CHAPTER XXV

PERMANENT OCCUPATION

The Free Soil issue. Kansas and Nebraska.

Distribution of

public lands. Louisiana in the Civil War. A glance at later development. Political and economic consequence of the old Louisiana Purchase.

The purchase of Louisiana was opposed by the New England Federalists. Half a century later their descendants were laboring to secure a result which would mean a political alliance with upper Louisiana. In the long struggle between the slaveholding and the free states the part of the Louisiana territory was one of supreme consequence.

By the act known as the Missouri Compromise, passed in 1820, Missouri was admitted into the Union as a slave state, but it was provided that there was to be no slavery in any portion of the Louisiana territory north of latitude 36° 30' except in the state of Missouri.

But by the middle of the century the westward movement of settlement reopened an issue which for a time had remained comparatively quiescent. In 1853, under the administration of President Pierce, it became clear that a new territory should be organized west of Iowa and Missouri, which would be within the Purchase. The North had believed the question of the extension of slavery into the Purchase settled by the Missouri Compromise. The South was fresh from the defeat of the "Wilmot Proviso," a bill forbidding slavery within the territory acquired from Mexico, and the representatives of the South were stimulated by the profits of slave labor on new land.1 They were unwilling to see slave labor definitely excluded, but it was a senator from Illinois, Stephen A. Douglas, who introduced a bill providing for the admission of two territories, Kansas and Nebraska, and

1 The influence of the cotton gin in cheapening production and the large returns from cotton raising by slave labor were obviously important political factors throughout this long struggle, and yet in the long run slavery was more expensive than freedom a fact generally conceded now.

repealing the restriction upon slavery contained in the Missouri Compromise. Douglas argued that the Compromise had been superseded by the legislation of 1850, passed primarily with reference to the territory acquired from Texas, which declared a policy of "nonintervention"; that is, that new territories should be admitted without any regulation regarding slavery. In other words, they were to decide the question for themselves; and this idea, which was termed "popular"— and later "squatter"-" sovereignty," was embodied in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of May, 1854.

Out of this sprang a bitter struggle for control. It was a question on either side of the greater number of settlers. In Massachusetts, where men were not content with protests, there was organized an Emigrant Aid Society, and there were similar leagues in other northern states. The antislavery men strained. every nerve to send settlers of their own party to Kansas, and with the coming of open strife the shipment of Bibles and rifles became a watchword of the times. Proslavery

emigrants were sent from the South, and the Southern cause was aided from Missouri. The first election in 1854 was gained by the proslavery men. There followed the period of anarchy and civil war which made the name of "Bleeding Kansas" known throughout the land. But by 1858 the free-state men were in control, although Southern influence in Congress made it impossible for a time to gain admission as a state with a constitution forbidding slavery. Nebraska, lying farther removed from the slave states, and rendered. less important for a time by the preoccupation of settlers with the territory to her east, escaped the battle for free soil in upper Louisiana of which Kansas bore the shock.

This was but one of a series of events which stimulated the occupation of upper Louisiana. The California gold seekers, and others who

1 It is unnecessary to give references to the voluminous literature of the slavery question which is readily accessible. For the part which concerns this history, however, the reader will find it useful to consult "Kansas," by Leverett W. Spring, a volume in the American Commonwealth Series.

rushed to Pike's Peak in the fifties to find disaster instead of treasure, had passed by farming lands which were to enrich future owners by producing the food of America and of foreign. lands. With convalescence from the California gold fever came appreciation of the farming lands of the middle West. While the battle for Kansas was in progress, a tide of immigration was sweeping into Iowa, which was presently felt in Nebraska and in Kansas as well. A telegraph line was built at Leavenworth in 1858, and two years more brought the opening of the first railroad in Kansas. To the north the development of Minnesota brought about her admission as a state in 1858. On the eastward, at least, upper Louisiana was developing its definite and permanent organization.

The vital importance of control of the Mississippi, which the history of the Louisiana. Purchase illustrates so constantly, was shown again in the Civil War. Of the states formed within the Louisiana Purchase, Louisiana and Arkansas seceded from the Union. Missouri for a time seemed doubtful. Her decision