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The President’s Kansas Proclamation—The Ohio Abolitionists Reduce Him to Action
The Kansas proclamation of President Pierce (of which we gave the substance yesterday, and which we publish at length this morning,) is a decidedly interesting document. Without doing any serious violence to the moral courage and independence of the administration, we dare say that we are indebted for the definite position which Mr. Pierce has at length assumed in this business, to the startling message of Governor Chase to the Ohio Legislature, and the concurrent proceedings in that body in behalf of civil war and disunion. We have already given our readers this belligerent, fanatical and disunion message of Governor Chase, which, with the extract we re-publish this morning from one of our Ohio cotemporaries, very clearly shows that the issue at length presented to Mr. Pierce was positive intervention or civil war.
The proclamation before us satisfies us that it was not ignorance of his duty in the promises to which we should attribute the apparent indifference of our executive heretofore to these border troubles. Oh! no! Mr. Pierce seems to understand very well, when driven to the wall, that he has taken an oath to support the constitution, and that the “the laws are faithfully executed.” The Kansas-Nebraska bill leaves the question of slavery or no slavery in the Territory to the people thereof. Immediately after the passage of the act the abolition propaganda of the North proceeded to organize joint stock societies for the “deliverance of Kansas from the slave oligarchy.” Armed bands of abolition emigrants were thus raised and dispatched to the seat of war, for the purpose of holding the Territory, to the utter exclusion of Southern emigrants with their slave property. The slaveholding people of the border counties of Missouri became alarmed for their future safety with this ingathering of active armed abolitionists upon the flank. They resolved to meet force by force, and proceeded accordingly to action. It is needless to recapitulate the well known details of the subsequent doings between the abolition expeditionists and the so-called “border ruffians.” It is enough to know that between them the popular sovereignty doctrine of the Kansas-Nebraska bill has been little better than a mockery and a delusion—that the law has not been “faithfully executed,” and that the President, for reasons best known to himself, has waived his prerogative and his duty of enforcing the law upon all parties concerned, until the abolition Governor of Ohio takes the field in open defiance and contempt of the powers at Washington.
As the matter now stands, there are two Territorial governments in Kansas—the government under the Kansas act, of which Wilson Shannon is the local executive chief, and the abolition propaganda government, of which General Lane and the so-called Governor Robinson, under the pretence of a new constitution, are the principals. The first government, it is charged by the adverse party, is a government of the Missouri “border ruffians;” and the second has been undeniably organized in contempt of the orgain Territorial law, and of the authority reserved in the law, to the general government of the Union, including his Excellency the President of the United States. It is in the midst of this condition of things, and with the hazards impending of an abolition filibustering descent upon Kansas, under the authority of the Governor and Legislature of Ohio—to say nothing of Governor Clark and the Seward legion at Albany—that President Pierce issues his marvelous proclamation. It is at this juncture that he admonishes all classes of filibusters, within and without the Territory that he intends to enforce the observance of the law—that is, to see that the law is “faithfully executed.” Why wait all this time? Why permit these border troubles to go on from bad to worse, inflaming throughout the Union a spirit of sectional discord, enmity and strife, until brought to the verge of a general rupture? Was it not easy to foresee what must inevitably follow those initiative abolition emigration movements to Kansas— or, with the first outbreaks between these fanatical adventures and the Missouri borderers, was it not manifest that it would be the worst of expedients to sit still and leave the evil cure itself? It strikes is that has we the one term principle established as the law of the Presidency there would have been smooth and peaceful work in the settlement of Kansas, and in the legitimate determination of the law if popular of sovereignty. Mr. Pierce has had that difficult take to do in reference to a renomination, of carrying water upon both shoulders without wetting himself upon either side. After a thorough drenching from the experiment, he makes a virtue of necessity, and proclaims his policy to be the enforcement of the law against all disorganizers within and without the Territory.
Promises, however, are one thing with this administration, and performances are another. We await the performance in this case, before joining in any rejoicings of the intervention of Mr. Pierce in behalf of law and order. In the meantime, we admonish the Kansas belligerents that they have nothing to fear and nothing to hope from the black republicans of Congress until they shall have disposed of the heavy plunder of the public printing, and made some arrangements concerning other measures for fleeing the public treasury. With our black republicans; but even with them, freedom is a humbug when the public plunder is at stake.