mit to a full investigation and exposure of all the atrocities they had committed in the last five-and-twenty years. True, the people were not prepared for such an issue, nor were they in 1861; yet, if they suffered themselves to be bullied into it now as they did, why would not the same routine of operations have served the purpose then?

But "the handwriting was on the wall," and it was clearly foreseen that this was the last expiring effort of Democracy, and that this was the last Democratic President to be elected; and they at once went to work and cleared the deck for action, and from that time to the day of secession the country has been kept in a constant state of turmoil and commotion. It was expedient, if not necessary, to familiarize the public mind to the idea of disunion, as they thought, and it was still more necessary to keep the mind of the South in a frenzied state of excitement on the subject of slavery, and of the injustice, inequality, and wrong of not being permitted to extend it to the territories, from which it had been expressly excluded by the founders of the gov ernment in 1787, and, still more recently, actually excluded by their own legislation in 1820.

THE ATTEMPT TO MAKE KANSAS A SLAVE STATE.

The next step taken by the Southern Democracy was the attempt to force slavery into the Territory of Kansas-for what purpose? it may be asked. It was considerably beyond the slaveholding region of the United States, where neither the soil nor climate were adapted to slave labor, and where the insecurity of the property would have deterred any rational man from carrying his slaves; why, then, were emigrant-aid societies gotten up in the Southern States, private and public subscriptions raised, large appropriations made by the state Legislatures from their public treasuries

to pay the expenses of those from the Slave States, who could be induced, with or without slave property, to settle in Kansas? They never expected nor hoped to make a permanent slave state of Kansas. Why, then, all this management and expenditure? Why, because it was a part of the programme by which the North was to be kept in a violent state of exasperation, and the South in fevered excitement on the subject of "our rights” in the territories, and at the opposition that was made to those rights by the people of the North.

In speaking of the controversies between the two sections on the subject of slavery, if I do not arraign the North as often as I do the South, it is not because I hold them guiltless; very far from it, for they have done a great many things by which they not only entitled themselves to severe censure and rebuke, but to the just punishment of the of fended laws of the United States. such as their occasional opposition to the execution of the Fugitive Slave Law, the passage of their Personal Liberty Bills, etc.; but I do mean to say that for the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which was the proximate and immediate cause of all the troubles now upon the country, and for the evils that have grown out of it, the South is not only particularly, but exclusively and solely to blame; and I say, moreover, as far as the leaders were concerned, it was not done through inadvertence, want of judgment, or by accident, but by design, from a studied and flagitious purpose to produce the very results that have followed; and the attempt since made to shift the responsibility from their own shoulders to those of the Abolitionists, as much belies the truth of history as does the attempt now every where, and by almost every body, made to shift the responsibility of making this war from the shoulders of South Carolina and the other South

ern States to those of Abraham Lincoln, which he had no more agency in making than I had; for he not only found war actually existing when he came into power, but it had been actively carried on for several months during the administration of his predecessor, Mr. Buchanan, without an effort on his part to arrest it, if it was not secretly winked at and encouraged, especially in its earlier stages. Another reason for not having said more of the Northern Abolitionists was, because whatever might have been their personal inclinations and their local action in the states, they were impotent for mischievous legislation, and never originated, or had the power to carry out any of the ruinous measures that culminated in the great catastrophe; all this was the work of Southern agitators and Southern Democracy; and, therefore, I have had less to say of the Abolition party than I otherwise should, believing it to have been created, nursed, and encouraged by designing politicians South for a purpose little suspected by the deluded people upon whom the cheat was put.

But while the South was thus actively engaged in sending off their own people to Kansas that they might adopt a Constitution recognizing slavery, the North was far from being inactive spectators of what was going on; they were also at work, and with every advantage in their favor. In my first letter on the Nebraska Bill in 1854, I said, “The next question is, by which section of the country could this territory be filled up with the greatest facility? The slaveholder of the South is generally a landholder on a larger or smaller scale; he would necessarily require time to sell out his lands, stock, and chattels, while the free laborer of the North packs his carpet-bag at night, buckles his belt around his body, and is off at the first whistle of the locomotive. Thus will he settle the territory and declare it free while

the Southern man is getting ready to start." (For a farther plagiarism of this idea, see General Wise's letter above.) And so it proved to be. It was settled by the surplus population of the North while the South was making haste to get ready.

Finding themselves overpowered by numbers in Kansas, the South-I say the South, because it was done by Southern men, and the Southern members of Congress without exception, as far as I know, unless Mr. Millson, of the Norfolk district, formed an exception, all approved and encouraged it; and the Southern people, with very rare exceptions, participated in the excitement growing out of it; the Southern Democracy, their aiders and abettors, I say resorted to stratagem and trickery to effect what by open and undisguised means they had failed in, and that by a most open, bold, unprincipled, and nefarious swindle, to force upon the people of Kansas a Constitution framed by the representatives of about two thousand persons out of a population of twenty thousand, by which slavery was not only declared to be a perpetual institution, but that no man should be permitted to question it, and affixing high penalties, either of death or imprisonment in the penitentiary, for any who should write, print, or publish or circulate in the territory any book, paper, magazine, pamphlet, or circular containing a denial of the right of persons to hold slaves, etc., etc., with other equally offensive provisions, upon which the people were not permitted to vote, because, as it was openly avowed, it was known they would reject it, but were to have it crammed down their throats as you would cram dough down the throat of a calf to fatten it for market.

I have not the time or space to write out the history of this piece of Democratic handicraft, which excited the disgust and contempt of every man who had any regard for

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the freedom of his own race, or any respect for honesty and fair dealing. Now that the excitement of the occasion has passed off, I know that there are thousands and tens of thousands who, if they would examine this subject and its history fairly, could scarcely be made to believe they had ever permitted themselves to be made participators in, or had lent their active aid to the perpetration of such an iniquity. Yet such was the fact; this was a part and parcel, and but one of the scenes in the great drama that had been put upon the stage by Southern Democracy, the boasted friends and champions of the rights of the people and the rights of the states; and then the people of the South, in the wild excitement of their passions, were made to believe that the resistance offered to this scheme of tyranny, despotism, and fraud by men who had the right to establish their organic law that we claimed for ourselves, was an unconstitutional and unholy war made upon the rights of the South. I quote what I said of it at the time in my Academy of Music speech in 1859.

MR. BOTTS'S SPEECH IN NEW YORK IN 1859.

"They claim to be a State-rights party, and utterly deny that any man can be a friend to the rights of the states who does not attach himself to their Democratic organization.

Well, in the course of my reading and my experience I have known of but few instances in which there has been any attempt on the part of the general government to interfere with or encroach upon the rights of the states; and those few are very striking and very remarkable instances, as well as of transcendant importance, and of very recent date, and have all originated and been sustained by the Democratic party.