f a cart in Western Missouri, surrounded by a mob of 'border
ruffians' rallying for fresh wrongs upon the free settlers of Kansas,
recited, in coarse glee and brutal triumph, the incidents of his
interview with the senator of Illinois, when, with mixed cajolery and
threats, he partly tempted, partly drove him to his ruin. The
Kansas-Nebraska bill was passed. What part Atchison took, what part
Missouri took, under the direction of the pro-slavery leaders that
filled every department of the State government, the 'border-ruffian'
forays, the pillage of the government arsenal at Liberty, the embargo of
the Missouri river, and the robbing and mobbing of peaceful emigrants
from the free States, the violence at the polls, and the fraudulent
voting that corrupted all the franchises of that afflicted territory, do
sufficiently attest. It is not needed to rehearse any of this painful
and well-known history.

The Territory of Kansas was saved to its prescriptive freedom. The
slavery propagandists sullenly withdrew and gave up the contest. The
last days of the dynasty that had meditated the conquest of the
continent to slave-holding government were evidently at hand. The result
of the struggle in Kansas had reversed the relation of the contesting
powers. The oligarchs, who had always before been aggressive, and
intended to subordinate the Union to slavery, or destroy it, found
themselves suddenly thrown on the defensive; and, with the quick
intelligence of a property interest, and the keen jealousy of class and
caste which their slave-holding had implanted, they saw that they were
engaged in an unequal struggle, that their sceptre was broken, and that,
if they continued to rule, it would have to be over the homogeneous half
of a dismembered Union. From this moment a severance of the Slave
States from the Free was resolved on, and every agency that could
operate on governments, State and National, was set to work. It was not
by accident that Virginia had procured the nomination of the facile
Buchanan for President in the Baltimore Convention of 1856; it was not
by accident that Floyd was made Secretary of War, or that, many months
before any outbreak of rebellion, this arch traitor had well-nigh
stripped the Northern arsenals of arms, and placed them where they would
be 'handy' for insurgents to seize. It was not by accident that John C.
Breckenridge headed the factionists that willfully divided and defeated
the National Democracy,