s repeal of the
Compromise. Against the repeal were Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts,
New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin.
Illinois and New Jersey voted a tie vote. Ohio cast four votes for the
repeal measure, seventeen against it.

This vote brought the territories of Kansas and Nebraska into the Union
with the option open on whether or not they should have slavery: "it
being the true intent and meaning of this act not to legislate slavery
into any territory, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people
thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their own domestic
institutions in their own way."

That was very well; but who were "the people" of these debated grounds?
Hundreds of abolitionists of the North thought it their duty to flock to
Kansas and take up arms. Hundreds of the inhabitants of Missouri thought
it incumbent upon them to run across the line and vote in Kansas on the
"domestic institutions"; and to shoot in Kansas and to burn and ravage
in Kansas. They were met by the anti-slavery legions along the wide
frontier, and brother slew brother for years, one series of more or less
ignoble and dastardly outrages following another in big or little,
murders and arson in big or little, until the whole country at last was
drawn into this matter of the domestic institutions of "bleeding
Kansas." The animosities formed in those days were bitter and enduring
ones, and the more prominent figures on both sides were men marked for
later slaughter. The civil war and the slavery question were fought out
all over the West for ten years, even twenty years after the war was
over. Some large figures came up out of this internecine strife, and
there were many deeds of courage and many romantic adventures; but on
the whole, although the result of all this was for the best, and added
another state to the list unalterably opposed to human slavery, the
story in detail is not a pleasant one, and adds no great glory to either
side. It is a chapter of American history which is very well let alone.

When the railroads came across the Western plains, they brought a man
who has been present on the American frontier ever since the
revolutionary war,--the land boomer. He was in Kentucky in time to rob
poor old Daniel Boone of all the lands he thought he owned. He founded
Marietta, on the Ohio river, on a land steal; and thence, westward, laid
out one town after another. The early settler who came d