Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/234

 210 T. W. Davenport. that Kansas, with the aid of Missourians and the official power and patronage of the general government, would be- come a slave State and a barrier to the extension of freedom southward. But both parties to that opinion were in error, and while the Supreme Court might come to the rescue of the South and legalize slavery in all the territories against the wall of their inhabitants, Mr. Douglas could not abandon his squatter sovereignty doctrine without being abandoned by his Northern constituents and losing his seat in the United State Senate— in a word, becoming a political bankrupt. That w^as a dramatic moment when Mr. Seward, standing in his place in the Senate, after the repeal, uttered his accept- ance and prophecy, in these words: "Come on, gentlemen from the South ; we accept your challenge to contest with you for freedom on the soil of Kansas, and may God give the victory to those w^ho are stronger in numbers as they are in right." If the upholders of the peculiar institution had not been blind they would have recognized in this declaration the hand- writing on the wall, and the doom of slavery, for they had taken the question out of the domain of compromise and diplomacy and referred it to a trial between nineteenth cen- tury civilization and the ancient barbarism, between the unprivileged many and the privileged few. They had made an analogous mistake to that of the abolitionists, who put all their .^aith on moral suasion. They, on the contrary, had been living so long wdthout reference to the ten command- ments and the Golden Eule that they had ceased to regard men as actuated by any other than selfish motives; and, indeed, from their long continued success in ruling the North through its appetite for the loaves and fishes, their blunder may not be wondered at. And they expected to have like success in Kansas by means of the Federal patronage and other con- nivance of the general government. But they miscounted; they left out the Puritan, John Brown, who would make slavery hazardous, yea, impossible, and that he was the natural and normal counterpart of the Yankee who would