stile camps.
Brawls were frequent, and it was clear that very soon, unless the
general government intervened, there would be concerted violence. A
force of several thousand pro-slavery men, encamped on the Wakarusa
River, were threatening Lawrence, the principal Free-Soil town. The
Free-Soil men were in a majority, but their course had been in disregard
of law. The pro-slavery men were in a minority, they had resorted to
violence and fraud, but they had followed the forms of law.

President Pierce, swayed by Jefferson Davis, took the side of slavery.
The House was nearly two months organizing, and then the President sent
in a message to Congress denouncing the Free-Soilers for resisting the
laws. He followed it up with a proclamation, and placed United States
troops at the disposal of the regular territorial government. In March,
Douglas, from his Committee on Territories, made a long report on all
that had occurred. He, too, laid the blame on the emigrant aid
societies. He was against the Topeka constitution, and offered, instead,
a bill providing for the admission of Kansas, so soon as her population
should reach 93,000, which would entitle her to one representative in
Congress, with such constitution as her people might lawfully adopt. The
House, with an anti-slavery majority, was for admitting Kansas at once
with the Topeka constitution. So was the anti-slavery group in the
Senate, now swelled into a strong minority. In the fierce debate that
followed, Douglas had to defend the results, as well as the theory, of
his law. Sumner was the bitterest of his assailants, and their
controversy passed all bounds of parliamentary restraint. In Sumner's
famous speech on the crime against Kansas, Butler, of South Carolina,
was represented as the Don Quixote of slavery, Douglas as its Sancho
Panza, "ready to do all its humiliating offices." The day after that
speech, Lawrence was sacked, and civil war broke out in Kansas. The next
day, Preston Brooks, of South Carolina, assaulted Sumner and beat him
down on the floor of the Senate. Ten days later, the Democratic
convention met at Cincinnati to name a candidate for the presidency.

Douglas had won a good following from the South, but Pierce was the
first choice of the Southerners. They wanted a servant merely, not a
leader, in the White House. But it was no longer a question of the
South's preference alone: it was a question of holding the two or three
Northern States that were