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votes, could not get an electoral majority, and he urged his friends to transfer the vote for him to Trumbull, who, though a Democrat, was nevertheless an antiNebraska man.

The defeat threw him back again into Circuit riding and the practice of law, but it gave him two more years of reflection, in which, keenly interested in politics but not of them, he could watch the drift of events. The Repeal found him an anti-slavery Whig, as he was at the age of twenty-two; two years of the whirlwind that it sowed placed him definitely with the new alignment against slavery, the Republican Party.

Kansas, the southern territory opened by the Nebraska Bill, was giving proof of just how the people were to be left perfectly free to form and regulate their institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution! Organized movements were immediately set on foot from both sections of the country to gain control of it. The North rushed in Free-Soil settlers through its emigrant aid societies, and the South sent in hooligans from Missouri, and men who took the name of Border Ruffians, who, with pistol in hand, forced their ballots on the day of voting, or shot the Free-Soilers and destroyed their property in the hope that they would stop these elements from further emigration and settlement. Few bona-fide settlers entered from the South, for the state of affairs was too unstable for them to risk their valuable property in slaves. The result of these two movements was a civil war, the beginning of that greater Civil War which was to take place in five years! Battles raged between the settlers, at their voting

booths, in their legislatures, and in the execution of their laws.

By fraudulent voting a pro-slavery delegate was elected to Congress, and a pro-slavery Legislature and Council was formed, which, by adopting the whole revised statutes of Missouri, formed Kansas into a slave territory. Not satisfied with the black code of Missouri, they added one of their own, by a Bill entitled "An Act to punish offences against slave property." Death was the penalty for inciting the negroes to insurrection or for assisting in escape, ten years of prison for harbouring a slave, and two years for refraining to help in recapture. Besides this, the rights of free speech were violated by drastic laws against the publication or utterance of anti-slavery sentiments. Practically it meant that the reading of the Declaration of Independence, which begins with the statement that all men are created free and equal, would be considered a felony under the law. Finally, all officers of the State were required by oath to sustain the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Fugitive Slave Law. These laws were practically all put in through the manipulation of the citizens of Missouri.

The real settlers, on the other hand, who were " Free State men," formed a counter agitation called the Topeka Movement. They held their own elections, formed their own council, and elected their own member to Congress, the former Governor Reeder, who had been dismissed by the Administration for following out the principle of popular sovereignty a little too sincerely. Of course the Topeka Constitution received no support from the Pierce Administration or the Senate,

but it helped to bring the state of affairs in Kansas before the people at large. The delegates of the Topeka Constitution, who were to meet in July 1856, were dispersed by the Federal troops. The citizens of the Free State Party considered themselves in no way bound to what they called the "bogus legislature" of the proslavery minority, and for two years maintained a steady passive resistance to it and to its laws. They refused to take the oath, they paid no taxes, they did no voting. The city of Lawrence, which was formed by the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society, was naturally the centre of the Free State Party. Not content with dispersing the Topeka delegates by Federal troops, the Sheriff of Kansas, who was also a postmaster in Missouri, collected a posse of fifteen hundred men on the pretext of a resistance to arrest that had taken place in Lawrence, and surrounded the town for the purpose of demolishing it. The Lawrence settlers managed to procure for themselves a 12-inch gun, and besides were well armed with the dreaded Sharp rifles. In contradistinction to the bowie knife of the Border Ruffian, the Free State settler had brought with him a Yankee gun called a Sharp rifle, which shot ten times a minute at a distance of one thousand yards. The Pro-slavery Party had more respect for the Sharp rifle of the Free State man than for his principles of liberty and equality.

This Wakarausa War, as it was called, ended in a compromise, to the displeasure of both extreme proslavery partisans and Free State men. After this compromise most of the Free State leaders were put under arrest, and in May, U.S. Marshal Donaldson,

again under the pretext that Lawrence was insurrectionary, called together the militia, and entering the city, placed two cannon in front of the Free State Hotel and destroyed it. The rest of the day was given up to pillage, while the officers sat on their horses and watched the destruction. Reprisals soon followed, wherein the pro-slavery men suffered as much as the Free State settlers, with the result that the governor became seriously bent upon the establishment of order. The first step was to dismiss the troops. Finally, by threats of execution, they were disbanded, and quiet reigned for a while. In the meantime, Northern anti-slavery men rushed to Kansas with their Sharp rifles to help carry on the fight, and in a few months the voting population sprang from about 2000 to 5000. Within a year it was clear that Kansas, if left to the principle of popular sovereignty, would vote itself Free State. The climate, as well as the settlers, proved hostile to slavery.

The moderate Democrats in the country thought it best to maintain the equilibrium of power by acquiring some new slave state towards the South and permit Kansas to enter as free-soil. A new governor from Pennsylvania was sent to Kansas, who, acting upon that principle, concentrated his energies in keeping Kansas, not slave-soil, but Democratic. On his arrival the extreme pro-slavery men showed their disapproval of his policy by renewed violence, and the whole state was thrown into open warfare again. After several months he succeeded in disarming and disbanding the militia and the guerillas. In the year's fighting, as far as can be estimated, about two million dollars' worth of property was destroyed and two hundred lives lost.

It was this war in Kansas which at last caused Lincoln to break with his old opportunistic affiliations and come out boldly with the new party of principle. By 1856 he was ready to take his stand. The new party, called the Republican Party, in honour of Thomas Jefferson, who also had called himself republican, decided to organize all factions which were against the extension of slavery in the territories, or, in other words, all "anti-Nebraska men." Herndon drew up a paper for "Friends of Freedom" to sign, which called a County Convention in Springfield to select delegates to the forthcoming Republican State Convention in Bloomington. Herndon himself signed Lincoln's name to it. His old friends and his wife's relations rushed in, alarmed and shocked, to ask whether Lincoln himself could have taken so suicidal a stand. Herndon confessed that he alone had signed it, and he telegraphed Lincoln, asking if he had done well. Lincoln's answer was: "All right; go ahead; will meet you radicals and all." And it was at the State Convention in Bloomington, which met on 29th May 1856, that Lincoln dedicated himself to the battle for which the new party had entered the lists. The night before, Governor Reeder, dismissed and disgraced, had told the story of "bleeding Kansas."

"Lincoln's speech in Bloomington," says Herndon, "was the grand effort of his life. Heretofore he had simply argued the slavery question on grounds of policy-the statesman's grounds, never reaching the question of the radical and the eternal right. Now he was newly baptized and freshly born. He had the fervour of a new convert, the smothered flame broke

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