Page:California Digital Library (IA historyofkansas00hollrich).pdf/11



Kansas has a history which is common with no other State in the Union. The history of Slavery in our country is the history of successive triumphs and continued advances over the will of a majority of our people, until it entered into a hand to hand grapple with Free Labor in Kansas. Here was the battle-field of the combined forces of the “Irrepressible Conflict,” and here the question of supremacy between its opposing elements was finally settled. Slavery triumphed in every Territory where she sought to establish her dominion until she provoked, by tearing down the bulwarks of Plighted Faith, a single-handed contest with Free Labor in the settlement of Kansas, upon the principles of Popular Sovereignty.

To the people of this Territory, aided by friends in the Free States, therefore, belongs the honor of first repelling the advances of Slavery, and of forever destroying its power. Slave propagandists felt this, and hence, when the question was decided in Kansas, they turned in their wrath upon the General Government, which had been to Slavery an indulgent and fostering guardian, to take its life, whereby to rid themselves of its control.

Few have fully comprehended the awful character and extent of the desperate conflict in Kansas. Both