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Updated: June 22, 2025
A considerable part of the State lay south of the line of 36º, 30', and the pro-slavery extremists had demanded that it should be divided into two States one to be a free and the other to be a slave-State in order to preserve the political balance between the sections, in the United States Senate.
But the young man who dared declare, in the prosperous beginning of his political life, in the midst of a community imbued with slave-State superstitions, that "he believed the institution of slavery was founded both on injustice and bad policy," attacking thus its moral and material supports, while at the same time recognizing all the constitutional guarantees which protected it, had in him the making of a statesman and, if need be, a martyr.
Under this theory, the courts of slave States had generally accorded freedom to slaves, even when acquired by the laws of a free-State, and reciprocally the courts of free-States had enforced the master's right to his slave where that right depended on the laws of a slave-State.
However much they might have party subordination and success at heart, some of them felt that they could not defend before their anti-slavery constituencies the Oxford frauds, the Calhoun dictatorship, the theory that slave property is above constitutional sanction, and the dogma that "Kansas is therefore at this moment as much a slave-State as Georgia or South Carolina."
This was but repeating in a bolder form the action taken by Governor Wise, of Virginia, during the Frémont campaign four years before. But, instead, as in that case, of confining himself to a proposed consultation among slave-State executives, Governor Gist proceeded almost immediately to a public and official revolutionary act.
You have no more right to force a free-State constitution on Kansas than a slave-State constitution. If Kansas wants a slave-State constitution she has a right to it; if she wants a free-State constitution she has a right to it. It is none of my business which way the slavery clause is decided. I care not whether it is voted down or voted up.
No. 8, 1st Sess. 35th Cong. Vol. I., p. 11. Governor Walker arrived in the Territory late in May, and it required but short investigation to satisfy him that any idea of making Kansas a slave-State was utterly preposterous. Had everything else been propitious, climate alone seemed to render it impossible.
Seward, of New York, a Whig of preeminent fame; Chase, of Ohio, a talented and zealous anti-slavery Democrat, an original founder of the new party; Dayton, of New Jersey, an old Whig high in personal worth and political service; Cameron, of Pennsylvania, a former Democrat, now the undisputed leader of an influential tariff State; Bates, of Missouri, an able and popular anti-slavery Whig from a slave-State; and last, but by no means least in popular estimation, Lincoln, of Illinois.
He believed in the balance of power; he preferred that the people of Kansas should make it a slave-State; he was "in favor of maintaining the equilibrium of the Government by giving the South a majority in the Senate, while the North would always necessarily have a majority in the House of Representatives."
For Frémont, free-States, Connecticut, 6; Iowa, 4; Maine, 8; Massachusetts, 13; Michigan, 6; New Hampshire, 5; New York, 35; Ohio, 23; Rhode Island, 4; Vermont, 5; Wisconsin, 5. Total, 114. For Fillmore, slave-State, Maryland, 8.
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