Congressmen Order Copies of Senator Jacob Collamer's Speech on Bleeding Kansas

KANSAS

Verlag: Washington, D.C., 1856

Beschreibung

Autograph Document Signed, Order for Copies of Speech, ca. April 1856. 1 p., 7 1/2 x 9 1/2 in. Fifteen members of Congress order a total of 3,050 copies of a speech by Senator Collamer. The 29-page pamphlet was entitled Speech of Hon. Jacob Collamer, of Vermont, on Affairs in Kansas, Delivered in the Senate of the United States, April 3 and 4, 1856. Complete Transcript The undersigned agree to take the No. of Copies set to our names of the Speech of Judge Collamer in the Senate on Kansas affairs - to be published at the Globe office at 2 cents per copy.M. W. Tappan 200A. H. Cragin 200C. L. Knapp 200T. T. Flagler 200A Sabin 600Schuyler Colfax 100Will Cumback 50A. Burlingame 100J. U. Pettit 100C C Chaffee 200Abram Wakeman 200Ezra Clark Jr 200Jno A Bingham 100C K Watson 100 Pay, 1.83. BaileyJ. Meacham 500 3050Historical BackgroundIn May 1854, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, opening the new territories for settlement by U.S. citizens. The Act employed the concept of "popular sovereignty" to allow the settlers to vote on the legality of slavery in the territory where they settled. Groups from both North and South sponsored settlers to the new territory of Kansas.In November 1854, thousands of armed proslavery men from Missouri poured into Kansas, swaying the election of a non-voting delegate to Congress. A Congressional investigation the following year found several voting irregularities. Northern antislavery settlers poured into the territory, and on March 30, 1855, Missouri residents again poured into the state to influence the election of delegates to a territorial legislature. Proslavery delegates won 37 of the 39 seats, and Territorial Governor Andrew Reeder invalidated the results in 11 of the races. In a special election on May 22, antislavery candidates won 8 of the 11 seats. When the largely proslavery legislature convened in July 1855, it refused to recognize the special election in May and seated the delegates elected in March. It moved the territorial capital to Shawnee Mission on the Missouri border, adopted a slave code, and passed laws favorable to slaveholders.Antislavery settlers elected delegates to a separate legislature that met in Topeka, which proclaimed itself the legitimate territorial legislature, created the antislavery Topeka Constitution, and elected a different territorial governor. President Franklin Pierce refused to recognize the Topeka legislature and replaced Reeder with a more pro-southern governor.On March 12, 1856, Senator Stephen A Douglas of Illinois from the Committee on Territories presented a very long report on Kansas. Then Jacob Collamer presented a Minority Report.In his speech before the Senate on April 3 and 4, 1856, Collamer insisted that the March 1855 election was invalid because it was heavily influenced by non-settlers, residents of Missouri who traveled to Kansas simply to vote. A three-person special Congressional committee reported in July 1856 that if the election of March 30, 1855, had been limited to "actual settlers," it would have elected an antislavery majority to the territorial legislature, and deemed the legislature that was seated "an illegally constituted body" with "no power to pass valid laws."Excerpts from Collamer's Speech"There are only three places in the Constitution in which, as we now understand the subject, slavery is alluded to at all." (p3)"How will those gentlemen who claim the right to hold slaves in the States under the Constitution get at that right, guaranteed to them, as they say, by the Constitution? Where is it in the Constitution? It certainly is not there." (p4)"I propose to show and insist.that, by the practical, contemporaneous construction of the Constitution, Congress has power over slavery in the Territories, without State limits. Congress has never submitted the question of freedom or slavery to the people of the Territories in any form, to be there operated upon, while they were Territories. (See website for full description). Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 26449

Bibliografische Details

Titel: Congressmen Order Copies of Senator Jacob ...

Verlag: Washington, D.C.

Erscheinungsdatum: 1856

Einband: No binding

Zustand: Very Good

Art des Buches: Autograph Document Signed