Our country was approaching that great crisis which appeared in the dreadful aspect of civil wara tremendous conflict between Freedom and Slavery for supremacy in the republic. With the enactmcnt and enforcement of the Fugitive-Slave Law and the virtual repeal of the Missouri Con, promise Act, in the case of Kansas and Nebraska, the important question was forced upon the attention of the whole people of the land, "Shall the domain of our republic be the theatre of all free or all slave labor, with the corresponding civilization of each as a consequence?" The time had come when one or the other of these social systems must prevail in all parts of the land.  Part free and part slave was a condition no longer to be tolerated, for it meant perpetual war. The supporters of the slave system, encouraged by their recent triumphs, had full faith in their ability to win other and more decisive victories and did not permit themselves to doubt their ultimate possession of the field, so they sounded the trumpet for their hosts to rally and prepare for the struggle. Kansas was the chosen field for the preliminary skirmishing. It lay nearest to the settled States; it was bordered on the east by a slave labor State, and it was easy of access from the South. On the surface of society they saw only insignificant ripples of opposition. They began to colonize the Territory; and, flushed with what seemed to be wellassured success, they cast down the gauntlet of defiance at the feet of the friends of free-labor in the nation.
That gauntlet was quickly taken up by their opponents, and champions of freedom seemed to spring from the ground like the harvest from the seed-sowing of dragons teeth. Enterprising men and women swarmed out of New England to people the virgin soil of Kansas with the hardy children of toil.  They were joined by those of other free labor States in the North and West. The then dominant party in the Union were astonished at the sudden uprising, and clearly perceived that the opponents of slavery would speedily outvote its supporters. Combinations were formed under various names, such as "Blue Lodges", "Friends' Society", "Social Band", "Sons of the South", etc., to counteract the efforts of the "Emigrant Aid Society" of Massachusetts, to gain numerical supremacy in Kansas a society which had been organized immediately after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska bill. The supporters of slavery, conscious that their votes could not secure supremacy in Kansas, where the question of slavery or no slavery was to be decided at the ballot box, organized physical force in Missouri to oppose this moral force. Associations were formed in Missouri, whose members were pledged to be ready, at all times, to assist, when called upon by the friends of slavery in Kansas, in removing from that Territory
|
