Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 5.djvu/348

 3i6 THE GRANITE MONTHLY.

have themselves again and again attempted its repeal by the enactment of in- compatible provisions ; and who, by the inevitable reactionary effect of their own violence on the subject, awakened the country to perception of the true constitutional principle of leaving the matter involved to the discretion of the people of the respective existing or incipient states."

Immediately upon the passage of the Nebraska and Kansas act, the settle- ment of Kansas was commenced by people from Missouri and from the north- ern and western states. In the progress of this settlement, disputes and difficulties occurred between the settlers from the free states and those from Missouri, which, in many instances, resulted in disorder and conflict. The acts and events of this period were much exaggerated, and their causes grossly mis- represented at the North. Although no difficulties of the kind had occurred in the settlement of Utah, New Mexico, or Nebraska, which wjre organized under precisely the same provisions as Kansas, yet it was claimed at the North that these difficulties in the case of Kansas, were the natural and inevitable results of the new policy, inviting competition between the people of the two sections in the settlement of the territory, and that they arose out of a spirit of slavery aggres- sion, as it was called, and were occasioned by determined efforts on the part of the people of the Souih to exclude free state settlers by force, and to mike Kansas a slave state, at all hazards. This furnished the fuel for an excited and continuous agitation of the slave question, which was prolonged through this and the next administration, and which was most instrumental in precipitating the bloody conflict between the sections which followed. It is important to understand the facts of this period. To the time of the introduction in the Senate of the Nebraska and Kansas bill, a large part of these territories, which was formerly known as the Platte country, was covered by Indian reservations into which the whites were strictly forbidden to enter. During the pendency of this bill, and but a short time before its passage, treaties were concluded at Washington, with the different tribes of Indians in possession of these reserva- tions, by which large portions of the territories, including some of the best land bordering upon Missouri, were opened for settlement and preemption, for the first time. On April 26, about one month before the passage of the Nebraska and Kansas act, the legislature of Massachusetts granted a charter to certain individuals, under the name of "The Emigrant Aid Company," with a capital of five millions of dollars, '" for the purpose of assisting emigrants to settle in the West," with the provision that '* said capital stock may be invested in real and personal estate, p?-ovided the said corporation shall not hold real estate in this commonwealth to an amount exceeding twenty thousand dollars." A similar corporation, with the same amount of capital, was chartered by the legislature of Connecticut in May of the same year, and another by the legis- lature of Massachusetts in February, 1855, with a capital of one million of dollars. The corporation first chartered as above was at once organized, and in July, 1854, the first company of emigrants was sent out, with instructions as to the lands on which a location should be made. This company was followed by others, and arrangements were made to forward companies every fortnight. This act of the legislature of Massachusetts, and the organization of the com- pany with such a vast capital, created an intense excitement among the people of the part of Missouri bordering upon Kansas. They knew the character of the lands in the territory, and at once entered and preempted some of the best tracts. The fact of this emigration by Missourians was immediately proclaimed through the North, as part of a concerted scheme throughout the South to obtain control of the government of Kansas for the purpose of making it a slave state ; and the anti-slavery orators and newspapers called upon the peo- ple of the Northern states to organize additional emigrant companies, and to

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