15th of February, 1854. The bill passed the House at the same session.

The repeal of the Missouri Compromise caused the deepest excitement throughout the North. The Abolitionists were wild with fury. Douglas was hung in effigy at different places, and was threatened with personal violence in case of his persistence in his non-intervention policy. The rapid development of a fanatical feeling in every free State startled many who had but recently indulged dreams of the perpetuity of the Constitutional Union. Abolitionism, in the guise of "Republicanism," swept almost every thing before it in the North and Northwest in the elections of 1854 and 1855. But few professed conservatives were returned to the Thirty-first Congress;

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not enough to prevent the election of Nathaniel Banks, an objectionable Abolitionist of the Massachusetts school, to the Speakership of the House.

The South had supported the repeal of the Missouri Compromise because it restored her to her rightful position of equality in the Union. It is true, that her representatives in Congress were well aware that, under the operations of the new act, their constituents could expect to obtain but little if any new accessions of slave territory, while the North would necessarily, from the force of circumstances, secure a number of new States in the Northwest, then the present direction of our new settlements. But viewed as an act of proscription against her, the Missouri Compromise was justly offensive to the South; and its abrogation, in this respect, strongly recommended itself to her support.

The ruling party of the North, calling themselves "Republicans," had violently opposed the repeal of the act of 1820, in the same sentiment with which it was fiercely encountered by the Abolitionists. The two parties were practically identical; both shared the same sentiment of hostility to slavery; and they differed only as to the degree of indirection by which their purposes might best be accomplished.

The election of Mr. Buchanan to the Presidency, in 1856, raised, for a time, the spirits of many of the true friends of the Constitutional Union. But there was very little in an analysis of the vote to give hope or encouragement to the patriot. Fremont, who ran as the anti-slavery candidate, received 1,341,812 votes of the people, and it is believed would have been elected by the electoral college, if the anti-Buchanan party in Pennsylvania had united upon him.

The connection of events which we have sought to trace, brings us to the celebrated Kansas controversy, and at once to the threshold of the dissensions which demoralized the only conservative party in the country, and in less than four years culminated in the rupture of the Federal Union. A severe summary of the facts of this controversy introduces us to the contest of 1860, in which the Republican party, swollen with its triumphs in Kansas, and infecting the Democratic leaders in the North with the disposition to pander to the lusts of a

growing power, obtained the control of the government, and seized the sceptre of absolute authority.

When Mr. Buchanan came into office, in March, 1857, he flattered himself with the hope that his administration would settle the disputes that had so long agitated and distracted the country; trusting that such a result might be accomplished by the speedy admission of Kansas into the Union, upon the principles which had governed in his election. Such, at least, were his declarations to his friends. But before the meeting of Congress, in December, he had abundant evidence that his favorite measure would be opposed by a number of Senators and Representatives who had actively supported him in his canvass; among them the distinguished author of the KansasNebraska bill, Mr. Douglas.

In the month of July, 1855, the Legislature of the Territory of Kansas had passed an act to take the sense of the people on the subject of forming a State government, preparatory to admission into the Union. The election took place, and a large majority of the people voted in favor of holding a convention for the purpose of adopting a Constitution. In pursuance of this vote, the Territorial Legislature, on the 19th of February, 1857, passed a law to take a census of the people, for the purpose of making a registry of the voters, and to elect delegates to the Convention. Mr. Geary, then Governor of Kansas, vetoed the bill for calling the Convention, for the reason that it did not require the Constitution, when framed, to be submitted to a vote of the people for adoption or rejec tion. The bill, however, was reconsidered in each House, and passed by a two-thirds' vote, and thus became a binding law in the Territory, despite the veto of the Governor.

On the 20th of May, 1857, Mr. F. P. Stanton, Secretary and acting Governor of Kansas Territory, published his proclamation, commanding the proper officers to hold an election on the third Monday of June, 1857, as directed by the act referred to.

The election was held on the day appointed, and the Convention assembled, according to law, on the first Monday of September, 1857. They proceeded to form a Constitution, and, having finished their work, adjourned on the 7th November