mmediately our success in convention materially depends
on my getting an immediate copy at Lecompton. My friends here all
regard now the 'Union' as an enemy and encouraging by its neutrality
the fire-eaters not to submit the constitution. Very well, the facts
are so clear that I can get along without the 'Union,' but he had no
right to suppress Dr. Tebbs's letter. I shall in due time expose that
transaction."--Extract from a letter of Robert J. Walker to James
Buchanan, dated October, 1857.

[11] For this autograph letter and other interesting manuscripts, we
are indebted to General Duncan S. Walker, a son of the Governor, now
residing in Washington, D.C.

[12] Under an Act of Congress popularly known as the "English Bill,"
this same Lecompton Constitution was once more voted upon by the
people of Kansas on August 2, 1858, with the following result: for the
proposition, 1788; against it, 11,300.--Wilder, "Annals of Kansas,"
pp. 186-8.

[13] Walker to Cass, Dec. 16, 1857. Senate Ex. Doc. No. 8, 1st Sess.,
35th Cong. Vol. I., pp. 131, 130.

CHAPTER VII

THE REVOLT OF DOUGLAS

The language of President Buchanan's annual message, the summary
dismissal of Acting Governor Stanton, and the resignation of Governor
Walker abruptly transferred the whole Lecompton question from Kansas
to Washington; and even before the people of the Territory had
practically decided it by the respective popular votes of December
21,1857, and January 4,1858, it had become the dominant political
issue in the Thirty-fifth Congress, which convened on December 7,
1857. The attitude of Senator Douglas on the new question claimed
universal attention. The Dred Scott decision, affirming constitutional
sanction and inviolability for slave property in Territories, had
rudely damaged his theory. But we have seen how in his Springfield
speech he ingeniously sought to repair and rehabilitate "popular
sovereignty" by the sophism that a master's abstract constitutional
right to slave property in a Territory was a "barren and a worthless
right unless sustained, protected, and enforced by appropriate police
regulations," which could only be supplied by the local Territorial
Legislatures; and that the people of Kansas thus still possessed the
power of indirect prohibition.

[Sidenote] 1857.

To invent and utter this sophism for home consumption among his
distant constituents on the 12th of June (a few days before the
Lecompton delegates were el