The tide of Northern emigration was stimulated as a result of all this stress, while help for the slaveholders of western Missouri diminished gradually.Īt the time Kansas territory was opened for settlement the people of western Missouri, where slave sentiment was exceedingly strong, took possession of the most favorable locations along the west bank of the Missouri on the border where their towns mostly came to be situated. He wanted to be impartial, but such a policy quickly offended the Proslavery Democrats who owned the legislative and judicial departments of the territory, so his tenure was brief. In time a measure of peace came to Kansas with a new governor, John W. Guerrilla warfare resulted in the territory, while the country seethed with the partisanship of a presidential election campaign. The grand jury at Lecompton had indicted Free-State leaders for treason following a doctrine newly devised by Judge Lecompte, and some of them had been arrested and confined, awaiting a trial that never was held. Donalson had pillaged the Free-State settlement of Lawrence. A mob led by Sheriff Samuel Jones of Westport and U. In Kansas the "Bogus" legislature had purged its Free-State members and had enacted a more rigorous slave code than existed in the many Southern slave states. Shipments to Kansas were searched for arms and all found were confiscated.
The people and officialdom of western Missouri had erected a virtual embargo on Free-State emigration through that state as many travelers were turned back and subjected to indignity.
The national administration of Franklin Pierce had approved the election frauds in Kansas, denounced all opposition as "revolutionary," and was completely dominated by the Southern radicals of the Democratic party. QUINDARO WAS CONCEIVED during the darkest hour of the Free-State cause in Kansas territory, and like the night-blooming cereus, the town flowered only in the nocturnal gloom of antislavery hopes, for in the fall of 1856 the proslavery program of acquiring Kansas seemed headed for success.
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