Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 3

[468] slave and its increase is the same, and as inviolable, as the right of the owner of any property whatever.

The bill allowed Kansas to enter the Union at once with¹ slavery established, and a land grant was offered as an inducement. Should she obstinately hold out for freedom, she must first have a population of 92,000 before she could be deemed fit for admission. The bribe was promptly spurned and the menace disregarded by the² Territory, which stood erect by more than ten thousand majority

The Slave Power had staked everything on Kansas and had lost. In both sections of the country there was a growing sense of the political revolution in progress, a growing conviction that the Republicans would at the next election take control of the Government. Governor Moore of Alabama, in his inaugural address to the³ Legislature in December, 1857, denounced the Black Republican scheme to stop the extension of slavery—“confining it within the limits of the States where it now exists, so as ultimately to render slaves valueless to their owners, and thus effect their emancipation.” Lib. 28.1. The Legislature unanimously responded by asking him to call a State⁴ Convention if Congress refused to admit Kansas under the Lecompton Constitution. At the so-called Southern Commercial Convention held at Montgomery, Ala., on⁵ May 10, 1858, to discuss the African slave-trade and the relations of the South to the Union, Roger A. Pryor of Virginia could pledge his State to disunion in case a⁶ Black Republican President were installed at Washington with a majority in Congress. Henry W. Hilliard of Alabama agreed that the election of such a President⁷ would result in the subversion of the Government, and that the South would neither wait to see him installed, nor delay for some overt act. William L. Yancey of Alabama, though denying that Republican success at⁸ the next election would constitutionally justify secession, nevertheless held the Union to be already dissolved. He