Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/680

 regulate their own social institutions, without foreign or domestic molestation. Interference, on the one hand, to procure the abolition or prohibition of slave-labor in the territory, has produced mischievous interference on the other for its maintenance or introduction. One wrong begets another. Statements entirely unfounded or grossly exaggerated, concerning events within the territory, are sedulously diffused through remote states to feed the Same of sectional animosity there; and the agitators there exert themselves indefatigably in return to encourage and stimulate strife within the territory.

The inflammatory agitation, of which the present is but a part, has for twenty years produced nothing save unmitigated evil, north and south. But for it the character of the domestic institutions of the future new state would have been a matter of too little interest to the inhabitants of the contiguous states, personally or collectively, to produce among them any political, emotion. Climate, soil, production, hopes of rapid advancement, and the pursuit of happiness on the part of settlers themselves, with good wishes but with no interference from without, would have quietly determined the question which is at this time of such disturbing character.

But we are constrained to turn our attention to the circumstances of embarrassment as they now exist. It is the duty of the people of Kansas to discountenance every act or purpose of resistance to its laws. Above all, the emergency appeals to the citizens of the states and especially of those contiguous to the territory, neither by intervention of non-residents in elections, nor by unauthorized military force, to attempt to encroach upon or usurp the authority of the inhabitants of the territory.

No citizen of our country should permit himself to forget that he is a part of its government, and entitled to be heard in the determination of its policy and its measures; and that, therefore, the highest considerations of personal honor and patriotism require him to maintain, by whatever of power or influence he may possess, the integrity of the laws of the republic.

Entertaining these views, it will be my imperative duty to exert the whole power of the federal executive to support public order in the territory; to vindicate its laws, whether federal or local, against all attempts of organized resistance; and so to protect its people in the establishment of their own institutions, undisturbed by encroachment from without, and in the full enjoyment of the rights of self-government assured to them by the constitution and the organic act of congress.

Although serious and threatening disturbances in the territory of Kansas, announced to me by the governor, in December last, were speedily quieted without the effusion of blood, and in a satisfactory manner, there is, I regret to say, reason to apprehend that disorders will continue to occur there, with increasing tendency to violence, until some decisive measures be taken to dispose of the question itself which constitutes the inducement or occasion of internal agitation and of external interference.

This, it seems to me, can best be accomplished by providing that, when the inhabitants of Kansas may desire it, and shall be of sufficient numbers to