The people of Kansas, outraged by the proceedings of the Convention, in large numbers petitioned the Governor to call a special session of the legislature to remedy the wrong. He summoned it to meet December 7th and it at once ordered the whole Constitution submitted to the people on January 4th. The election ordered by the Convention was held on December 21st. The free-State people declined to vote.
"The Constitution with slavery" carried by a vote of 6,143 to 589.
On January 4th the pro-slavery men took part in the election of State officers, but refused to vote on the Constitution, holding that the legislature had no power to submit it. More than ten thousand votes were cast against the Constitution and another set of officers for an imaginary state selected.
The Constitution was sent to Buchanan to be submitted to Congress.
This was the beginning of Douglas' official relation to the affair.
Congress met on the 5th of December. When Douglas reached Washington he called on the President to discuss the program for the winter.
He told him that it would never do to send the Constitution to Congress for approval. It violated the plighted faith of the President and his party. His advice was that it be summarily rejected. Buchanan must submit it and recommend its approval. Douglas told him he would denounce it in the Senate. The President, excited and alarmed, rose from his seat and said, with great solemnity:
"Mr. Douglas, I desire you to remember that no Democrat ever yet differed from an Administration of his own choice without being crushed;" then he bade him beware of the fate of certain noted insurgents in the old Jackson-VanBuren days.
"Mr. President," replied Douglas, "I wish you to remember that General Jackson is dead."On the 8th of December Buchanan transmitted his first message to Congress, which satisfied the world that he had abandoned such faint convictions as he had theretofore had and surrendered unconditionally to the South. He confessed that he had formerly pledged himself that the Constitution should be submitted to a vote of the people.
But he said he had reached the conclusion that the only question upon which it was important to take the popular judgement was that of slavery. This question could not be more clearly or distinctly submitted than it would be under the ordinance of the Convention on December 21st. Should the Constitution without slavery be adopted, it, of course guarded the right of property in all slaves then in the Territory; but that was only common justice.
It was a great day in Washington. As a leading statesman declared, "the Administration had staked their all upon sustaining the Kansas Constitution, * * * * but Douglas was against it, decidedly, but not extravagantly." It was felt that a great storm was brewing, but of so uncertain and mysterious a character that no one knew what to expect. Douglas, who had theretofore scoffed at moral ideas in politics, had turned stern moralist, though still protesting his old cynical indifference, and was declaring inexpiable war on those whose champion he had been on a hundred hard fought fields. And strange to say, the allies with whom he was now to join hands, were Seward and Hale, perhaps even Chase and Sumner.
When the message was read on the 8th, he moved that 15,000 extra copies of it be printed for the use of the Senate and announced his intention to attack that part of it relating to Kansas. The next day when he rose to speak the galleries were thronged with an eager multitude. He congratulated the country that the President had not endorsed the Constitution or recommended its approval, but had only expressed his own satisfaction with it. He patronizingly apologized for Buchanan's error in supposing that the Kansas-Nebraska act provided only for the submission of the slavery question to a vote, recalling the fact that, at the time that act was passed he was representing the country with great wisdom and distinction at a foreign court and had never given the matter serious thought.
They had, in fact, repealed the Missouri Compromise and justified it everywhere on the ground that the people of the Territories had the right to form all their institutions according to their will.
The President's later doctrine was in error, radical, fundamental, subversive of the platform on which he was elected. His suggestion that the Convention, throughout the territorial legislature, had the implied sanction of Congress, was without foundation. The Toombs bill expressly authorizing the calling of a Convention had recently passed the Senate, but was defeated in the House, clearly indicating that Congress disapproved it. The legislature could not give consent for Congress which it had itself refused. The Administration of Jackson solemnly decided in the case of Arkansas that a Territory had no right to hold a Constitutional Convention until Congress passed an act authorizing it. The Lecompton Convention differed from the Topeka Convention only in this; that the latter was called in opposition to the will of the legislature, while the former was sanctioned by it. But that body was utterly without authority in the matter until Congress empowered it to act.
