The statesmen who framed the Compromise of 1850 believed that it was necessary to save the Union and that without it the plantation States would try the remedy of secession. If this should occur, it was believed by many that the States of the Mississippi Valley would of necessity follow the South because of the dominating influence of the Father of Waters as a trade route. Canals had been given up as an economic panacea, and the significance of the through railroads was not appreciated by even the most enthusiastic promoters of the railroad movement.

The Compromise saved the day, and secession was averted until it was too late for it to succeed. But the elder statesmen agreed that another such struggle would wreck the Union, and pledged themselves, after the passage of the measures in the autumn of 1850, not to revive the question of slavery, but to treat it as a settled issue. In his inaugural address the next President, Franklin Pierce, in 1853, gave his unhesitating support to the measures of 1850 and expressed the fervent "hope that the question is at rest.” He spoke, however, to a new political audience, for Webster, Clay, and Calhoun were dead, and Benton had been repudiated by his State. Pierce had behind him a victorious Democratic party, entrenched in both houses of Congress, but it was marshaled by new generals, Jefferson Davis, William H. Marcy, and Stephen A. Douglas. Two of these were in the cabinet; the third was party leader in the Senate.

The only unorganized part of the United States after the Compromise of 1850 was the Indian Country, running from Texas to Canada, and from the Missouri border to the Rockies. So long as it endured, it constituted a barrier which the most hopeful railroad projector could hardly expect to pass, and its significance was fully appreciated by southern leaders who pointed to their own open strip as the obvious route. In the Congress that expired in 1853 the signs indicated that the barrier would not be allowed to stand, in spite of treaties and southern support. The railroad surveys were ordered, the Indian cessions were demanded, and a bill to create a Territory of Nebraska covering most of the Indian Country passed the Senate. In the debates over this, opposition was based upon the good faith which was pledged against it, and the bill failed of enactment. It reappeared in the first session of the new Democratic Administration, accompanied by a report from Douglas of Illinois, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories.

The motive of Senator Douglas in pushing through Congress in 1854 a bill for the territorial organization of the Indian Country has been one of the great moot points in the interpretation of American history. To his surprise and dismay, his measure broke the charmed silence, and let loose all the attack upon slavery that the old leaders had hoped to stifle. Mr. James Ford Rhodes, whose monumental volumes are still, with right, the guide of the student through this period, felt able to assert with confidence, "that the action of the Illinois Senator was a bid for Southern support in the next Democratic convention." And most historians have agreed with Mr. Rhodes. But of recent years Professor Frank H. Hodder, whose diligent research in the history of the West has been done from the angle of a professor in Kansas, has collected much testimony to indicate that Douglas was primarily a railroad statesman. He shows with great plausibility and what approaches proof, that Douglas's leadership was wrapped up in the economic advantage of his adopted State and of his home town, Chicago. The South was averse to further northern territories from which slavery could be excluded and averse also to aiding any northern railroad to the Far West. To get support for a railroad measure out of a Congress in which the Democrats were so strongly entrenched it was necessary to pay a price. And this Douglas unquestionably paid."

As he first brought in his bill in January, 1854, it still provided for a single territory of Nebraska, but he had discovered that in spite of the Missouri Compromise it was not necessary to exclude slavery from it. The principle of the Compromise of 1850, he said in substance, was the right of each territorial community to determine for itself the character of its local institutions. California had come in free because it so desired; Utah and New Mexico had been organized without requirement upon slavery. There were many, moreover, he advised, who doubted whether Congress ever had the right to exclude slavery from any of the territory of the United States. Accordingly, in the spirit of 1850, he urged the creation of Nebraska Territory without a word on slavery.

Within the next few days his ideas grew. Kansas was cut apart from Nebraska, and embraced that part of the former huge territory that fell between the thirty-seventh and fortieth parallels. This was obviously to give a chance for each of the sections

"Frank H. Hodder, "Genesis of the Kansas-Nebraska Act," in Wisconsin State Historical Society Proceedings, 1912; but compare P. O. Ray, The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise (1909).

to gain a State. An amendment was also added to the bill that said in explicit words what Douglas's original measure had said by inference. It declared that the Missouri Compromise was repealed, that there might be no misunderstanding on the subject.

From January until the end of May the battle raged, with the South finding its price and supporting with growing enthusiasm the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. But in the North, instead of gratification that now a means was being found to build a central railroad, a new political party was born to fight the extension of slavery; and even northern Democrats joined in the denunciation of Douglas and his bill. The disturbance was out of all proportion to the expectation; what seems to have been conceived as a piece of log-rolling in order to let the railroads cross the plains became a fight of vital consequence. Its leader did not weaken from the storm he had provoked. Instead he found and developed further reasons to justify his attitude on the Missouri Compromise and convinced his friends that popular sovereignty was a new and great interpretation of the frontier ideal of democracy. He was doubtless not blind to the fact that if he could succeed in getting slavery transferred to the realm of popular sovereignty and out of national politics, there would be an excellent chance for him to lead a united Democratic Party where he would.7

The new Territories of Kansas and Nebraska were created May 30, 1854, and together embraced the whole Indian Country except the part between Texas and the thirty-seventh parallel, which is to-day the State of Oklahoma. A land office was opened, and the sections acquired from the Indians by Manypenny's treaties were thrown open to the preemptioner. But the passions of the debate prevented the territories from being settled in the normal fashion that had recently been witnessed in Iowa and Texas. There was no drift to Kansas or Nebraska until politicians started one by propaganda. North and South the cry was heard against permitting either section to colonize and thus determine the future of the territories. Northern philanthropists gave of their wealth to aid societies to assist able-bodied men to go to Kansas, to make it free. Southern politicians urged the sons of the South to keep it slave. The response to these heated calls came mostly from the north, for persons wealthy enough to have slaves generally took

"From "consent of the governed," through "popular sovereignty," to "self-determination," there has been a marked similarity of teaching among Democratic statesmen. Andrew C. McLaughlin, Lewis Cass (1891).

little part in frontier advance. The southerners contented themselves with riding across the border, en masse from Missouri, to vote a southern ticket on election days. Kansas became "bleeding Kansas" in a few months as partisans of the sections clashed, but the bloodshed was lessened because of the scant number of settlers who came in.8

Pierce, and after him Buchanan, did what Presidents could do to make a slave State out of Kansas. They favored the slave minorities that called themselves the people and disapproved the action of the free settlers, who were the majority. Four governors of the territory were appointed in as many years, in the vain search for a man who could manage Kansas. The factions on the ground made four constitutions in the same period, but were properly balked in their aspirations for immediate statehood, for when the decade came to an end there were only 107,206 people in Kansas; and in Nebraska but 28,841. As a means of settling the slavery question the Kansas-Nebraska Bill was even less than a total failure. It was hardly more important as a means of promoting emigration. But it was a success in removing the barricade of the Indian Country and preparing the way for a railroad to the Pacific.

W. E. Miller, Peopling of Kansas (1906).

CHAPTER XLVII

"PIKE'S PEAK OR BUST!"

THE panic of 1857, like its predecessor twenty years before, separated two waves of migration. Two sharply contrasting types of effort met at this point; and two geographic areas whose common boundary is the line of the Bend of the Missouri, assumed modern form in the successive periods. There was to be in the new era, and in the western region of the plains, little of the gradual growth that was distinctive of the advance of the agricultural frontier from the line of the Proclamation of 1763 to that of the Missouri Bend. This had been a continuous process, without haste and without cessation, until it brought Missouri into the Union in 1821. Then its pressure to the west had stopped for a period of thirty years. Rounding out its conquests north and south, it remained a Mississippi Valley movement. The advance after the panic of 1857 was thus not from a new frontier into a newer, but from and through a community in Missouri and Iowa whose institutions had lost much of the rawness of frontier beginnings and were taking on an aspect of settled prosperity. The country from Lake Michigan to the Missouri was indeed yet chiefly agricultural, but it was becoming mixed with the complex contacts of the railroad age and the first stages of industrial society. Cincinnati and New Orleans, the centers of wealth in the West at the beginning of the century, were now great cities; but their dominance over the Mississippi Valley was being contested by St. Louis and Chicago, the newer growths of the steamboat and railroad ages.

The town of St. Louis was rounding its first century of settlement in the fifties.' In this hundred years it had seen the rise and decline of the Missouri fur trade, the advent of the flatboat migration and the arrival of the river steamers. It had found the reason for its existence in the supply trade of the farming country around it, and in wholesale business which it could command from its strategic position near the head of river commerce. Benton, in his oratorical moments, spoke of fifty thousand miles of navigable

'L. U. Reavis, St. Louis: The Future Great City of the West (1875), possessed an ironical title even at the date of its publication.