South succeeded in passing the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, repealing the Missouri Compromise, and under the doctrine of "Squatter Sovereignty" throwing all the territories open to slavery at least as a possibility.
The North at once took alarm and the Free-soil party, newly named the Republican party, grew in numbers and enthusiasm as no other party had ever done before.
Events mightily aided this growth, driving into the Free-soil or Republican party many thousands of men who had before held aloof from a movement which they thought to be dangerous to the perpetuity of the Union and to peace within its borders.
First of these events was the outbreak of civil war in Kansas. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise opened that territory at once to settlement by men from both sections and at the same time opened the question whether it should become a free or a slave state. Incidentally a contest of factions began which raged hotly to the end.
Whether Kansas should be a slave state or a free state depended upon the will of the settlers alone. The land was in many respects a tempting one to emigrants in spite of the aridity of its western part, so that even without any incentive of politics its speedy settlement was quite a matter of course. But politics North and South enormously aided in that behalf. There was a rush from both sections to fill up and occupy the land in order to control it. From the Missouri border and from farther south slaveholders and the representatives of slavery poured into the territory in great numbers with the purpose of voting it into the Union as a slave state. In the slang of the period these were called "border ruffians." On the other hand there was an "assisted emigration" from the North, the emigration of men whose way was paid in consideration of their votes and their rifle practice against slavery in Kansas. These called themselves "Free State Men" but they were called by their adversaries "Jayhawkers."
In order to promote the emigration of these men to Kansas societies were formed in Massachusetts and other states which not only paid their way but furnished them with rifles of an improved pattern and ammunition in plenty, with the distinct understanding that it was their duty to ply both the bullet and the ballot in aid of the cause they represented.
These two groups of men quickly fell by the ears, as it was intended that they should, and civil war in the strictest sense of that term ensued.
John Brown—an able, adventurous, and fanatical man—took command of the free state forces and between him and his adversaries there was a contest for supremacy which involved every outrage to which civil war, waged by uncivilized man, can give birth. Small battles were fought. Men on either side were shot or hanged without mercy. Homes were desolated. Women and children were driven forth to suffer all the agonies of starvation, of cold, and of homelessness—all in aid of the voting one way or the other.
In our time such a situation in a territory subject to national control would be instantly ended by the sending of troops to the disturbed region with instructions to preserve order, to suppress all manner of lawlessness, and to protect all citizens equally in the enjoyment of the peaceful possession of the land. But in the fifties the government of the United States was still unused to such exercise of its authority—parties were too evenly divided, political feeling was too hot and voters were far too sensitive, to admit of such a treatment of the situation as would in our time seem quite a matter of course. Troops were sent to Kansas, it is true, but in quite insufficient numbers and under inadequate instructions. So the war in Kansas went on and otherwise peaceful citizens of the Union actively aided it upon the one side or the other quite as if it had not been a civil war within the Union and in a territory in which the authority of Congress was supreme beyond even the possibility of question.
At the South companies of armed men were organized, equipped, and sent into Kansas nominally to settle there and vote to make a slave state of the territory, but really, if possible, to drive out every "Free State" man or to overawe or overcome them all, so that the voting might be all one way. At the North similar companies of men were organized and armed and aided to emigrate for the purpose of doing very much the same thing to the representatives of slavery and achieving a contrary result at the ballot box.
Many of the men on both sides were not genuine settlers at all but merely armed bandits engaged in a mission of violence. Yet on both sides they were supported, encouraged, and defended in their lawlessness by the pulpit, the press, and every other agency of civilization.
Elections were held in the territory in which both sides voted their men without question as to their age, the length of their residence within the territory or any other qualification for voting which the loose laws of the time provided. Every devilish device of fraud and swindling that had up to that time been invented by ingeniously unscrupulous politicians was employed on the one side or the other without so much as a qualm of conscience or a scruple of conventionality.
It was war that these men were engaged in and elections were a mere pretense. War habitually has no scruples as to the means it uses for the overcoming of an adversary. On each side men voted who had arrived within the territory just in time for the election, cheerfully perjuring themselves in order to do so, an incident which nobody seemed to regard as a serious matter. Each side voted its men as often as it could under the loose election laws of the time and in some cases that was very often. Ballot boxes were stuffed with fraudulent votes by one side and were seized and destroyed by the other.
Conventions fraudulently chosen by such practices as these framed constitutions which were one after another rejected by Congress.
The story need not be told here in further detail. The struggle continued until the end of the decade and it was not until after the Confederate War had begun that the territory was admitted to the Union as a state. In the meanwhile the eyes and minds of all the people in the country were concentrated upon that center of disturbance and the situation there enormously increased the intensity of that acrimony which already characterized the relations of men North and South.
Another event which tended to increase the acrimony between the two sections of the country and ultimately to bring about war was the rendering of the "Dred Scott" decision, which alarmed and intensely angered the North.
Dred Scott was a negro slave in Missouri, owned by an army surgeon who, about twenty years before, had taken him as a servant to an army post in Illinois. Under the laws of Illinois any slave taken by his master into that state was by that act set free.
Dred Scott remained however in the position of a slave and after a time he was taken back to Missouri. There he was sold to a new master whom he presently sued for assault on the ground that his former master had in effect set him free by voluntarily taking him into a free state, and that therefore he was not liable to sale or to a chastisement at the hands of a master.
The negro won in the lower courts but was defeated upon appeal. Later, circumstances enabled him to bring suit in the United States Court, and finally the case went on appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States. The questions directly and indirectly involved in it were of so great national and political interest that four of the greatest constitutional lawyers in all the land volunteered to argue it—two of them on the one side and two upon the other. The argument was a contest of intellectual giants with the whole country looking on and listening. At the end of it the judgment of the court was rendered by Chief Justice Taney in March, 1857. The decision negatived all of Dred Scott's contentions and it affirmed principles that were even more offensive to Northern sentiment than its negations were. It amounted in fact to a judgment that state laws setting free such slaves as might be brought into the states concerned by voluntary act of their masters were null and void. It expressly declared unconstitutional that part of the Missouri Compromise which forbade slavery in territories north of 36° 30´ north latitude.
So completely did the court decide upon the slavery side of the question that Thomas H. Benton, the great Democratic senator from Missouri, characterized this deliberate and very
