etrayed and deserted him, and that his policy
had saved the Territory from civil war and brought the entire people
together for the first time in a peaceable election.

Indeed the troubles of Kansas were practically ended. The people
rejected the Lecompton constitution and its land grant by a heavy
majority. They framed and ratified a Constitution of their own at
Wyandotte, and came into the Union as a free State when secession had
left the Republicans in full control of Congress in the winter of
1860-1.

The accession of Kansas to the Free States was full of significance. It
was fresh evidence that in the actual settlement of the new country the
inevitable preponderance lay with free labor. Its industrial advantage
could not be overborne by a hostile national administration, nor by the
inroads of aggressive and lawless neighbors. The management of their
affairs by the Free State settlers was a great vindication of the
methods of peace. The guerrilla warfare undertaken by Brown and his
party had won no real advantage. The decisive triumph came from the
habitual self-control of the Free State men, their steady refusal to
resist the Federal authority, and the sympathy they thus won from the
peaceful North, turning at last the scales of Congressional authority in
their favor. Thus far, peace and freedom moved hand in hand.

The tide in the country was running strongly with the Republicans. The
alliance with Douglas failed, because his price was the Senatorship from
Illinois, and the Republicans of that State were "willing to take him on
probation, but not to make him the head of the church." They named
Abraham Lincoln as their candidate for the Senatorship, and these two
men held a series of joint debates which fixed the attention of the
country; with the result that Lincoln won the popular majority, but
Douglas the Legislature and the Senatorship. In the country at large,
the Republicans made such gains, in this election of 1858, that they won
the control of the National House. The Whigs were defunct, the Americans
were a dwindling fraction; the "Constitutional Union" party held a
number who sought peace above all things; but the great mass divided
between the Republicans and the Democrats. Douglas, the most dextrous of
rope-dancers, had regained his place as the foremost man in his old
party. The Republicans held firmly to their constitutional principles;
but the depth of the antagonism of the two industrial systems gr