i Compromise, and a triumphant slave-power. Its
instant effect was to accelerate in the South the action of the disunion
working forces there, to hurry the inevitable moment when the two
sections would rush together in a death-grapple within or without
Webster's once glorious Union.

Indeed the foes had already closed in a frightful wrestle for the
possession of Kansas. When the National Government adopted the popular
sovereignty doctrine in solution of the Territorial problem between the
two halves of the Union, freedom and slavery thereupon precipitated
their forces upon the debatable land, and, for the first time, the men
of the North and the men of the South came into actual physical
collision in defence of their respective ideas and institutions. The
possession of land is nine points of the law among Anglo-Saxons, and for
this immense advantage both sides flung themselves into Kansas--the
North by means of emigrant aid societies, the South by means of bands of
Border ruffians under the direction of a United States Senator. It was
distinctly understood and ordained in connection with the repeal of the
compromise of 1820, that final possession of the Territories then thrown
open to slave labor should be determined by the people inhabiting the
same. In the contest for peopling Kansas the superior colonizing
resources of the free States was presently made manifest. They, in any
fair contest with ballots, had a majority of the polls, and were,
therefore, able to vote slavery down. Worsted as the South clearly was
in a show of heads, it threw itself back upon fraud and force to decide
the issue in its favor. The cartridge-box took the place of the
ballot-box in bleeding Kansas, and violence and anarchy, as a
consequence, reigned therein for the space of several years.

This is no place to depict those scenes of slave-holding outrages,
supported as they were by a Northern President with Southern principles.
The sight of them rapidly changed the pacific character of the free
States. Many a peace man dropped his peace principles before this bloody
duel between the civilization of the South and that of the North.
Ministers and churches took up collections to send, not Bibles, but
Sharp's rifles to their brethren in Kansas. The South had appealed to
the sword, and the North had sternly accepted the challenge. War was in
the air, and the Northern temper, without there being any general
consciousness of it, was fast mounting t