e Constitution of the United States.
"Kansas is, at this moment, as much a slave State as Georgia or South
Carolina"! Slavery, then, could be prohibited only by constitutional
provision; and those who desired to do away with slavery would most
speedily compass their ends, if they admitted Kansas at once under
this constitution.

The President's message with the Lecompton constitution was referred
to the Committee on Territories and gave rise to three reports:
Senator Green of Missouri presented the majority report, recommending
the admission of Kansas under this constitution; Senators Collamer and
Wade united on a minority report, leaving Douglas to draft another
expressing his dissent on other grounds.[651] Taken all in all, this
must be regarded as the most satisfactory and convincing of all
Douglas's committee reports. It is strong because it is permeated by
a desire for justice, and reinforced at every point by a consummate
marshalling of evidence. Barely in his career had his conspicuous
qualities as a special pleader been put so unreservedly at the service
of simple justice. He planted himself firmly, at the outset, upon the
incontrovertible fact that there was no satisfactory evidence that the
Lecompton constitution was the act and deed of the people of
Kansas.[652]

It had been argued that, because the Lecompton convention had been
duly constituted, with full power to ordain a constitution and
establish a government, consequently the proceedings of the convention
must be presumed to embody the popular will. Douglas immediately
challenged this assumption. The convention had no more power than the
territorial legislature could confer. By no fair construction of the
Kansas-Nebraska Act could it be assumed that the people of the
Territory were authorized, "at their own will and pleasure, to resolve
themselves into a sovereign power, and to abrogate and annul the
organic act and territorial government established by Congress, and to
ordain a constitution and State government upon their ruins, without
the consent of Congress." Surely, then, a convention which the
territorial legislature called into being could not abrogate or impair
the authority of that territorial government established by Congress.
Hence, he concluded, the Lecompton constitution, formed without the
consent of Congress, must be considered as a memorial or petition,
which Congress may accept or reject. The convention was the creature
of the territ