amazed at
the dangers he had escaped than at the great number of congratulations
now pouring in from opponents. "Was ever anything more curious," he
writes his wife, "than the fact that this result is scarcely more
satisfactory to my truest friends, than, as it seems, to so many
lifelong opponents? We have nothing but salutations and
congratulations here. How strange the mutations of politics."[460]

[Footnote 457: F.W. Seward, _Life of W.H. Seward_, Vol. 2, p. 243.]

[Footnote 458: _Ibid._, p. 251.]

[Footnote 459: _Ibid._, p. 245.]

[Footnote 460: _Ibid._, p. 246.]

After Seward's re-election the Kansas troubles began attracting
attention. Governor Reeder fixed March 30, 1855, for the election of a
territorial legislature, and just before it occurred five thousand
Missourians, "with guns upon their shoulders, revolvers stuffing their
belts, bowie-knives protruding from their boot-tops, and generous
rations of whiskey in their wagons,"[461] marched into the territory
to superintend the voting. This army intimidated such of the election
judges as were not already pro-slavery men; and of six thousand votes,
three-fourths of them were cast by the Missourians in the interest of
slavery. The Northern press recorded the fraud. If further evidence
were needed, Governor Reeder's speech, published in the New York
_Times_ of May 1, in which he declared that the fierce violence and
wild outrages reported by the newspapers were in no wise exaggerated,
set all controversy at rest. Instantly the North was in a ferment. The
predominant sentiment demanded that Kansas should be free, and the
excitement aroused by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was
quickly rekindled when the South approved the murderous methods
intended to make it a slave State. A journal published in the
pro-slavery interest threatened "to lynch and hang, tar and feather,
and drown every white-livered Abolitionist who dares to pollute our
soil," and secret societies, organised for the purpose of keeping out
Northern immigrants, resolved "that we recognise the institution of
slavery as already existing in this territory, and advise
slave-holders to introduce their property as early as possible."

[Footnote 461: Spring's _Kansas_, p. 44; see also, Sara Robinson,
_Kansas_, p. 27.]

As the year went on matters got worse. The territorial legislature,
elected by admitted and wholesale fraud, unseated all free-state
members whose election was contested, and p