In excusing this invasion from Missouri--in attempting to hold on to an advantage obtained by force and fraud--you are setting an example which, in its ultimate consequences, may trample your rights under foot.
John Sherman
The Public Record
John Sherman was an American politician from Ohio who served in federal office throughout the Civil War and into the late nineteenth century. A member of the Republican Party, he served in both houses of the U.S. Congress. He also served as Secretary of the Treasury and Secretary of State. Sherman sought the Republican presidential nomination three times, coming closest in 1888, but was never chosen by the party. Between 1861 and 1897, John Sherman served in the U.S. Senate for nearly 32 years and holds the record for longest serving senator from the state of Ohio.
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You are in a minority and, from the nature of your institutions, your relative power is yearly decreasing.
In the name of southern rights, crimes have been committed, and are being committed, which I know you cannot and do not approve.
The worst evil that could befall our country is civil war, but the outrages in Kansas cannot be continued much longer without producing it.
The contrast of this region between then and now is a marked evidence of the wonderful change that has been made within a single generation.
Thus, when we arrived in Kansas, two rival governments were in existence, one the result of fraud and force, the other confessedly incomplete, being without executive power or recognition.
The legality of this legislature was denied by the great majority of the people who never acquiesced in or obeyed its enactments, thus taking the only course open to them to secure a lawful government.
A more wanton and shameless overthrow of popular rights cannot be found in history.
Not content with voting they made false returns of votes never cast, and excluded legal voters because they were "Abolitionists.
It was the result of an organized invasion from the State of Missouri, a lawless seizure of the conduct of the election, and the open voting by thousands of persons who neither resided in nor pretended to be residents of Kansas.
Their enactments were, by every principle of law and right, null and void.
Had it been observed, a just and fair election would have reflected the will of the people of Kansas.
The excitement which always accompanied the discussion of the slavery question was greatly increased by the hope, on the one hand, of extending slavery into a region from which it had been excluded by law; and, on the other, by a sense of…
The whole country was agitated by the reopening of a controversy which conservative men in different sections believed had been settled in every state and territory by some law beyond the danger of repeal.
The testimony taken by the committee clearly showed that before the proposition to repeal the Missouri Compromise was introduced into Congress, the people of western Missouri were indifferent to the prohibition of slavery in the territory…
Their mutual interests and intercourse, instead of endangering the harmony of the Union, would have strengthened the ties of national brotherhood.
Its climate, its soil, and its easy access to the older settlements, would have made it the favored course for the tide of emigration constantly flowing to the west, and in a brief period it would have been admitted to the Union as a free…
It cannot be doubted that if the free condition of Kansas had been left undisturbed by Congress, that territory would have had a rapid, peaceful, and prosperous settlement.
It forced the irrepressible conflict in the most dangerous form.
It is easy to perceive now that if this had been promptly done the slavery question would have been settled for many years.
I do not propose to continue agitation; I only appear here to demand justice,--to demand compliance with compromises fully agreed upon and declared by law.
And I say now, that until this wrong is righted, until Kansas is admitted as a free state, I cannot act in party association with them.
Nothing less than that will satisfy the country; and if it is not done, as it probably will not be, we will maintain our position of resisting the admission of Kansas as a slave state, under all possible circumstances.
In my reply I repeated my position in respect to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, declaring: "If the repeal was wrong all northern and southern men alike ought to help to reinstate that restriction.
I vote for him simply because he has had the manliness to say here, that, having the power, he will resist the encroachments of slavery, even by opposing the admission of any slave state that may be formed out of the territory north and…
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