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Updated: May 1, 2025
On March 30, 1855, a Territorial Legislature was similarly chosen by Pro-Slavery voters "colonized" from Missouri. But the Free-Soil settlers of Kansas, in Mass Convention at Big Springs, utterly repudiated the bogus Legislature and all its acts, to which they refused submission.
On the nomination of General Taylor to the presidency by the Whigs , a "Free-Soil" party was organized on this basis, the precursor of the Republican party. The convention which nominated Taylor laid on the table a motion approving of the Wilmot Proviso. The Whigs succeeded in the election, but their party lost a portion of its adherents.
When, in the opening of the anti-Nebraska contest, the Free-soil leaders undertook the formation of a new party to supersede the old, they had, because of their generally democratic antecedents, with great unanimity proposed that it be called the "Republican" party, thus reviving the distinctive appellation by which the followers of Jefferson were known in the early days of the republic.
The Republican party neither aim nor profess to aim at this object. And when we consider the flood of wrath which would have been poured out against them if they did, by the very writers who now taunt them with not doing it, we shall be apt to think the taunt a little misplaced. But though not an Abolitionist party, they are a Free-soil party.
We all remember that fight about Kansas, and what sort of a fight it was! Kansas lies alongside of Missouri, a slave State, and is contiguous to no other State. If the free-soil party could, in the days of Pierce and Buchanan, carry the day in Kansas, it is not likely that they would be beaten on any new ground under such a President as Lincoln.
In this convention the advocates of slavery were in the majority and the instrument was so prepared as not to interfere with slavery wherever it already existed in the territory. The free-soil advocates refused to accept this constitution.
They might hesitate as to going willingly with the North, while possessing slaves, as to sitting themselves peaceably down as a small slave adjunct to a vast free-soil nation, seeing that their property would always be in peril. Under such circumstances a slave adjunct to the free-soil nation would not long be possible.
General Cass had been nominated for the Presidency, but his militia title had no glamour of carnage about it, and the secession of the New York Anti-slavery "Barnburners" from the convention was a presage of disaster which was fulfilled in the following August by the assembling of the recusant delegates at Buffalo, where they were joined by a large number of discontented Democrats and "Liberty" men, and the Free-soil party was organized for its short but effective mission.
Missouri was the only State he carried, and there he had less than five hundred majority. He got more than that many free-soil votes. I was strongly tempted to give him mine. Chiefly on account of political associations, I voted for Lincoln. When it came to the second election, I again voted for Mr. Lincoln with reluctance.
And there was an infinite abundance of strange and exciting conversation in many of the circles, not only on Slavery, but on the Bible and Religion, on the Church and the Priesthood, and on Woman's Rights, and the Bloomer Costume, and Marriage Laws, and Free-love, and Education, and Solomon's Rod, and Non-resistance, and Human Government, and Communism, and Individualism, and Unitarianism, and Theodore Parkerism, and Spiritualism, and Vegetarianism, and Teetotalism, and Deism, and Atheism, and Clairvoyance, and Andrew Jackson Davis, and the American Congress, and Quakerism, and William Henry Channing, and his journey to England, and Free-soil, and the Public Lands, and the Common Right to the Soil, and Rent, and Interest, and Capital, and Labor, and Fourierism, and Congeniality of Spirit, and Natural Affinities, and Domestic Difficulties, and the Good time Coming.
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