ciple of the country,-which no sophistry could mislead nor party bonds enslave, nor even victories in war and acquisitions of territory satisfy,-that the Mexican war was never popular. The party and the administration which origi nated it and carried it on successfully, were all the while losing the confidence and support of the country. The House elected in the ensuing autumn had a decided majority against the administration. And this, as has been said, "was the first and only time in our political history when a party conducting a war victorious at every step, steadily lost ground in the country." In regard to our little respect for freedom and human rights, even as compared with Mexico, it is humiliating to read that :——

"Every acre of the nine hundred thousand square miles of this acquisition was free territory under the rule of Mexico, and the commissioners of that government were extremely anxious that the United States should give a guaranty that its character in this respect should not be changed. They urged that to see slavery recognized upon soil once owned by Mexico would be as abhorrent to that gov ernment as it would be to the United States to see the Spanish Inquisition established upon it. Mr. Nicholas P. Trist, our American commissioner, gave a reply which a free republic reads with increasing amazement. He declared that if the territory proposed to be ceded to us, were ten fold as valuable, and in addition to that was covered a foot thick with pure gold, on the single condition that slavery should be forever excluded, he would not entertain the offer for a moment, nor even think of sending it to his government. No American President would dare submit such a treaty to the Senate." Mr. Blaine's “Twenty Years of Congress," vol. I, p. 74.

Another concession made to the South was the infamous Fugitive Slave Law, a law which denied to the fugitive any trial by jury,—a right granted to every citizen for a claim of more than twenty dollars,-left his personal liberty to be decided peremptorily by a United States Commissioner without appeal, provided no penalty for perjury, but did subject to heavy penaltics those who sheltered a fugitive, or ventured to protect him from injustice and violence. "By this law, the body, the life, the very soul of a man, possibly

a freeborn citizen, might be consigned to perpetual enslavement on the fallible judgment of a single official." Even the paltry bribe was held out to such official that if he remanded the alleged fugitive to slavery he should receive a fee of ten dollars, but if he adjudged him free, it should only be five. Then as if to make it as humiliating and insulting as possible to the Free States, whose citizens abhorred slavery, and had forever prohibited it within their own borders so far as it could be done by their own laws and judicial decisions, this law demanded of them acquiescence, approval, assistance in this business. When Christianity puts the question which admits of but one answer: "How much is a man better than a sheep?" when Judaism that had to deal with a rude people, according to the imperfect ideas of that age, commanded "Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped," and when every instinct of humanity and justice forbid our helping to enslave again one who has secured his own freedom, what infatuation to expect that a nation of freemen were going to help enforce a law like that!

Then came the Dred Scott Decision of the Supreme Court, which President Buchanan made such use of in his attempt to fasten slavery upon Kansas. Though the case to be decided was only a question of personal liberty, this court took occasion to go further and decide that slavery was not a local institution, and the creature of local laws, as had hitherto been supposed and acted upon in all our state and general legislation, but had a right to exist everywhere and in spite of local laws; that the act of Congress prohibiting slavery in the territories north of 36° 30° was unconstitutional, and the Missouri Compromise justly repealed it; that slave property was as much entitled to protection in the national domain as any other property; that Congress had no right to shut it out from the District of Columbia, or any of the territories of the United States; and in short,

that the blacks, so far from being included in the "all men" with certain "incalculable rights," referred to in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, were regarded at the time as "so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." It was a bitter disappointment to the people of the North to find that after all their patient waiting in hopes of removing slavery by demonstrating the superiority of freedom, this institution was to be forever imposed upon them, and that it had been read into the Constitution by a sympathizing bench of judges, from which instrument it had been so conscientiously excluded. They saw the very barriers which Virginia and Mr. Jefferson had helped to rear against slavery, torn down by Southern hands, and by men of Mr. Jefferson's political principles. They were indignant as well as disappointed, and became satisfied that more determined steps must be taken for the protection of their own rights and the rights of others, if any liberty was to be left to anybody in our boasted Republic. As showing how this decision was regarded at the North, the New York Legislature immediately enacted that neither color nor African descent should disqualify from citizenship; that every slave brought by his master into the State should become free; that any attempt to retain such persons as slaves should be punished by from two to ten years imprisonment. It passed a resolution also declaring that the Supreme Court had lost the confidence and respect of the people.

Then came the Kansas troubles. The territory of Kansas was open to settlement, and the slave state of Missouri on the east was determined that it should not become a free state. The first settlers of Lawrence, while still living in tents, were visited by a band of two hundred and fifty armed Missourians, and ordered to leave the territory. They were expecting this, and were themselves armed, and so they did not leave. The town, however, was afterwards

twice beseiged and burned, while other towns were repeatedly raided upon, and some of them partially destroyed. The free-state men were not allowed to vote, but the polls were either broken up by armed Missourians, or such men did the voting. The Territorial Legislature was disturbed, and on one pretence and another its officers and members were arrested and imprisoned. And on one occasion when a delegate was to be elected to Congress, the Missourians poured over the borders and returned three thousand votes for their pro-slavery candidate when there were not half that number of voters in the whole territory. Successive Constitutions for the organization of a State were voted upon, and submitted to Congress, but they were either so favorable to freedom, or the voting was so flagrantly fraudulent, that even pro-slavery Congress dared not impose them on the State without submitting them to the people again, where a Slave Constitution was sure to be rejected. The Lecompton Constitution, the worst of all, and the most fraudulent in its conception and pretended adoption was drawn up by a convention never authorized by the people, forbade free blacks to live in the State, allowed slavery, prohibited emancipation, conferred on slaveholders all the immunities of the worst slave codes, and declared these provisions of the Constitution inviolable, and that no change whatever should be made in it for a number of years. Then the question of slavery was not fairly submitted to the people, for they must vote for the Constitution with slavery and all these objectionable provisions, or else have no state organization. Nor was this all; a bribe was offered of a large land grant made to depend upon the adoption of this particular Constitution. The people had already decided the question of slavery, by the most peaceful and undisputed election they ever held, and the free-state men, by a majority of two to one, had carried both houses of the Legislature in favor of freedom, yet this victory was

snatched from them by fraudulent returns. From a single precinct of only eleven houses a return was sent in, and accepted, with the names of 1,624 persons, copied in alphabetical order from the Cincinnati directory. One of the facetious and truthful representations of that election was the affidavit of Horace Greeley, denying with all the formality and solemnity of such an instrument, that he ever voted at Kickapoo, where his name was found recorded by the side of James Buchanan, William H. Seward and others.

And yet in spite of this remonstrance on the part of the people, and such fraudulent returns of their voting, and so many objectionable provisions in the Constitution itself, it was transmitted to Congress, accompanied by a message from President Buchanan recommending the prompt admission of the State. The Lecompton Bill passed the Senate, but it could not pass the House without modifications, and without having the Constitution submitted once more to the people, where it was rejected, land grant and all, by a majority of more than ten thousand. "The whole contrivance," as Mr. Blaine has characterized it," was fraudulent, wicked, and in retrospect incredible. It is not possible, without using language that would seem immoderate, to describe the enormity of the whole transaction. That Constitution no more represented the will or the wishes of the people of Kansas, than the people of Ohio or Vermont." But this action of Congress divided and broke down the Democratic party. It united the North in opposition to slavery as nothing else could have done. It organized the Republican party, and drew all the elements of opposition to the extension of slavery into that party. "This effort to make Kansas a slave state resulted in not only making it free, but the most tenacious Republican state in the Union." It secured the election of Mr. Lincoln as the next President.

Thus the final struggle of slavery for the control of the