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Essentially a slave-State constitution of the most pronounced type, containing the declaration that the right of property in slaves is "before and higher than any constitutional sanction," it made the right to vote upon it depend on the one hand on a test oath to "support this constitution" in order to repel conscientious free-State voters, and on the other hand on mere inhabitancy on the day of election to attract nomadic Missourians; it postponed the right to amend or alter for a period of seven years; it kept the then existing territorial laws in force until abrogated by State legislation; it adopted the late Oxford fraud as a basis of apportionment; it gave to Calhoun, the presiding officer, power to designate the precincts, the judges of election, and to decide finally upon the returns in the vote upon it, besides many other questionable or inadmissible provisions.
One was personal, in that Senator Douglas of Illinois, by whom the repeal was championed, and whose influence as a free-State senator and powerful Democratic leader alone made the repeal possible, had been his personal antagonist in Illinois politics for almost twenty years.
Nothing could more forcibly demonstrate the unequal character of the contest between the slave-State and the free-State men in Kansas, even in these manoeuvres and conflicts of civil war, than the companion exploit to this third Lawrence raid.
Yet, despite all oppositions, discouragements, and outrages, the Free-State population of Kansas continued to increase from immigration. In 1857, the Pro-Slavery Legislature elected by the Pro-Slavery voters at their own special election the Free-State voters declining to participate called a Constitutional Convention at Lecompton, which formed a Pro-Slavery Constitution.
Both the factions which had come so near to actual battle in the "Wakarusa war," though nominally disbanded, in reality continued their military organizations, the free-State men through apprehension of danger, the Border Ruffians because of their purpose to crush out opposition.
The free-State people were incensed because the appointment of delegates had been made on the basis of a defective census and registration; and even the assurance of the governor, in his inaugural, that the constitution would be submitted to a popular vote, failed to overcome their distrust. They therefore took no part in the election of delegates.
On the 13th of December, 1860, Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee, afterwards President of the United States, submitted to the Senate a proposal to amend the Constitution in substance as follows: That the Presidential election should take place in August; that a popular plurality in each district should count as one vote; that Congress should count the votes on the second Monday of October; that the President chosen in 1864 be from a slave-holding State, and the Vice-President from a free-State; and in 1868 the President be from a free-State and the Vice-President from a slave State, and so alternating every four years.
Your attempt, if there be such, to resist the laws of Kansas by force, will be criminal and wicked; and all your feeble attempts will be follies, and end in bringing sorrow on your heads, and ruin the cause you would freely die to preserve. No doubt was felt of Lincoln's sympathies; indeed, he is known to have contributed money to the Free-State cause.
It was already working out Northwestern or Free-State control of the Territories, and the fear of losing the Territories had been the motive for following Chase and Sumner in 1854. But the Republicans of the Northwest had been planning to make an end of the "Little Giant," the man who was the most feared of all the public leaders of the time. Abraham Lincoln was to be his successor in the Senate.
It was to admit California with her free-state constitution; to organize the remainder of the Mexican Cession into Territories, with no restriction as to slavery; to pay Texas a sum of money on condition that she yielded in the dispute over the boundary between her and New Mexico; to prohibit the slave trade, but not slavery, in the District of Columbia; to leave the interstate slave trade alone; and to pass an effective fugitive slave law.
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