Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/121

 they could not have proceeded more cunningly with their task. Their aim has been, as it has seemed, to give the lie to all the principles on which it has been assumed that these institutions rest, and to show that their real object is to subject the many to the government of the few, as the manner is of the nations round about. The thin veil of decent falsehood, under which the caution of earlier time had decorously hid this fact, has been torn aside by the rude intrepidity of assurance which long-continued success had fostered. The problem to be solved being to prove the chief axiom of our political science, that the people have a right to self-government and to the choice of their own institutions, to be a lie, it is worked out in the presence of an admiring world, after this fashion.

The old Ordinance--which set limits to Slavery, and which, as it preceded the Constitution, should in honor and equity be taken as a condition precedent to it, and the later pledge of the South, that this contract should be sacredly kept on the other side of a certain parallel of latitude, having both been infamously violated for the sake of extending the domain of Slavery into regions solemnly dedicated to Liberty, the entire energies of the General Government and of the political party it represented were put forth to crystallize this double lie into the institutions of Kansas, and thus take it out of the category of theory and reduce it into that of fact. The reluctance of the inhabitants of the young Territory went for nothing, and provision was soon effectually made to overcome their resistance. Every form of terrorism, to which tyrants all alike instinctively resort to disarm resistance to their will, was launched at the property, the lives, and the happiness of the defenceless settlers. Hordes of barbarians, as we have said before, from every part of the Southern hive, but especially from the savage tribes of the bordering Missouri, poured themselves over the devoted land. Murder, arson, robbery, every outrage that could be offered to man or woman, waited on their footsteps and stalked abroad with them in their forays against Freedom. When the first steps were to be taken towards the organization of a government, they precipitated themselves upon the Territory in fiercer numbers. They made themselves masters of the polling-places; they drove away by violence and threats the peaceable inhabitants and lawful voters, and by open force and unblushing fraud elected themselves or their creatures the lawgivers of the commonwealth about to be created. So outrageous were the crimes of these miscreants at this and subsequent periods, that even the very creatures of Pierce and Buchanan, chosen especially for their supposed fitness to assist in these villanies, turned away, one after another, sickened at the sight of them, and forfeited forever the favor of their masters by shrinking from an unqualified and unhesitating obedience.

The Constitution, contrived by the wretches thus nefariously clothed in the stolen sovereignty of the true inhabitants of Kansas, of course made Slavery an integral part of the institutions of the State. A code of laws was enacted absolutely without parallel in the history of the world for insolent trampling down of rights and for bloody cruelty of penalties,--laws so abominable as even to call down upon them, from his place in the Senate, the emphatic condemnation of so veteran a soldier in the service of Slavery as General Cass, now Mr. Buchanan's Secretary of State. These Territorial laws, thus infamously vile, thus made in defiance of the well-known will of the great majority of the people of Kansas, Mr. Pierce hastened to recognize as the authentic expression of the mind of the people there, and exerted all the moral and all the physical force of the government to maintain them in their authority. Since that magistrate was kicked aside as no longer available for the uses of Slavery, because of the very infamy he had won in its service, Mr. Buchanan, unlessoned by his fate, has adopted his views and carried out his