but do not ask us
to submit to wrongs so daring or to frauds so foul!" The marauders took
them at their word, and hewed and hacked them with shameless cruelty;
yet, with a singular forbearance, the friends of freedom did not hastily
resent the outrages with which they had been visited. They loved
freedom, but they loved law too; and they proceeded in a legal and
peaceful spirit to procure the redress of their grievances,--in the
first place by an appeal to Congress, and in the second, by the
organization of a State government of their own. Both of these methods
they had an indisputable right to adopt; for the first is guarantied to
every citizen, even the meanest,--and the second, though informal, was
not illegal, and had, time and again, been sanctioned by the highest
political tribunals of the land.

Congress had dismissed the subject of Territorial Government; and here
it was again, in a more troublesome guise than it had ever before
assumed. The ghost of the murdered Banquo would not down at its bidding.
Nearly the entire session of 1856 was consumed in heated and virulent
debates on Kansas. The House, fresh from the affections of the people,
was disposed to do justice to the sufferers; it confirmed, by the
investigations of its committees, the verity of every complaint, and it
was not willing to allow a trivial technicality to stand in the way of
the great cause of truth and right. But the Senate was dogmatic
and hard,--full of whims, and scruples, and hair-splitting
difficulties,--ever straining at gnats and swallowing camels; of the few
there inclined to bear a manly part, one was overpowered by the club of
a bully, and the others by the despotism of numbers and of party drill.
As for the Executive, it was bound hand and foot to the Slave Power, and
had no option but to let loose its minions, its judges, its sheriffs,
its vagabonds, and its dragoons upon the poor Free-State men, whose only
crime was a refusal to submit to the most outrageous abuses. Their towns
were burned, their presses destroyed, their assemblies dispersed, and
their wives and children brutally insulted. The debauched and imbecile
Governor, who represented the Federal Power, hounded on the miscreants
of the border to the work of destruction, so long as he was able; but he
happily became in the end too weak even for this perfunctory labor; and
he gradually sank into deliquium, till his final withdrawal into
the obscurities whence he had emerged