CHAPTER XLII. THE ENGLISH BILL. Kansas fraud. — Relative strength of parties in the two houses. - Bill and substitute in the Senate. -Committee of conference. English bill characterized. Debate. Speeches of Howard, Grow, and Bingham. - Opposition to it in the Senate. — Speeches of Stuart, Douglas, Wilson, Seward. — AntiLecompton Democrats. Conferences between them and Republicans. - Faltering. Testimony of Mr. Haskin.-S. S. Cox. Attempts at bribery. Twelve remain firm. Joseph C. McKibbin. Bill adopted by both houses. Rejected by the people of Kansas. -- - FROM testimonies that could not be gainsaid and by witnesses that could not be impeached a most gigantic scheme of duplicity, violence, and fraud had been revealed. Kansas lay helpless under the feet of a proslavery executive in undisguised complicity with the men who had committed these crimes. Its only hope was in Congress, and there it could only depend upon the House of Representatives, as the Senate was unequivocally committed to the President's policy. On the 23d of March, the Senate proceeded to vote upon the bill for the admission of Kansas. Mr. Crittenden moved a substitute, providing that it should be submitted to a vote of the people, and, if rejected, they should be authorized to choose delegates to a convention to frame a constitution. But this substitute was rejected by ten majority. The Republicans; Bell, Crittenden, and Kennedy, Americans; and Broderick, Douglas, and Stuart, anti-Lecompton Democrats, voted for it. The bill was then passed by a vote of thirty-three to twenty-five, Mr. Pugh voting against it. In the House of Representatives, William Montgomery of Pennsylvania, an anti-Lecompton Democrat, offered, as an amendment to the bill, the same substitute which had been offered in the Senate by Mr. Crittenden, and it was carried by a majority of eight. The Senate rejected it, asked for a committee of conference, and appointed Green, Hunter, and Seward on its part. The House adhered to Montgomery's amendment, but agreed to the committee of conference by the casting vote of the Speaker, and English, Stephens, and Howard were appointed on its part. The committee concurred in a report, Mr. Seward of the Senate and Mr. Howard of the House dissenting. This report was made in both bodies on the 23d of April. It was made in the House by William H. English of Indiana, and was known as the English bill. This report excited surprise and indignation, and evoked the most determined opposition. Though equivocal and capa ble of widely different constructions, it was regarded by the friends of Kansas as a surrender. It was, too, in marked contrast with the speech of its reputed author, in which he had not only opposed the Lecompton constitution, but had avowed his purpose, though a personal admirer and stanch supporter of his administration, to part company with the President rather than give it his vote. But now and suddenly he had reached the conclusion that the exigencies of the occasion demanded concession. In his remarks accompanying the report he said: "A great question, perhaps the greatest of the age, one which has agitated and engrossed the public mind for the past four years, - has at last come to a crisis," and the committee had concluded that "it was not best to hazard longer the peace of the country for the sake of an unimportant point or unmeaning word." He proposed, therefore, to accept the Lecompton constitution, with all its enormities and the admitted fact that it was in no sense the work of the people, " on a condition." In substance, it offered to the people in connection with the constitution a large land-grant with these conditions: if they voted to accept it, they were to be admitted with the constitution and the land; if they voted against receiving it, they would not receive the land, nor could they become a State until the Territory had acquired a population sufficiently large to elect a Representative to the House. Singular as was the form of this proposition, unfair and double-faced as were its spirit, purpose, and purport, the circumstances under which it was presented rendered still more reprehensible this action of its movers, and more creditable and almost wonderful the conduct of those who rejected it. For those struggling pioneers, harassed and harried as they were, and strongly tempted to purchase peace at any price, to " spurn the bribe" was indeed heroic, and revealed the stuff they were made of. Mr. Howard, a member of the conference committee, characterized it as a measure to keep open the quarrel, imposing, as it did, one set of conditions if the Territory applied for admission as a slave State, and another set if it applied as a free State. He said it offered a premium to Kansas to become a slave State; but he thought that if the people could have a fair chance, they would reject it "four to one." Indeed, he predicted that they would never submit to it on any conditions whatever. The proposition of the bill was, indeed, a gigantic bribe. Bluster and bullying had been tried, exhausted, and they had failed. Mercenary considerations were now proposed, combined with the menace that, if the bribe was not accepted, Kansas could not be admitted until, by the gradual accretion of numbers, its population should reach the general" ratio of representation" for members of the House. Its spirit and purport were tersely expressed and characterized by Mr. Crittenden, whose devotion to slavery would rescue his judgment from the imputation of prejudice against the bill on account of its proslavery character. "This measure," he declared, "says to the people of Kansas: If you choose to take this Lecompton constitution with all its imperfections on its head; if you choose to silence all the complaints and all the denunciations which you have made against it; if you choose to humiliate yourselves as freemen by a confession of as much baseness as that would imply, then, no matter what your numbers are, we shall make no inquiry, — but come into the Union at once, with all the dowry of land. But if you will not come in on these conditions, then you shall not come in at all until your population shall amount to that number which is fixed by the general law as the representation throughout the country.'" The truth of this allegation was substantially admitted by Mr. Hunter, a member of the conference committee, who declared that the new bill " acknowledges not only the authority of the Lecompton convention, but the validity of their action," while "it receives the constitution presented by them as the constitution of the people of Kansas"; and Mr. Stephens, another member of the committee, declared that it was never his intention that the constitution should be submitted to the people. The bill was most earnestly and eloquently opposed by some of the ablest debaters of the House. Among them was Mr. Grow. In a speech at once learned and logical, packed with facts and arguments, and glowing with the fervor of an intense indignation, he analyzed and fearlessly exposed the iniquitous measure. "Four governors," he said, "have returned from that Territory, all telling the same story to the American people; that is, that the rights of the people of Kansas have all been trampled in the dust, the ballot-boxes violated, their houses burned, their presses destroyed, their public buildings battered down by United States cannon under the direction of United States officers." But there were few speeches made during the debate which displayed with more vigor of logic and force of rhetoric the enormity of the bill and of its provisions than that of John A. Bingham of Ohio. "Gloze that bill over with what words. you may," he said, "it is a written crime. Enact it into a law, and it will be a legislative atrocity engrossed upon parchment. Dignify this act with what title you please, historystern, truthful, impartial history-will entitle it An act to take away the liberties of American citizens.' Instead of an honest and fair submission to the people, instead of that, sir, it submits to them a bribe in the way of lands and money. I say to gentlemen, you may pass this bill, but you cannot make the lie perpetual. A lie cannot live forever, it has no vitality in it. Sooner or later it must perish. You may induce the majority to accept the proffered bribe; you may thereby impose upon that young Territory the shame and crime and curse of this brutal atrocity, but you can never give permanence to such an act of perfidy, to such a system of wrong. In this hour of the world's repose and the world's hope, shall America, the child and stay of the earth's old age, prove false to her most sacred traditions, false to her holiest trust, and by this proposed enactment consent to strike down Liberty in her own temple, and forge chains for her own children ? . . . . GOD IS IN HISTORY. Let gentlemen give heed. to its lessons of the terrible retribution which sometimes overtakes those who seek to establish an odious and hated despotism on the minds and consciences, the brain and heart, of freemen." .... In the Senate the bill encountered a similar earnest and determined opposition. Mr. Stuart said that if he was so borne down by oppression that he was compelled to falsify all his opinions, he would take the naked Senate bill in preference to the measure that stood on nothing " either human or divine"; for it was not like anything" in the heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth. . . . . It is an anomaly, a miserable, ingeniously concocted pretence to smuggle through Congress, and fasten upon the necks of the people of Kansas, an obnoxious organic law." Mr. Doolittle charged the administration with having forced Geary, Walker, and Stanton out of office because they would not count fraudulent votes, while it continued John Calhoun, the surveyorgeneral of the Territory, in office, notwithstanding all that had been proved in relation to election returns which had been made to him, and which had been found "hid in a candle-box in his wood-pile." Mr. Douglas referred to the fact that "some of that glorious band of Democrats " felt it to be their duty to support the bill, but he never could "consent to violate that great principle of State equality, of State sovereignty, of popular sovereignty"; that his position was taken, and that he should follow the principle wherever its logical consequences carried him. Mr. Wilson said this compromise was "a conglomeration of bribes, menaces, and meditated frauds. It goes to the people of Kansas with a bribe in one hand and a penalty in the other." The government had advertised hundreds of thou |