river available for steamboats, had attracted his attention to the
problem of steering river vessels over shoals.

In 1864, when I was campaigning on the Red River in Louisiana, I noticed
with interest a device that had been put into shape for the purpose of
lifting river steamers over shoals. This device took the form of stilts
which for the smaller vessels (and only the smaller steamers could as a
rule be managed in this way) were fastened on pivots from the upper deck
on the outside of the hull and were worked from the deck with a force of
two or three men at each stilt. The difficulty on the Red River was that
the Rebel sharp-shooters from the banks made the management of the
stilts irregular.

In 1854, Douglas carried through Congress the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. This
bill repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and cancelled also the
provisions of the series of compromises of 1850. Its purpose was to
throw open for settlement and for later organisation as Slave States the
whole territory of the North-west from which, under the Missouri
Compromise, slavery had been excluded. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill not only
threw open a great territory to slavery but re-opened the whole slavery
discussion. The issues that were brought to the front in the discussions
about this bill, and in the still more bitter contests after the passage
of the bill in regard to the admission of Kansas as a Slave State, were
the immediate precursors of the Civil War. The larger causes lay further
back, but the War would have been postponed for an indefinite period if
it had not been for the pressing on the part of the South for the right
to make Slave States throughout the entire territory of the country, and
for the readiness on the part of certain Democratic leaders of the
North, of whom Douglas was the chief, to accept this contention, and
through such expedients to gain, or to retain, political control for the
Democratic party.

In one of the long series of debates in Congress on the question of the
right to take slaves into free territory, a planter from South Carolina
drew an affecting picture of his relations with his old coloured
foster-mother, the "mammy" of the plantation. "Do you tell me," he said,
addressing himself to a Free-soil opponent, "that I, a free American
citizen, am not to be permitted, if I want to go across the Missouri
River, to take with me my whole home circle? Do you say that I must
leave my old 'Mammy' behind in Sout