waterqgresham3

The Life Of Walter Q. Gresham
Chapter 3
The Kansas Bill

SQUATTER SOVEREIGNTY - CORRESPONDENCE WITH SALMON P. CHASE
THE ELECTION OF 1854 ATTEMPT TO DEFEAT WILLIAM H. ENGLISH,
DEMOCRATIC MEMBER OF CONGRESS
WALTER Q. GRESHAM ANTI-NEBRASKA
CANDIDATE FOR PROSECUTING ATTORNEY
ASIATIC CHOLERA - " KNOW-NOTHING " RIOTS IN LOUISVILLE

BLOODY MONDAY - GRESHAM ON THE STUMP - HELPS ORGANIZE THE REPUBLICAN PARTY.

Walter Q. Gresham was reviewing his studies preparatory to admission to the bar when the country was thrown into a frenzy by the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. No measure was ever less understood, aroused greater opposition, or was more far reaching in its effects. Today the layman and the publicist seem to be equally ignorant as to what it really was and just how it operated.

January 23, 1854, Senator Stephen A. Douglas, as chairman of the Committee on Territories of the United States Senate, reported his third amended bill to organize the territory west of Missouri and Iowa, the remaining portion of the Louisiana Purchase, into two territories, Kansas and Nebraska, with or without slavery, as the people might desire; because, as the bill declared, Section 8 of the Missouri Compromise, which prohibited slavery north of the line 36° 30', the southern boundary line of Kansas, was "inoperative" in that it was superseded by the Compromise of 1850, which had refused to extend the 360 30' line to the coast; the purpose being, as the bill declared, that "Congress shall neither legislate slavery into any of the territories or States, nor out of the same; but the people shall be left free to regulate their own domestic concerns in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States."

As the bill finally emerged from the committee, Salmon P. Chase, one of the anti-slavery leaders of the United States Senate, and an Independent Democrat, as he styled himself, denounced it as a gross violation of a sacred pledge, and in an address previously prepared and that day started broadcast over the land, called on the anti-slavery people to defeat the purpose "to exclude from a vast unoccupied region immigrants from the Old World and free laborers from our own States, and convert it into a dreary region of despotism, inhabited only by masters and slaves."

The law student at once wrote Senator Chase, which started a correspondence that was kept up for years, and perhaps accounts for the fact that in i860 Gresham was for Chase rather than Mr. Lincoln in the nomination for President.

In the debate that followed, in the Spring of 1854, on the Kansas Nebraska Bill, Senators Chase, Seward, and Sumner, representing the anti-slavery sentiment, and Senators Bell, Huston, and Davis the pro slavery side, the moderates and extremists were no match for Senator Douglas.

From the accepted doctrines that the people of the States were accorded the right to determine their own domestic concerns, Senator Douglas argued the same right should be accorded the people of a territory, and they should begin to exercise that right as soon as the government of the United States intrusted them with a territorial government.

When, later on, the practical operation of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill was what neither the anti-slavery nor the pro slavery people expected, sides were changed. Among the first to see the effect it would have the making of Kansas into a Free State and to give his approval to the principle upon which it was constructed, was Walter Q. Gresham.

By 1856 the extreme pro slavery Secessionists, led by Senator Robert L. Toombs of Georgia, perceived what had become plain to the young lawyer the year before, that the practical workings of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill would make of Kansas a Free State. It was for this reason that W. L. Yancey and the extremists wanted to defeat Douglas's nomination, and especially to repudiate as a party measure the doctrine of "Squatter Sovereignty"

In February, 1861, after the pro slavery men had seceded because Douglas held their party to what Mr. Lincoln called "Squatter Sovereignty," a Republican Congress, Charles Sumner and William H. Seward sitting mute, copied the Kansas-Nebraska Bill verbatim in bills for the organization of the territories of Colorado, Dakota, and Nevada.

In 1883, while Mr. Blaine was writing his " Twenty Years in Congress," I heard him discuss the operation of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill with Mr. Gresham in our library in Washington. If, as Mr. Blaine says in his book, and as he said to my husband, Charles Sumner, Salmon P. Chase, and William H. Seward owed an apology to the memory of Daniel Webster for the maledictions they heaped upon him for his seventh of March speech, which was mainly in support of the proposition of the Compromise of 1850 to make Utah and New Mexico territories with the right to adopt or reject slavery, then it must be admitted, as my husband said to Mr. Blaine, that much of the criticism in the year 1854, and afterwards, of Senator Douglas, was unjust, and that history must, as it will, do him that justice which Mr. Blaine does not accord him.

Senator Douglas could not have been ignorant of the Springville Resolutions and the effect of Congress giving them heed. But he never mentioned them. Disclaiming all sympathy with the bondsman, was the lawyer's way of advancing a principle of government that made for the bondsman's freedom and caused Abraham Lincoln to denounce him as the best Abolitionist of them all. It was inside the ropes and under the Constitution of the United States that Douglas fought.

In 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Bill centered the attention of the people of the second Indiana congressional district on their congressman, William H. English of Lexington, Scott County, who was then serving his second term. When, on May 2, the bill passed the House with many Democratic votes against it, but with "Bill" English and many Whig members from the South for it, an organization at home was started to defeat Mr. English's re-election. In this movement Walter Q. Gresham was particularly active. On August 30, 1854, a convention, which was called "The People's Convention," assembled in New Albany and nominated Thomas C. Slaughter, the senior member of the firm of Slaughter and Gresham, as the Anti-Nebraska candidate for; Congress.

In addition to helping manage the Slaughter campaign, Walter Q. Gresham became the Anti-Nebraska candidate for prosecuting attorney for the Court of Common Pleas in the district composed of the counties of Harrison, Crawford, Orange, and Washington, against T. S. Ganiott. Much of the time Mr. Slaughter was kept out of the contest because of his ill health and on account of the illness and death of his eldest son. Many of his appointments to speak were filled by his young partner and George P. R. Wilson, a Kentuckian who had come at an early date to Harrison County and married a daughter of Spier Spencer, who fell at Tippecanoe while in command of the Harrison County troops at that battle. Except when he was engaged in public affairs Mr. Wilson lived on a large farm in the western part of the county. He had then been a member of the Indiana legislature for ten terms, and in 1845 had failed as a Whig candidate for Congress when pitted against that remarkable man, Robert Dale Owen, who as a Democrat in the midst of the war advanced some of the most important arguments for its prosecution to a finish.

The masses of the Democrats at first looked on the Kansas-Nebraska bill as a violation of the pledge embodied in the Missouri Compromise; but party lines were strong, William H. English was a good campaigner, and the people easily led. The New Albany Ledger, in a leading editorial June 2, 1854, denouncing the bill, concluded as follows:
'' If it is to be organized it ought to be as a free territory. It is a violation of twice-plighted faith for the benefit of a presidential candidate and ought to fail." But on September 16 the same paper said: "When Mr. Slaughter says, 'We denounce the repeal of the Missouri Compromise by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, as a violation of twice pledged faith,' Mr. Slaughter says that for which he has not a particle of reason or shadow of proof.'

In this contest Judge Slaughter, who was a man of singular purity of character, as well as of ability, came nearer defeating Mr. English than ever happened in the long career of the latter gentleman. Two years before, Mr. English's majority was 2,500; that year he led Mr. Slaughter by only 536. Democrats like Thomas A. Hen-dricks, with good majorities behind them, were easily defeated that year. The Anti-Nebraska men had a majority of 11,000 in Indiana. There was an Anti-Nebraska majority returned to the next Congress. Ganiott was elected prosecuting attorney, but young Gresham carried Harrison County by a vote of 1,328 to 1,276, the only candidate who did so on the Anti-Nebraska ticket that year. Notwithstanding the bitterness of the political contest, the acquaintance then formed by young Gresham with William H. English ripened into a friendship that was never afterwards broken. Of all the Democrats that Indiana produced, Mr. English was, in my judgment, the ablest. Less gifted than many others, he surpassed them all in force and practical sense.

The year 1855 was marked by an epidemic of cholera and by the " Know-Nothing' outbreak against the foreigners and the Roman Catholics in Louisville. One morning early in the summer I went to market with my mother, a negro carrying our basket. As we passed along Market Street, where the hacks stood, one of the drivers tumbled from his box. The report at once spread that he was attacked with Asiatic cholera. My mother hastened home and we were all rushed off to Cedar Glade at Corydon. Before this, the disease had made its appearance at many points on the Ohio River. There were many deaths in Louisville and at other places, and it was not until late in the fall that the ravages of the plague were stopped.

The American or Know-Nothing party had prevailed in many of the municipal elections throughout Kentucky in the Spring of 1855. It was equally successful at the State and congressional elections in August of that year. It elected Governor Moorehead and a majority of the members of Congress. Being a foreigner by birth, my father's opposition to it was somewhat akin to its proscriptive nature. He went from Corydon to Louisville to vote against it at the August election, but the Know-Nothings carried the day, which has gone into history as "Bloody Monday." In Louisville there were riots in which a score of men were killed and many more wounded.

Fortunately my father returned to Corydon before the news of the riots reached us. The commotion which these events created in a household such as ours can better be imagined than told. For a time we were more frightened at the word " Know-Nothing " than at the mention of the Abolitionists. The impression produced on my father was never effaced. The riots were described with great detail, and we were told how George D. Prentice and Lovell H. Rousseau saved the Irish from a general massacre and the Catholic Cathedral from destruction by fire. My father had always subscribed for the Journal, which George D. Prentice had established years before as the Whig organ but primarily in the interests of Henry Clay. When he went over to the Democracy because of the Know-Nothing craze, my father changed newspapers, stopped the Journal and took the Courier, the Democratic organ. But after "Bloody Monday," although the Courier continued to be my father's paper, the Journal was invariably delivered at the house and read by him, though there was much in the charge of the Courier that it was Prentice's intemperate editorials before and on the day of the election that had brought about "Bloody Monday."

Following the excitement over the Know-Nothing riots in Louisville, there was the greatest interest in Harrison County, Indiana, over a local election, which brought home not only to every voter but to every man, woman, and child the Kansas-Nebraska trouble. In correspondence with the young lawyer, Salmon P. Chase repeated the advice he had urged upon the people of the United States in the debates in the Senate the year before, that they manifest in every concrete form possible their opposition to the plan, as he claimed, of the Kansas-Nebraska bill to make Kansas a Free State.

July i, 1855, the county commissioners of Harrison County ordered a special election to be held on the 15th of October following, to fill vacancies in the offices of the county clerk, county treasurer, and county commissioner. Here was an opportunity for the young lawyer. Walter Q. Gresham did not want the office of county clerk, as it would take him out of the practice of his profession, but as a candidate for that office he would have an opportunity to organize and advance the ideas of the men of the Anti-Nebraska sentiment. He accepted the nomination on the Anti-Nebraska ticket for clerk, with Hamilton Tressewxiter for treasurer, and Reuben W. Reynolds for commissioner.

The Democrats presented as their candidate for county clerk, William H. McMahon, a worthy man. They nominated Samuel Douglass for treasurer and Jacob Tense for commissioner. Mr. McMahon had been chief deputy clerk for years, and as such had managed the office to the satisfaction of everybody. He was a deservedly popular man, but did not pretend to be a public speaker. So the young lawyer challenged the Democrat lawyers to a joint debate to discuss the Kansas-Nebraska bill. They appointed Simeon K. Wolf, an ex-Whig and afterwards a Democratic member of Congress, to meet him. They had a joint debate in the public square in Corydon, and then met in every schoolhouse in the county.

George P. R. Wilson could not be induced to join the new political organization (it was not yet the Republican party and the name "Republican" was not heard that year in Harrison County), but he volunteered to take the stump for his young friend and against his old enemy, the Democracy. He would not forgive the Abolitionists for their denunciation of his idol, Henry Clay; but he approved of all the denunciation the Abolitionists could heap on the Democratic organization. Even in 1856 Mr. Wilson was still so inoculated with the virus of slavery that he refused to join the Republicans, and voted for Fillmore, the Know-Nothing candidate for President. He died in 1857.

Great meetings were held in the woods, and the old and the young man addressed them. Mr. Wilson is said to have surpassed any of his previous efforts. As one enthusiast said, who had frequently heard Mr. Clay speak, he equaled Mr. Clay when the latter was at his best. The aid Mr. Wilson thus rendered (and it was the only aid he received on the stump in that contest) the young man never forgot. Forty years later, out of a list of eligible, he induced President Cleveland to advance one of George P. R. Wilson's sons, a regular army officer in every way qualified, when General Scofield, then in command of the army, urged the promotion of another officer.

In his address, after reviewing all the historical and legal objections to the system of African slavery that had come to him from his Virginia and Kentucky ancestors, the young man claimed that the discussion had been opened by the Kansas-Nebraska bill on the theory that it had been necessary by the Compromise of 1850 to repeal the Missouri Compromise, and that hence he was free to discuss and criticize those provisions of the Compromise of 1850, namely, those sections of the Fugitive Slave Law which bore so harshly on the alleged fugitive and had no regard for the sensibilities of those who thought slavery immoral and wrong. He would accord to the master all his constitutional rights. State laws that interposed obstacles to the master's recovering his runaway slave were unconstitutional and wrong and should be repealed, but the fugitive slave provision of the Constitution of the United States did not contemplate that Congress should offer a cheap bribe to a judicial officer of the United States, either to do or fail to do his duty, five dollars to a United States commissioner when he set the black free but ten dollars when he certified him into slavery. Neither did the framers of the Constitution expect that the United States marshal would make every man, regardless of his feelings, a "nigger catcher."

" If the negro was the same kind of property as a horse, why was there not in the Federal Constitution some provision for the reclamation of runaway horses ?" he asked. The constitutional provision and the law of Congress to enforce that " personal service" conclusively demonstrated there could be "no such thing as property in man."

He further argued that while the Kansas-Nebraska bill had not been passed in good faith, now that it operated contrary to the expectations of its author and his cohorts, it was not being; and would not be enforced in good faith by the National administration, dominated as it was by the slave power. He stated that only the preceding March President Pierce had removed Governor Reeder, the first governor of Kansas and the man he (Pierce) had appointed under the Kansas-Nebraska act, because Reeder had set aside the first election in Kansas for the reason that many of the actual settlers of Kansas, anti-slavery men, had been driven from the polls before they could vote, by border ruffians from Missouri, who stuffed the ballot boxes and then returned home. Mr. Gresham said: "I opposed the Kansas-Nebraska bill, but now that I see how it operates, I am for it. . . The only way, my good honest Democratic friends of warm and generous anti-slavery sentiments, to free the Democratic organization from the control of the slave power, is to vote it out of office."

In addition to the challenge to the Democratic lawyers, an offer was kept up to meet all comers in joint debate. John Mathes, an auctioneer and a local celebrity, who had been a member of the legislature and began all his speeches with the statement, "I have voted for every Democratic candidate for President from Andy Jackson down," named Lowden's schoolhouse in Spencer Township as the place where he would like "to trim the young sapling." Of that Lowden schoolhouse debate Walter Q. Gresham never heard the last. In his native township, Franklin, and in Spencer Township, there were many Germans, but, contrary to the usual rule, these Germans were pro slavery in their views. Taking these views as a text, the Germans were severely arraigned for fleeing from absolutism and persecution in their native land, only to side with it or the slave power in this. He jarred a few of them from their prejudices, but not many. Invective and denunciation sometimes shames a man into abandoning a position he cannot be reasoned out of. It was a weapon which Gresham knew how to use and did use in private as well as in public. Growing out of the fierceness of this debate, the story was fabricated and embodied in an affidavit and spread broadcast that the young man had said: "It was not necessary that the American or Know-Nothing party should ask me to join their ranks, as I have an American heart. I grew up in the town of Lanesville, where it was almost impossible for the Americans to get to the polls because of the presence of dirty, long-eared Dutch. They are paupers and criminals.

The penitentiaries, jails, and poorhouses of the old country were emptied, and that is how they came here."

Although he denied having at any time uttered such sentiments, the fact that he did not deny that he had joined a Know-Nothing lodge before he was a voter was cited as evidence that he had used these identical words. Debarred from the Whig party because of its pro slavery tendencies, he said, he joined the Know-Nothings, but as soon as he learned that party's narrowness and prescriptive nature, he at once abandoned it. Unlike many men who were afterwards prominent, he never denied that he had been a member of that organization.

When the votes were counted, Walter Q. Gresham was defeated by a vote of 1,447 to 1,340 But he received more votes than any of his associates. Almost everywhere else, except in Ohio, where Salmon P. Chase was elected governor by a fusion, there was a lessening of the vote in opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska bill. The increase in the number of votes cast over the year before, when the excitement was great and a State ticket and a congressman were to be elected, shows the interest that, without the aid of a newspaper, had been aroused in the public mind. It also satisfied Mr. Gresham, as he afterwards repeatedly said, as to the response the people of his native county, although largely settlers or descendants of settlers from Slave States, would make when they were finally satisfied of the deception, as he claimed, that was being practiced on them. It also convinced him of the correctness of the proposition that the people could be trusted to rule themselves, and that on all domestic and local questions they and their local tribunals should be followed by the National courts. It was a principle he afterwards strictly adhered to when on the Federal bench.

My father scrutinized closely all the young men who paid attention to his daughters. He disliked the anti-slavery views of the young man who was attentive to me. As did all men of foreign birth, he particularly disliked the American or Know-Nothing party. With him it was "Once a Know-Nothing, always a Know-Nothing." Before the subject of marriage was mentioned, my father told me he did not like the political principles of my youthful admirer; he rated him both an Abolitionist and a Know-Nothing, and he said that while there was no possible objection to him as a man of character, he could not encourage his suit. Meanwhile my mother had died, but in my grandmother my husband-to-be had a warm advocate and admirer.

The school years of 1855-56 and 1856-57, I was in school in Corydon, Louisville, and at the boarding school at Bardstown, Kentucky. All the girls at Bardstown were from Southern families, and my sisters and I were regarded as such. They considered it "awful' that I had an Abolitionist for a sweetheart. One day Mrs. Crosby, the wife of the principal of the school, sent for me and gave me a small package she had just received for me through the mail. It was opened in her presence. It satisfied her when I said, "How glad I am to get Cousin Walter's picture."

Lucy Brown, of Georgetown, Kentucky, was a special friend of my sister Lyde. Frequently on Fridays Lyde would go home with Lucy to stay over Sunday. Lucy's brother George often brought them back to school. Sue Simmons, one of my special friends, lived a few miles from Bardstown. I often went home with her for Saturday and Sunday. There was a large family of the Simmons; among them were two brothers, George and Reese Simmons. Later on I will tell you how I met George Simmons and George Brown as Confederate officers commanding the advance guard of the Morgan raids through Indiana and Ohio. The Simmons family had a large farm and many slaves. One of our amusements there was to get one of the old darkies to start his fiddle and see the little pickaninnies come out of the cabins in swarms and dance.

One of my intimates and a part of the time my roommate was a bright, charming girl named Carrie Taylor. Her mother, a widow, was a wealthy woman living just south of Louisville. We frequently visited each other. On one of my visits to the Taylors, I met Zeb Harney, the young man Carrie subsequently married. His father, Major Harney, was the editor and proprietor of the Louisville Democrat. Through my friendship for the Taylors and the Harneys, I induced my father to subscribe for the Louisville Democrat. Afterwards the war wrought havoc with the Taylor estate and the Democrat.

The distinction of that time between the simple anti-slavery man, the Republican-to-be, and the Abolitionist, was not beyond the understanding of a young woman who at least wanted to see the difference, if there was one. Besides, in a household that was pro slavery, with sisters both older and younger who were given to criticizing and ridiculing in the privacy of the home every young man who showed any one of us special attention, I was forced to learn the distinction between a Republican and an Abolitionist. But this vast difference the pro slavery people of the South did not understand; and the anti-slavery people of the North never seemed fully to realize it. The Abolitionists were careful to keep up the delusion in the Southern mind. They purposely compromised every Northern leader in the eyes of the Southern people. Southern girls could not understand that a Republican or a simple anti-slavery man was not an Abolitionist. With them there were only two classes pro slavery men and Abolitionists. The horror the Abolitionists excited in the minds of Southern women has never been appreciated by the Northern people, especially by the Northern historians.

The first platform of the Republican party was based on the Declaration of Independence, the maintenance of which it declared was necessary to preserve the Constitution of the United States. In the light of these principles the Constitution should be interpreted. It declared that all the territory of the United States should be free, and demanded the admission of Kansas at once as a Free State. But it disclaimed any purpose to interfere with the domestic institutions of any of the States. By bringing Kansas and other Free States into the Union, the Republicans, at least those Republicans with whom I was closely associated believed slavery would be so restricted that public sentiment would, without violence or bloodshed, bring about in time abolition, but with compensation to the slave owner. On the other hand, the Abolitionists' platform was Immediate and unconditional abolition." They claimed that fairness and good faith precluded the interpretation of the Constitution in the light of the Declaration of Independence, for the fathers who drew the Constitution intended it should be a pro slavery instrument. But because it was immoral they would not obey it.

Prior to 1856 there was no political organization in southern Indiana under the name Republican. The Republican party was organized as a National party at a conference held at Pittsburgh, February 22, 1856. Slaughter and Gresham aided in sending a representative to this conference, and Mr. Slaughter was made one of the delegates from the second Indiana congressional district to the first National Republican Convention that met at Philadelphia, pursuant to the Pittsburgh call, and nominated Fremont and Dayton. The junior member of the firm went on the stump that year for "the Pathfinder," as Fremont was called.

An incident that happened during this campaign marked the first meeting of Walter Q. Gresham and Oliver P. Morton, afterwards Indiana's "War Governor," and explains why Mr. Gresham never deferred to Mr. Morton as did many men, although he rated Mr. Morton's intellect as the strongest that had appeared in the Senate since Mr. Webster's time. Up to 1854 Oliver P. Morton was a Democrat, but in 1856 he and Conrad Baker were the Republican candidates for governor and lieutenant governor of Indiana against Ashbel P. Willard and David Turpie, the Democratic candidates.

When Mr. Morton came to southern Indiana campaigning, a large crowd assembled in a grove near Corydon early in the afternoon to hear him speak. While Godlove S. Orth was making his address, according to the program, and before it was Mr. Morton's turn to speak, Mr. Willard appeared in front of the stand, interrupted Mr. Orth, and said he was there for the purpose of discussing the public questions of the day with Mr. Morton, and desired to know if he could be accommodated. Mr. Morton stated that he and Mr. Willard had been unable to make arrangements for a meeting, and that he could not then enter into a joint discussion with Mr. Willard, as other gentlemen had been advertised to speak with him. Mr. Willard then turned to the crowd and said that all who wished to hear him speak should go to the court house. More than half of those present followed him. Mr. Gresham was on the platform at the time, and immediately on the conclusion of the meeting told Mr. Morton that under no conditions and on no pretext could he afford to avoid meeting Willard, that rather than that he should retire from the stump, and that in southern Indiana he should be as aggressive in opposition to slavery as he was among the Quakers of Wayne County. Morton acquiesced, met Willard at Leavenworth the next day, and followed up that meeting with joint discussions at other points. With Conrad Baker the young lawyer canvassed the district, and the friendship then formed was never broken. But it was different with Oliver P. Morton.

In the Cincinnati Convention of 1856, by reason of the two thirds rule, Douglas was defeated for the nomination, but with a majority of the convention behind him, he first wrote the platform in which he pledged his party and its candidate to the principles of his Kansas-Nebraska bill, and nonintervention by Congress with slavery in State and territory. Then James Buchanan, who had been, during all the Kansas-Nebraska trouble up to that time, the American minister at the Court of St. James, was made the Democratic candidate for the Presidency. He was acceptable to the Douglas Democrat and the extreme pro slavery Democrat alike, because he had no record, and although John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky was named for the Vice-Presidency, George D. Prentice and his Journal delivered Kentucky's electoral vote to Fillmore and Donelson, the Know-Nothing candidates.

The pledges that Senator Douglas made in his speeches throughout the country that his party and its candidates would honestly and in good faith stand by the Kansas, Nebraska Bill, that is, that they would admit Kansas as a Free or Slave State as the people of Kansas might determine, held in line enough Democrats of free soil tendencies to elect Buchanan. Willard was elected governor of Indiana by 6,000 majority. William H. English, who pledged himself to the principles of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, was re-elected to Congress by a majority of 2,650 over his opponent, John C. Wilson, of New Albany. Many men that year, both North and South, masqueraded behind the American or Know-Nothing party, which presented Millard Fill-more, of New York, and Andrew J. Donelson, of Tennessee. The popular vote was for Fillmore, 974,536; for Fremont, 1,341,264; for Buchanan, 1,838,169. In Kentucky, Fremont received but 386 votes.

Four years later, when Douglas again wrote the platform, the Yancey crowd, in the meanwhile permeated with Prentice's ideas against the squatters, bolted.

Chapter Two

Chapter Four