Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

ADDRESSES:

By

JOHN A. MARTIN.

DELIVERED IN KANSAS.

PRIVATE CIRCULATION.

TOPEKA.

KANSAS PUBLISHING HOUSE: CLIFFORD C. BAKER.

1888.

INTRODUCTION.

BY DANIEL W. WILDER.

Those most familiar with the Governor’s office during recent years know what a busy place it is. During the session of the Legislature it is not often that the Governor has a rest of ten minutes, by day, and at night he is followed to his hotel and the solicitations often continue until midnight. Governor Martin usually reaches the office at eight in the morning and remains until five or six, never going out for a lunch. During these hours he sits and listens to the crowds of callers, dictates letters, and, rarely, reads or writes. With all of these personal demands, entreaties, and importunities, the Governor not only never neglects any caller, never loses his placid self-control, but even finds time to attend to many outside affairs in his own busy life and in the ceaseless activity of the restless Kansas life that surrounds us all. The busy man is the one who finds the most time; he loses none.

Before coming to Topeka our Governor had passed all of his active life in a printing office or in the editorial room. He began at the case, setting type, and has remained in the same office, the Atchison Champion,—soon buying the paper, and changing its form from a weekly to a daily when the growth of town and State demanded it. During the war he was the Colonel of the Eighth Kansas, one of the youngest in the service, and one of the most successful. That is the only “rest” he has had since boyhood. But change is rest, and his election to the office of Chief Magistrate he appears to have enjoyed as a vacation; no cessation of labor, but great intellectual activity and real enjoyment.

The speeches and addresses in this volume are not the efforts of a man of leisure who is trying to see what he can say and how handsomely he will say it. They are all hastily prepared; no corrections, no re-writing, no polishing. But they need no apology.

They are of and for Kansas by a man whose whole life and thought is wrapped up in Kansas. They are chapters of Kansas history, and worthy of preservation. For this reason they have been cut out of the newspapers in which they originally appeared and are now presented in permanent form. That they will be highly prized by our people there is no doubt. Kansans are a reading and writing people; they are proud of their history, and they preserve all the records of the past. Governor Martin was one of the founders of the State Historical Society, has been its President, and if he did not have this spirit he would not be a Kansan. The historical facts in this book will be eagerly prized and gladly treasured. Governor Martin was one of the Secretaries of the convention that organized the Republican party of Kansas, at Osawatomie; he was the Secretary of the convention that framed our State Constitution; he was a member of the first State Senate; he has been President of the Kansas and Missouri Associated Press, and has long been Vice President of the National Board of Soldiers’ Homes. Thus he has been an active participant in the scenes and events that he describes.

The work was not intended as a history, but it abounds in historical narratives, relating to war and peace; the part played by our State during the great Rebellion; the growth of the State in population; its agriculture, and manufactures; its schools and colleges; its civic and benevolent organizations; in brief, illustrations of the full, eager life of our people—a picture of the Kansas of these years.

A century hence it will appear strange that all of these things took place in the life of one man, before he had reached his fiftieth year. John Winthrop and William Penn had no such story to tell of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Those commonwealths became only clearings in the wilderness during the lives of their founders. Future readers of these records will know the man revealed herein, his standard of manhood and patriotism, and the people who chose him as their leader. They loved courage and truth; they honored labor; they believed in education; coming to a desert, they planted trees and flowers and made it a garden; wayward and feverish at first, they soon started the church and made a land of steady habits. And so our own children will read this book in their school libraries.

The most important address in the volume is the one delivered when the State was a quarter of a century old. Its statistics will be of enduring interest. One of the most graphic is the Address at Wichita, describing the different types of Kansas soldiers,—with its tribute to the flag. The happiest literary effort is the picture of an army on the march, in the speech to the Loyal Legion, at Topeka. The Scandinavian Address, delivered at Lindsborg, was translated and printed in the Swedish papers in this country and in Sweden. Probably no other Kansas speech has enjoyed that distinction. The speech that has had the widest circulation and has done the most good is the one entitled “Republicanism in Kansas,” delivered in Topeka. It was called for all over the Union, but especially in Texas, Tennessee and Michigan, where the friends of Prohibition were endeavoring to have that principle placed in their State Constitutions. The most distinctive feature of Governor Martin’s administration has been the enforcement of the Prohibitory law and the redemption of the State from the liquor traffic.

Should this book be read in any European country the reader will know just what Kansas is, and the greater his familiarity with the history of other lands and peoples, the greater will be his surprise and delight. Kansas has added a new page to the progressive history of humanity, and is still marching on.

Topeka, May 16, 1888.

ADDRESSES.

PENNSYLVANIA AND KANSAS.

Address at a Reunion of the Pennsylvania Society of Atchison County, held at Atchison, March 1st, 1878.

Mr. President: The reunion of Pennsylvanians held in our city to-day is a meeting to be commended, not alone because it affords opportunity for acquaintanceship among citizens native of the same State, and promotes social friendships among them, but because it is favorable to the development of that individual and National sentiment which, while reverencing birthplace and old home, has a still higher reverence and love for the broad country which stretches from ocean to ocean. Whether in Kansas or in Pennsylvania, the same brave old flag floats over us; our new home and our native State are parts of the same good land; and the Union, which takes in its wide, and strong, and loving embrace the wheat-fields of Kansas and the coal-fields of Pennsylvania, is the dearer to us because away off there near the Atlantic are the graves of our forefathers, and here by the Missouri, half-way across the Continent, are our homes, our wives, and our children.

Years ago, when the passions born of our Territorial troubles were yet fiercely burning, I heard it said that Kansas was “the child of Massachusetts.” The “Old Bay State,” it is true, contributed her full quota towards moulding that public sentiment whose enthusiastic impulses sent so many immigrants to people our prairies, and her firm friendship for Free Kansas did very much to break down the intolerant domination of slavery within our borders. The voice of Massachusetts, then as during the Revolution of our forefathers, was eloquent and courageous, and her action swift, vigorous and determined. But Sam and John Adams, a century ago, had Benjamin Franklin and Robert Morris, representatives of the “Old Keystone State,” as their most efficient coadjutors, and so in the struggle which made Kansas free, the zeal, the courage, and the constancy of Pennsylvania’s sons were conspicuously illustrated.

If Kansas could properly be called the child of any State, she is the daughter of Pennsylvania. But Kansas is really cosmopolitan. The blood of all States and all Nations runs in her veins. The East and the West, the North and the South, all sections and all nationalities have sent their sons and daughters to swell her population and contribute to her development. There is a wonderful aggregation of peoples in the citizenship of this young Commonwealth; and out of these has grown a remarkable community—a people homogeneous, yet diverse; combining the sturdy independence, firm convictions and all-conquering energy and industry of the North with the intense enthusiasm and fine courage of the South. It is difficult to estimate what the result of such fusing of bloods and temperaments will be in the future, but I believe it will produce as strong, intelligent and vigorous a manhood as this Continent or the world ever saw.

I do not intend, however, to discuss physiological questions. This is Pennsylvania’s Day in our city, and I want to trace the connection of Pennsylvania and her sons, as briefly as may be, with the history and development, political and material, of Kansas. But first let me ask, did any of you ever notice the striking similarity in the appearance of the two States, Pennsylvania and Kansas, as shown upon the map? In size, shape and general outlines, this resemblance is remarkable. In no other two States of the Union is the conformation of outlines and appearance so noticeable. Three sides of each, and the same three sides—north, south and west—are squarely cut, while the eastern boundary of each is irregular and formed mainly by the course of a river. Pennsylvania has a territorial area of 46,000 square miles, and is 315 miles east and west by 160 miles north and south. Kansas is a larger State, having a territorial area of 81,000 square miles, and being 400 miles east and west by 200 north and south. Both are longer, in about equal proportions, than they are wide.

Perhaps the resemblance between the two States on the map of our country—a resemblance as striking as that so often noticed in twin children—is the birth-mark which stamps them as of one blood and family, and accounts for the curious and interesting identification of Pennsylvania’s sons with events in Kansas, during the whole of that exciting epoch when this State was so prominent a figure in the history of the Nation.

And the relations of the two States have been indeed curiously interwoven—so curiously that I wonder the facts have not attracted more general attention and remark. Less than a month after the bill organizing the Territory of Kansas had become a law, Andrew H. Reeder, of Pennsylvania, was appointed the first Governor. At the first election ever held in the Territory, R. P. Flenniken, a Pennsylvanian, was the Free-State candidate for Congress. The first Free-State newspaper ever printed in Kansas was published and edited by George W. Brown, a Pennsylvanian. The first great seal of Kansas was designed by Governor Reeder, and engraved by Robert Lovett, a Philadelphia artisan. John L. Dawson, a Pennsylvanian, was the second Governor appointed for Kansas, but he declined. The first Free-State delegate convention ever held in Kansas was presided over by George W. Smith, a Pennsylvanian; and the resolutions adopted, constituting the first platform of the Free-State men, were mainly written by the deposed Governor Reeder. One of our first Territorial Judges was J. M. Burrell, a Pennsylvanian. The convention which set in motion the Free-State government organized under the “Topeka Constitution” had for its President William Y. Roberts, a Pennsylvanian; and at the election held that year, Andrew H. Reeder received a majority of the votes cast as the Free-State candidate for Congress. William Y. Roberts was elected Lieutenant-Governor under the Topeka Constitution. Capt. George W. Bowman, a Pennsylvanian—long a resident of this city—at the peril of his life and property took Governor Reeder out of Kansas. Hon. Galusha A. Grow, of Pennsylvania, introduced the first bill in Congress to admit Kansas into the Union under the Topeka Constitution.

The third Governor of Kansas, succeeding Governor Shannon, was John W. Geary, afterwards Governor of Pennsylvania. And he, like Governor Reeder, espoused the cause of the Free-State men before he had been in the Territory a week. He had been here only four days, in fact, when he ordered the Lawrence Company of Capt. Sam’l Walker, a Pennsylvanian, and one of the fighting leaders of the Free-State men, to be mustered into the United States service, and issued a proclamation ordering the invading Missourians out of Kansas. During the whole term of his service he was an earnest opponent of the outrages and crimes which were perpetrated upon the Free-State men. He was succeeded by Robert J. Walker, a native of Pennsylvania, who soon espoused the cause of the Free-State men; who induced them to take part in the election held in October, 1857; and who threw out the returns from Oxford and Kickapoo precincts and McGee county, thus giving the Free-State party control of both branches of the Legislature, and sending a Free-State Delegate to Congress.

The Grasshopper Falls Free-State Convention, held in August, 1857, at which it was decided to vote at the ensuing election, under the promise of Governor Walker that the vote should be free and fair, was presided over by George W. Smith, a Pennsylvanian. On the assembling of the first Free-State Legislature, in December, 1857, Cyrus K. Holliday, a Pennsylvanian, was elected President pro tem. of the Council, and George W. Deitzler, long a resident of Pennsylvania, and who came from that State to Kansas, was chosen Speaker of the House.

December 21, 1857, at the election held for State officers under the Lecompton Constitution, George W. Smith and William Y. Roberts, both Pennsylvanians, and the candidates of the Free-State men, were elected Governor and Lieutenant-Governor, respectively.

The last Territorial Legislature assembled in January, 1861, and it had native Pennsylvanians for presiding officers in both branches, W. W. Updegraff, President of the Council, and John W. Scott, Speaker of the House. The bill admitting Kansas into the Union under the Wyandotte Constitution was signed on the 29th of January, 1861, by James Buchanan, of Pennsylvania. And when the first State Legislature assembled, thirteen of its members and four of its officers, including the Speaker of the House, W, W. Updegraff, were native Pennsylvanians.

The connection of the sons of Pennsylvania with affairs in Kansas, political, military and industrial, has since that time been quite as prominent and as honorable. But I have no time to trace such details further. I can only add that of the officers commanding and the soldiers forming our gallant Kansas regiments and companies during the war for the Union, a very large proportion were native Pennsylvanians; of our civil officers, a United States Senator, a Governor, a member of Congress, a Lieutenant-Governor, three Superintendents of Public Instruction, and a number of other State officials, have been Pennsylvanians; and in every State Legislature there have been many members who were natives of the “Old Keystone State.” And, as Owen Seip would say, “the returns from Old Lehigh are not all in yet.”

The last accurate census of this State, taken in 1875, shows that 13,399 citizens of Kansas came from Pennsylvania. Only five States, Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, Indiana and Ohio, furnished a larger number of immigrants to Kansas. I think, however, that many more of our citizens are natives of the old Keystone State. The figures I quote do not show how many were born in each of the States, but only “where from to Kansas.” Of the citizens of Atchison county, 640 emigrated from Pennsylvania to Kansas. Only five States, Missouri, Illinois, Ohio, Iowa and New York, furnished a larger number. I have no doubt that quite a large proportion of those who came from the Western States were originally from Pennsylvania.

Kansas is a young State. It was only seventeen years old last month, while Pennsylvania has rounded a full century of Statehood. Yet in 1542, just 140 years before William Penn landed on the shores of the Delaware, Francisco de Coronado, a Spanish commander of high rank, marched from Mexico through Kansas to its northern boundary. He was seeking gold and silver mines. He missed them. But he found, as he reported, “mighty plains, full of crooked-backed oxen;” and he wrote that “the earth is the best possible for all kinds of productions of Spain; for while it is very strong and black, it is well watered by brooks, springs and rivers.” This old Spanish explorer gave a very accurate description of the Kansas of to-day. But they didn’t receive his report in England, which probably accounts for the fact that Penn landed on the shores of the Delaware instead of sailing up the Mississippi and Missouri to Kansas.

Kansas was embraced in the grant of land made by King James I, of England, in the Virginia charter of 1609. Pennsylvania was embraced in the grant of land made by Charles II, of England, to William Penn, in 1681. But the French discovered the Mississippi in 1682, and from that date until 1763, Kansas was a French possession. It then passed into the hands of Spain. In 1780 Benjamin Franklin, then in Paris, set on foot negotiations for the purchase of Louisiana, which included Kansas. In 1800 the first Napoleon wrested Louisiana from Spain, and on the 30th of April, 1803, sold it to the United States. Pennsylvania remained an English colony until it became an American State.

A very old poetical legend explains how Pennsylvania came to be settled, in the statement that that—

“Penn refused to pull his hat off

Before the King, and therefore sat off

Another country to light pat on.”

Reduced to sober prose, this doggerel expresses an idea that first attracted public attention to Kansas, and for many years did much to promote settlement in this State, i. e., love of freedom—religious, political, and individual. This sentiment gave Kansas her first start in the world, and she has kept her pace and her place ever since. In 1800 our old native State had a population of only 602,361, and in twenty years this had increased to but little over a million. Kansas will far surpass that growth within twenty years from 1875, when she had a population of 531,156. We have over 700,000 now, and will have a round million in 1880. This is a fast age. Kansas was organized as a Territory less than a quarter of a century ago, and yet we have had nearly as many Governors as Pennsylvania, mossed as she is with the antiquity of over two centuries. As to State Constitutions, we can beat her, for Pennsylvania has managed to get along with three in a century, while Kansas had four before she got fairly into the Union, and I don’t know how many amendments since. Only one railroad crosses the good old Keystone State from East to West; Kansas has two passing from the Missouri to the Colorado line, and a third nearly half-way across. Atchison has more railroads than the great manufacturing city of Pittsburgh, and is as great a “Railroad Center” as Philadelphia. They make a man live there seven years before he can be Governor, yet they sent us three who were sworn in before they ever saw Kansas. Pennsylvania had nearly three million people in 1860, yet their Legislature is not as big, numerically, as is ours. Probably the average Kansan needs more laws to keep him within reasonable bounds than does the average Pennsylvanian.

Pennsylvania is a great State, and no son of hers, wander wheresoever he may, is ever ashamed to acknowledge his nativity. Virginia may be the mother of States, but the “Old Keystone” is the Pa.—especially of Kansas, as I think I have shown. And the citizens of Kansas hailing from Pennsylvania will never “go back on” their native State—nor to it, perhaps, unless on a visit. Not that they love Pennsylvania less, but Kansas more.

Looking back over the records of our eventful, often stormy past, and contemplating the prosperous present and hopeful future of Kansas, it has seemed to me that one great duty this State of ours has forgotten. All nations, all States, have delighted to perpetuate, in the names they have given to their cities or counties, the memory of those who, in times of great trouble and danger, testified their devotion to the welfare of the people by a courageous, steadfast, self-sacrificing defense of their rights and liberties. It is one of the crowning glories of the Old Keystone State, that of all the Governors who wielded the executive power during the Territorial existence of Kansas there were three, and only three, who did not consort with, or assist, or excuse those who invaded our soil with armed force, murdered our people, stuffed our ballot-boxes, burned our towns, and attempted to stifle free speech and a free press, in order to blight this fair land with the curse of human slavery—and these three were Pennsylvanians. And it is a just reproach to Kansas that not one of our counties bears the name of either of these three men—Reeder, Geary, or Walker. Kansas owes them much. Their memory should be honored by every Kansan. They have all passed away from the trials and troubles of this world. This State, the rights and liberties of whose people they defended with such self-sacrificing devotion and steadfast courage, cannot now reward them with substantial gifts. But it can at least testify its respect for their memory, and its gratitude for their splendid services in behalf of its early pioneers, by perpetuating their names in the names of some of its counties. And this it ought to do. Kansas will be justly open to the reproach of having forgotten those to whom she is largely indebted until three of her counties bear the honored names of Reeder, Geary, and Walker—her only Federal Governors who held justice above partisanship, who enriched the history of a dark and troubled period with the record of official duties fairly, honestly and bravely discharged; who sternly kept faith with the people, and so doing fought a great battle, not for a single generation or a few thousand citizens of a sparsely-settled Territory, but for all time and for the whole Republic.

THE FIRST KANSAS.

Speech delivered at the Reunion of the Society of the First Regiment, Kansas Volunteers, at Atchison, August 10th, 1881.

Fellow-Soldiers: It is reported that an old Roman once said: “If I were not a Roman citizen, I would be a Greek.” This is an anniversary of the First Kansas, and upon such an occasion, and in a similar spirit, I declare that if I was not an Eighth Kansas man, I would like to be a First Kansas man.

This is especially a reunion of the First Kansas, but to their festival, with true soldierly fellowship, they have invited all other soldiers who care to join in celebrating the anniversary of one of the most desperate battles of the war, and especially all who have, not exactly “drank from the same canteen,” but served in the same commands.

With the exception of my own regiment, I had, during the war, a more familiar acquaintance with the First than with any other body of Kansas troops. And the First represented, probably more than any other regiment, that magnificent uplifting of national pride, patriotism and enthusiasm which succeeded the first shot at Sumter. No man who cannot remember the spirit of that hour can have any conception of the fierce, strong, irresistible outburst which flowed over the whole land when the flash of that gun revealed the Nation’s danger. There was more coolness and deliberation, and no doubt quite as much sincere patriotism and noble consecration to a great cause, in the formation of regiments under subsequent calls. But the men who responded to Abraham Lincoln’s first call for 75,000 men, represented, more than any others, the passionate resentment and white-heat enthusiasm of that most startling and momentous event in American history. To them belonged the soldiers of the First Kansas.

And the regiment nobly sustained the promise of its rapturous and wonderful organization. Within two weeks after the Governor had called for volunteers the regiment had its full complement of companies; in ten days more it was in Missouri; within a month after it was sworn into service it had formed a junction with General Lyon at Grand River; and in but little more than two months it had taken part in one of the most desperate and bloody battles of the war, losing over one-third of its effective force, and by its unflinching courage, determination and coolness, reflecting imperishable honor upon the name of the State.

Its subsequent career was alike creditable and distinguished. It participated in thirty battles and skirmishes; the tramp of its feet was heard in eight different States, from the Missouri to the Gulf; it marched over six thousand miles; it followed the flag it loved during the revolving seasons of three long, gloomy and eventful years; it made history wherever it went, and did its full share in the work of suppressing rebellion and annihilating slavery; and finally, when the term of its service was concluded, a large number of its soldiers reënlisted as veterans, to see the war through to the end.

The soldiers who served in its ranks have a just right to be proud of the record of their regiment, and to unite, on such an occasion as this, in reviving the incidents and events of their comradeship. Into no living man’s life, probably, will ever come such a lifting of noble emotion as that which swept over our land twenty years ago, and sent the flower of our youth and manhood hurrying off to the war. What eager, exciting, restless, passionate days those were! Probably not one of you had the faintest conception of the reality of war. Most of you thought it would be over in six months or a year. We all forgot that the men arrayed against us were Americans, and that the war was to be the old, old story of Greek meeting Greek. Most of you thought, no doubt, as nearly all volunteers did, that you might be cheated out of a chance to meet the “insolent foe,” by a sudden collapse of the Confederacy, and the hanging of a man named Davis on the sourest of sour-apple trees. Few imagined that the weary months would roll on, until the three years’ term of enlistment should expire, and still another year must elapse before Appomattox came. But you did your duty through it all, fulfilling every obligation you had made.

And herein, I have always thought, the American volunteer exhibited the noblest qualities and the truest heroism. A battle is a terrible ordeal, but it never lasts long. It is the weary march, the silent vigils of the picket-line, the cheerless bivouac, the dull monotony of camp duties, the hard fare, the long procession of days dragging through spring, summer, autumn and winter—it is all of these, crowded full of discomfort, and fatigue, and hardship, and exposure, which wear upon the patience, endurance and courage of a soldier, and are the most severe tests of true soldierly qualities. There were many regiments in the volunteer army during the war that lost but few men in battle, but returned home with ranks as thin as if they had been decimated in many a fierce contest.

“They need no praise whose deeds are eulogy,” and the men of the First Kansas—those gathered here to-day, and those sleeping in their lonely graves throughout the South—have a monument that will endure forever; the stately monument of a reunited, free, happy and prosperous country. This was the glad picture which was imprinted upon their hearts when they consecrated themselves to the cause of Union and Liberty; this is the reward they won for themselves and their posterity; this is the inspiration of the gathering here to-day; this will be the theme of historians and poets centuries hence; and this will be the pride and consolation of one and all when you hear the bugle sounding “lights out” for the last time on earth.

THE WYANDOTTE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION.

Address, delivered at a reunion of the surviving officers and members of the Wyandotte Constitutional Convention, held at Wyandotte, Kas., July 29th, 1882.

Mr. President: It is often charged that participants in assemblages of this character are apt to exaggerate the importance of the occasion they commemorate, and, after the manner of one of our poets, sing in chorus: “I celebrate myself.” Perhaps I can speak of the Wyandotte Convention and its work without being accused of this self-gratulation; for I was more of an observer of its proceedings than a participant in them. I recorded what was done, but I had no part or lot in the doing. If its work had been crude or weak, I could not fairly have been held responsible for the failure. As it was strong, efficient and enduring, I can felicitate you, the survivors of those who wrought this great service for Kansas, without a suspicion of self-praise.

KANSAS CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTIONS.

Four Conventions framed Constitutions for this State. The first assembled at Topeka, on the 23d of October, 1855, and adjourned on the 11th of November, after a session of twenty days. It was composed of forty-seven members, of whom thirty-one signed the Constitution. On the 15th of December this instrument was submitted to the people for ratification or rejection. Only 1,777 ballots were cast, all but 46 being favorable. One of its sections, a provision excluding negroes and mulattoes from the State, was submitted as an independent proposition, and adopted by an affirmative vote of 1,287, to 453 against it.

The second convention was that held at Lecompton, which met on the 7th of June, 1857, and after a session of four days, adjourned until the 19th of October, a final adjournment being reached on the 3d of November. It was composed of sixty-four members, forty-five of whom signed the organic law it framed, and its session continued twenty days. No direct vote on this Constitution was provided for. The Schedule ordered two forms of ballots, one, the “Constitution with Slavery,” the other, “Constitution with no Slavery.” It was the old turkey-and-buzzard choice. The Free-State men refused to vote at the election, held on the 21st of December, and only 6,712 ballots were cast, 6,147 being for Slavery and 569 against Slavery. The Free-State men had, however, elected a majority of the Territorial Legislature in October, and at a special session of that body, held in December, a law was passed providing for a direct vote on the Constitution. This election was held on the 4th of January, 1858, resulting: Against the Constitution, 10,266; for, 164—the Pro-Slavery men not voting. A third vote on the Lecompton instrument was taken August 2d, 1858, Congress having ordered its re-submission under the terms of the English bill. Again it was rejected, the ballots in its favor being only 1,788, and those against it, 11,300.

The Leavenworth Convention met at Minneola, March 23d, 1858, and at once adjourned to Leavenworth, where it reassembled March 25th. It was composed of ninety-five members, was in session only eleven days, and the Constitution it framed was signed by eighty-three persons. This instrument was adopted at an election held May 11th, by a very small vote, the Pro-Slavery men taking no part in the contest. It was never a popular organic law, and many Free-State men who supported it did so under protest. An earnest effort was made, by the Republicans, to secure the admission of Kansas under the Topeka Constitution, and by the Democrats, with a few exceptions, to bring the Territory in under the Lecompton Constitution. But no serious or determined contest was waged, in Congress, for admission under the Leavenworth Constitution, and in less than eight months the movement in its behalf was formally abandoned.

THE WYANDOTTE CONVENTION.

Early in February, 1859, the Territorial Legislature passed an act submitting to the people the question of calling a Constitutional Convention. This vote was taken March 28th, and resulted: For, 5,306; against, 1,425. On the 10th of May, 1859, the Republican party of Kansas was organized, at Osawatomie, and at the election held on the 7th of June, for delegates to the Wyandotte Convention, the Republican and Democratic parties confronted each other in Kansas for the first time. The Democrats carried the counties of Leavenworth, Doniphan, Jefferson and Jackson, and elected one of the two delegates from Johnson. The Republicans were successful in all the other counties voting. The total vote polled was 14,000. The Republican membership was thirty-five; the Democratic, seventeen.

The Convention then chosen assembled on the 5th day of July, 1859. In its composition it was an unusual, not to say remarkable, Kansas assemblage. Apparently the chiefs of the contending parties had grown weary of Constitution-making, or regarded this fourth endeavor in that line as a predestined failure, for they were conspicuous by their absence. In the Topeka Convention nearly every prominent man of the Free-State party had a seat. Gen. James H. Lane was its President, and Charles Robinson, Martin F. Conway, Marcus J. Parrott, Wm. Y. Roberts, Geo. W. Smith, Philip C. Schuyler, Cyrus K. Holliday, Mark W. Delahay, and many other recognized Free-State leaders were members. In the Leavenworth Convention there was a similar gathering of widely-known Free-State men. Conway was its President, and Lane, Roberts, Thos. Ewing, Jr., Henry J. Adams, H. P. Johnson, Sam’l N. Wood, T. Dwight Thacher, Preston B. Plumb, Joel K. Goodin, A. Larzelere, W. F. M. Arny, Chas. H. Branscomb, John Ritchie, and many other influential Free-State chiefs or partisans, were among its members.

THE MEMBERSHIP.

In the Wyandotte Convention all the noted Free-State leaders were conspicuously absent. Its roll-call was made up of names generally new in Kansas affairs, and largely unknown in either the Free-State or Pro-Slavery councils. Its President, James M. Winchell, his colleague, Wm. McCullough, and John Ritchie, of Shawnee, had been members of the Leavenworth Convention; Col. Caleb May, of Atchison, and William R. Griffith, of Bourbon, had been members of both the Topeka and the Leavenworth Conventions; and Jas. M. Arthur, of Linn, had been a member of the Topeka Convention. But their prominence was largely local. On the Democratic side, too, appeared men before unnoted in the annals of the stirring and tremendous conflict that had for years made the young Territory the cynosure of a Continent’s interest. None of the prominent Pro-Slavery men who sat in the Lecompton Convention or the Pro-Slavery Legislature—Calhoun, Stringfellow, Henderson, Elmore, Wilson, Carr, and others—appeared in this body.

Perhaps the absence of these party leaders was a fortunate thing for the Convention and the incipient State. For in discriminating intelligence, in considerate zeal for the welfare of the people, in catholic grasp of principles, and in capacity for defining theories clearly and compactly, the members of this body were not wanting. On the other hand, there were fewer jealousies and far less wrangling than would have been possible had the envious and aspiring party leaders been present. I think it is certain that the work was better done, done with more sobriety, sincerity, prudence and real ability, than would have resulted had the recognized chiefs of the rival parties been on the floor of the Convention. The pioneers—the John Baptists—of the Free-State cause were all at Topeka, and the Constitution they framed is disfigured by some blotches and much useless verbiage. The leaders were all at Leavenworth, where they schemed for precedence, and spread traps to catch one another, and quarreled over non-essentials, and did everything but make a popular Constitution. Lecompton was the last expression of a beaten, desperate and wrong-headed, but intellectually vigorous faction, and was really, barring the mean method of its submission, and its attempt to perpetuate Slavery, an admirable organic law.

The younger men of the Territory constituted the Convention at Wyandotte. They came upon the field fresh, enthusiastic, and with a place in the world of thought and action to conquer. They recognized the fact that they must do extremely well to secure popular favor, and they set about their task with industry, intelligence and prudence. They were not martyrs or reformers, as many of those at Topeka were; nor jealous politicians or factionists, as most of those at Leavenworth were. They had no old battles to fight over again, no personal feuds to distract them, no recollection of former defeats or victories to reverse or maintain. They were their own prophets. They had had no experience in Constitution-making, and hence did not look backward. They were not specialists. A few had hobbies, but the vast majority had no bees buzzing in their bonnets. A few were dogmatic, but the many were anxious to discuss, and willing to be convinced. A few were loquacious, but the majority were thinkers and workers. Some were accomplished scholars, but the majority were men of ordinary education, whose faculties had been sharpened and trained by the hard experience of an active and earnest life. Many were vigorous, direct, intelligent speakers; several were really eloquent; and a few may justly be ranked with the most versatile and brilliant men Kansas has ever numbered among her citizens.

Very few were old men. Only fifteen of the fifty-two members were over forty. Over one-third were under thirty, and nearly two-thirds under thirty-five. Very few, as I have said, had previously appeared as representatives of the people in any Territorial assemblage, and this was especially true of the men whose talents, industry and force soon approved them leaders. Samuel A. Kingman had been in the Territory only about eighteen months, and was unknown, outside of Brown county, until he appeared at Wyandotte. Solon O. Thacher was a young lawyer of Lawrence, never before prominent in public affairs. John J. Ingalls had served, the previous winter, as Engrossing Clerk of the Territorial Council. Samuel A. Stinson was a young attorney, recently from Maine. William C. McDowell had never been heard of outside of Leavenworth, Benjamin F. Simpson was a boyish-looking lawyer from Miami county, and John T. Burris had been practicing, for a year or two, in Justices’ courts in Johnson county. John P. Slough had been a member of the Ohio Legislature, but was a new-comer in Kansas; and Edmund G. Ross was the publisher of a weekly newspaper at Topeka.

One-half of the members had been in the Territory less than two years. Six came in 1854, four in 1855, and twelve in 1856, while Mr. Forman, of Doniphan, dated his residence from 1843; Mr. Palmer, of Pottawatomie, from 1854, and Mr. Houston, of Riley, from 1853. Forty-one were from Northern States, seven from the South, and four were of foreign birth, England, Scotland, Ireland, and Germany each contributing one. It appears singular that only one of the Western States, Indiana, was represented in the membership, that State furnishing six delegates. Twelve hailed from New England, Ohio contributed twelve, Pennsylvania six, and New York four. Only eighteen belonged to the legal profession—an unusually small number of lawyers in such a body. Sixteen were farmers, eight merchants, three physicians, three manufacturers, one a mechanic, one a printer, one a land agent, and one a surveyor. The oldest member was Robert Graham, of Atchison, who was 55; the youngest Benj. F. Simpson, of Lykins county, (now Miami,) who was 23.

A WORKING BODY.

It was a working body, from the first hour of its session until the last. There is a tradition that the Continental Congress which promulgated the Declaration of Independence was materially hastened in its deliberations over that immortal document by swarms of flies that invaded the hall where it sat, and made the life of its members a burden. Perhaps the intense heat of the rough-plastered room where the Convention met, or the knowledge that Territorial scrip would be received by importunate landlords only at a usurious discount, had something to do with urging dispatch in business. But certainly the Convention went to work with an energy and industry I have never seen paralleled in a Kansas deliberative body since that time. It perfected its organization, adopted rules for its government, discussed the best mode of procedure in framing a Constitution, and appointed a Committee to report upon that subject, during the first day’s session; all the standing Committees were announced on the third day; and by the close of the fifth day it had disposed of two very troublesome contested election cases, decided that the Ohio Constitution should be the model for that of Kansas, perfected arrangements for reporting and printing its debates, and instructed its Committees upon a number of disputed questions. The vote on selecting a model for the Constitution was, on the second ballot: for the Ohio Constitution, 25 votes; Indiana, 23; and Kentucky, 1. So our Kansas Constitution was modeled after that of Ohio—something, I think, as the farmer’s new house was designed after his old one; it was built upon the old site.

THE COMMITTEES.

The Chairmanships of the different Committees were assigned as follows: Preamble and Bill of Rights—Wm. Hutchinson, of Lawrence; Executive Department—John P. Greer, of Shawnee; Legislative Department—Solon O. Thacher, of Lawrence; Judicial Department—Samuel A. Kingman, of Brown county; Military—James G. Blunt, of Anderson county; Electors and Elections—P. H. Townsend, of Douglas; Schedule—John T. Burris, of Johnson; Apportionment—H. D. Preston, of Shawnee; Corporations and Banking—Robert Graham, of Atchison; Education and Public Institutions—W. R. Griffith, of Bourbon county; County and Township Organizations—John Ritchie, of Topeka; Ordinance and Public Debt—James Blood, of Lawrence; Finance and Taxation—Benj. F. Simpson, of Lykins; Amendments and Miscellaneous—S. D. Houston, of Riley county; Federal Relations—T. S. Wright, of Nemaha county; Phraseology and Arrangement—John J. Ingalls, of Atchison.

I have studied the composition of these Committees with some interest, reviewing the work of their members in the Convention, and recalling their subsequent careers. And it appears to me that in making them up, President Winchell exhibited phenomenally quick and accurate judgment of men. He was, indeed, one of the best presiding officers I have ever known. His imperturbable coolness, never for an instant ruffled by the most sudden and passionate outbreaks of excitement in the Convention; his mastery of all the niceties of parliamentary law; his uniform courtesy and tact; his promptness and clearness in stating his decisions; and above all, the mingled grace and kindness and firmness with which he announced to an indignant member an adverse decision, were really wonderful. But what shall be said of that still more wonderful prescience with which he made up the Committees? What induced this calm, gray-eyed, observing little man, whose brass-buttoned blue coat was first seen by two-thirds of the Convention on the morning of the 5th of July—what impelled him, within twenty-four hours, to select an obscure, dull-looking, shock-headed country doctor as Chairman of the Military Committee, and thus name in connection with military affairs, for the first time, the only Kansas soldier who reached a full Major-Generalship? How did he happen to pass by half a dozen more wide-known lawyers, and appoint as Chairman of the Judiciary Committee a man who, during more than fifteen years thereafter, occupied a place on the Supreme Bench of the State, for the greater portion of this time as the Chief Justice? How came he to recognize so quickly, in the Engrossing Clerk of the Territorial Legislature, the ripest scholar and the fittest man in the body for the Chairmanship of the Committee to which every article of the Constitution was referred for final revision and amendment? In the youngest and most boyish-looking member he found the man who was to form, for this State, a code of Finance and Taxation whose clear directions and wholesome restrictions have guarded Kansas against the wasteful extravagance of Legislatures and the curse of a burdensome public debt, during all the tempting and perilous affairs of its first quarter of a century. And he named as head of the Committee on Education, the first State Superintendent of Public Instruction. All of his appointments were made with rare judgment, but those mentioned appear notably discerning.

PROGRESS OF WORK.

On the sixth day a resolution favoring biennial sessions of the Legislature—adopted sixteen years afterward—was submitted and referred. The first of a long series of resolutions or proposed sections of the Constitution, prohibiting the settlement of negroes or mulattoes within the limits of the State, was also introduced. This question, with others of a kindred nature, such as propositions to prohibit colored children attending the schools, or to exclude them from the University, or to forbid the appropriation of any funds for their education, and last, and meanest of all, to deny to negroes the shelter of county poor-houses when poor and helpless, was voted upon again and again, first in one form and then in another; and to the enduring honor of the majority, always defeated. It seems singular, in this day and generation, that such theories found persistent and earnest advocates. But it should be remembered that all this happened before the war, when slavery was still an “institution” in nearly half the States of the Union. The Pro-Slavery party was, of course, solidly in favor of excluding free negroes from the State, and less than four years prior to the meeting of the Convention, the Free-State party, in voting on the Topeka Constitution, had given a decided majority in favor of such exclusion. It therefore required genuine courage and principle to go upon record against each and every proposition of this character. For very few members who so voted felt absolutely certain of the indorsement of their constituents.

The first article of the Constitution reported, that on corporations and banks, was submitted on the sixth day and considered. It was stated by the President that many other Committees had their reports in the hands of the printer, and during the next few days they began to come in very rapidly. The Convention, to expedite work, adopted a resolution requiring all Committees to report on or before Saturday, the eleventh day of the session.

THE BOUNDARIES OF THE STATE.

On the seventh day the annexation of that portion of Nebraska lying south of the Platte river, was formally considered. The then organized Nebraska counties included in that section of our sister State had elected delegates to the Convention, who were present earnestly advocating annexation. This proposition was discussed during several days, and the debate took a wide range. The Nebraska delegates were admitted to seats as honorary members, with the privilege of speaking on this subject. The final determination, however, was to preserve the original Northern line. Two influences induced this decision, one political, the other local and material. Many Republicans feared that the South Platte country was, or would be likely to become, Democratic. Lawrence and Topeka both aspired to be the State Capital, and their influence was against annexation, because they feared it would throw the center of population far north of the Kaw.

The Preamble and Bill of Rights was reported on the tenth day, and opened the whole question of the State’s boundaries. The Committee proposed the twenty-third meridian as the western line, and the fortieth parallel as the line on the north. This would have excluded about ninety miles of territory within the present limits of the State. The Committee’s recommendation was, however, adopted, and stood as the determination of the Convention until the day before the final adjournment, when Col. May, of Atchison, secured a reconsideration, and on his motion the twenty-fifth meridian was substituted for the twenty-third. The northern boundary question was finally settled on the fifteenth day, when, by a vote of 19 ayes to 29 nays, the Convention refused to memorialize Congress to include the South Platte country within the limits of Kansas.

FEATURES OF THE CONSTITUTION.

On the seventh day the Legislative and Judicial Committees reported. The Legislative article was considered next day. The Committee proposed that bills might originate in either House, but Mr. Winchell submitted a novel amendment, which required all laws to originate in the House of Representatives. This was adopted, notwithstanding the vigorous opposition of Mr. Thacher, the Chairman of the Committee, by a vote of 37 to 13. It survived the admission of the State only three years, being amended in 1864.

On the eighth day the Militia article was adopted; on the ninth day the Judicial article was perfected, and the article on Education and Public Institutions reported and discussed; and on the tenth day the Committees on County and Township Organizations, and Schedule, reported. The deathless pertinacity of a “claim” is illustrated by a petition presented that day, from one Samuel A. Lowe, a clerk of the so-called “Bogus Legislature,” who wanted pay for certain work he alleged he had performed. Only a year ago Mr. Lowe presented the same claim to Congress, and it was, I believe, allowed by the House. But the Kansas Senators made such determined war on it that Mr. Lowe can still sing, “A claim to keep I have.”

I have mentioned the fact that Mr. Winchell was the author of the section providing that all bills should originate in the House. It should be stated that Mr. Ingalls was the author of the provision that “in actions for libel, the truth may be given in evidence to the jury, and if it shall appear that the alleged libelous matter was published for justifiable ends, the accused shall be acquitted.” Another original provision of the Constitution is the Homestead section. This was first proposed by Mr. Foster, of Leavenworth county, on the sixth day of the session, and reported by the Committee on Miscellaneous and Amendments, on the thirteenth day. No other feature of the Constitution, perhaps, elicited more animated and earnest debate. It was discussed for several days; amended, referred, and again submitted. As originally reported, it provided for the exemption of “a homestead of 160 acres of land, or a house and lot not exceeding $2,000 in value, or real, personal and mixed property not exceeding $2,000, to any family.” This was adopted by a vote of 28 ayes to 16 nays. Two days later the vote was reconsidered, and President Winchell proposed the wording finally adopted: “A homestead of 160 acres of farming land, or of one acre within the limits of an incorporated town or city, occupied as a residence by the family of the owner, together with all the improvements on the same, shall be exempted from forced sale under any process of law, and shall not be alienated without the joint consent of husband and wife, where the relation exists.” Thus perfected, it was adopted by a vote of 33 to 7.

I thought at the time, however, and a review of the proceedings and debates has confirmed my impression, that favorable action on this provision was due to the earnest and eloquent advocacy of Judge Kingman, who was its most zealous, logical and courageous supporter. The homestead clause of the Kansas Constitution has been severely criticised, but I believe the people of the State generally regard it as a most beneficent provision of their organic law. For nearly a quarter of a century it has been maintained, and it still stands, as Judge Kingman said it would, guarding “the home, the hearthstone, the fireside around which a man may gather his family with the certainty of assurance that neither the hand of the law, nor any nor all of the uncertainties of life, can eject them from the possession of it.”

The Finance and Taxation and the Executive articles were adopted on the fourteenth day, and the Miscellaneous article considered. This originally provided for the election of a Public Printer, but that section was stricken out, after a vigorous protest by Messrs. Ross and Ingalls. Nine years later their idea was indorsed by the adoption of an amendment creating the office of State Printer.

On the seventeenth day the temporary Capital was located at Topeka, the second ballot resulting: For Topeka, 29; for Lawrence, 14; for Atchison, 6.

THE FIRST “PROHIBITION AMENDMENT.”

On the same day a proposition was made by Mr. Preston, of Shawnee county, to amend the Miscellaneous article by adding the following section:

“Sec. ——. The Legislature shall have power to regulate or prohibit the sale of alcoholic liquors, except for mechanical and medicinal purposes.”

A motion made to lay this amendment on the table, was defeated by a vote of 18 ayes to 31 nays. But the anxiety of the members to exclude from the Constitution any provision that might render its adoption doubtful, or prevent the admission of the State, finally prevailed, and after a full interchange of views, Mr. Preston withdrew his amendment. There is, it is said, nothing new under the sun. Those who imagine that the prohibition amendment adopted in 1880 was a new departure in Constitution-making, have never examined the records of the Wyandotte Convention.

THE LAST OF SLAVERY IN KANSAS.

On the nineteenth day occurred the last struggle over the Slavery question in Kansas. Sec. 6 of the Bill of Rights, prohibiting Slavery or involuntary servitude, came up for adoption, and it was moved to add a proviso suspending the operation of this section for the period of twelve months after the admission of the State. This proviso received eleven votes, and twenty-eight were recorded against it. A most exciting discussion occurred, on the same day, over the apportionment article, which the Democrats denounced as a “gerrymander.”

THE LAST DAYS.

The work of the Convention was practically completed on the twenty-first day. The various articles had each been considered and adopted, first in Committee of the whole, then in Convention, then referred to the Committee on Phraseology and Arrangement, and, after report of that Committee, again considered by sections and adopted. But so anxious were the members that every word used should be the right word, expressing the idea intended most clearly and directly, that when the reading of the completed Constitution was finished, on the morning of the 21st day, it was decided to refer it to a special committee, consisting of Messrs. Ingalls, Winchell, Ross and Slough, for further revision and verification. This Committee reported the same afternoon, and again the Constitution was read by sections, for final revision, with the same painstaking carefulness and attention to the minutest details. All that afternoon, and all the next day, with brief interruptions for action on other closing work, this revision went on, and it was five o’clock in the afternoon of the 29th before the last section was perfected. Then occurred one of the most dramatic scenes of the Convention. Mr. Hutchinson submitted a resolution declaring that “we do now adopt and proceed to sign the Constitution.”

A SPIRITED DEBATE.

At once Mr. Slough addressed the Chair, and after warmly eulogizing the general features of the Constitution, pronouncing it “a model instrument,” he formally announced that political objections impelled himself and his Democratic associates to decline attaching their signatures to it. These objections he stated at length. They were, briefly: The curtailment of the boundaries of the State; the large Legislative body provided for; the exclusion of Indians made citizens of the United States, from the privilege of voting; the registry of voters at the election on the Constitution; the refusal to exclude free negroes from the State; and the apportionment.

This action of the Democratic members had been foreshadowed for several days, but it was, nevertheless, something of a surprise. The Republicans understood that several of the Democrats had earnestly opposed such a course, and hoped that some of them would be governed by their own convictions, rather than by the mandate of their caucus. For a few moments after Mr. Slough concluded, the Convention sat, hushed and expectant. But no other Democratic member rose. It was evident that the caucus ruled. Then Judge Thacher, President pro tem., addressed the Chair, and in a speech of remarkable vigor and eloquence, accepted the gauge of battle thrown down. “Upon this Constitution,” he declared, “we will meet our opponents in the popular arena. It is a better, a nobler issue than even the old Free-State issue. They have thrown down the gauntlet; we joyfully take it up.” He then proceeded to defend, with great earnestness and power, the features of the Constitution objected to by Mr. Slough. “The members of the Convention,” he asserted, “have perfected a work that will be enduring.” The Constitution, he affirmed, would “commend itself to the true and good everywhere, because through every line and syllable there glows the generous sunshine of liberty.” It was and should be, he declared:

“Like some tall cliff, that lifts its awful form,

Swells from the vale, and midway leaves the storm;

Though round its breast the rolling clouds shall spread,

Eternal sunshine settles on its head.”

Read in the light of subsequent history, these declarations appear almost prophetic.

SIGNING THE CONSTITUTION.

The twilight shadows were gathering about Wyandotte when this debate closed, and the Convention proceeded to vote on Mr. Hutchinson’s resolution, which was adopted by 34 ayes to 13 nays—one Republican and four Democrats being absent. The roll was then called, and the Constitution was signed by all the Republican members except one, Mr. Wright, of Nemaha, who was absent, sick. The work of the Convention was completed, and after voting thanks to its officers, it adjourned without date.

TWO MISTAKES.

Each party, I think, was guilty of one blunder it afterwards seriously regretted—the Republicans in refusing to include the South Platte country within the boundaries of Kansas; the Democrats in refusing to sign the Constitution they had labored diligently to perfect. I speak of what I consider the great mistake of the Republicans with all the more frankness, because I was at the time in hearty sympathy with their action; but I feel confident that no Republican member is living to-day who does not deplore that decision. And I am equally confident that within a brief time after the Convention adjourned, there were few Democratic members who did not seriously regret their refusal to sign the Constitution.

“ADDED TO THE STARS.”

On the 4th of October, 1859, the Constitution was submitted to the people for ratification or rejection, and, for the first time in the history of Kansas, all parties cast a full, free and unintimidated vote. The Republicans favored, and the Democrats generally opposed its adoption. Nearly 16,000 ballots were polled, of which 10,421 were for, and 5,530 against the Constitution. The Homestead clause, submitted as an independent proposition, was ratified by a vote of 8,788 for, to 4,772 against it. Every county in the Territory except two, Johnson and Morris, gave a majority for the Constitution.

Two months later, December 6th, State and County officers and members of the Legislature were elected, and the people of Kansas, having exhausted their authority in State-building, patiently awaited the action of Congress. On the 11th of April, 1860, the House of Representatives voted, 134 to 73, to admit Kansas as a State, under the Wyandotte Constitution. Twice, during the next eight months, the Senate defeated motions to consider the Kansas bill, but on the 21st of January, 1861, several Southern Senators having seceded, Mr. Seward “took a pinch of snuff” and called it up again. It passed by a vote of 36 to 16, and on the 29th of the same month President Buchanan approved it. Thus young Kansas, through many difficulties and turmoils, was “added to the Stars.”

AN ENDURING CONSTITUTION.

During nearly twenty-two of the most eventful and exciting years of American history, the Constitution thus framed and ratified has defined the powers and regulated the duties of the government of Kansas. Three Legislatures have voted down propositions to call a new Constitutional Convention. Twelve or fifteen amendments have been submitted, but only eight have been approved by the people. Finally, in 1880, the Legislature voted to submit a proposal for a new Convention, and at the regular election held in November of that year, this ballot was taken. The result was an indorsement of the old Wyandotte Constitution by a majority far more emphatic and overwhelming than that by which it was originally adopted, the vote standing 22,870 for, and 146,279 against the proposed Convention, or nearly seven to one.

It is doubtful whether the organic law of any other State in the Union has more successfully survived the mutations of time and inconstant public sentiment, and the no less fluctuating necessities of a swiftly-developing Commonwealth. Of its seventeen articles, only four, and of its one hundred and seventy-eight sections, only eight, have ever been amended. And of the eight amendments adopted, only five have revoked or modified the principles or policy originally formulated, the others being changes demanded by the growth of the State, or by the events of the civil war. The first amendment, ratified in 1861, provides that no banking institution shall issue circulating notes of a less denomination than $1—the original limitation being $5. In 1864 the provision requiring all bills to originate in the House of Representatives, was repealed; and a section intended to prevent U. S. soldiers from voting, but which was so worded that it deprived our volunteers of that right, was also repealed. In 1867 an amendment was adopted disfranchising all persons who aided the “Lost Cause,” or who were dishonorably discharged from the army of the United States, or who had defrauded the United States or any State during the war. In 1868 the State Printer amendment was ratified. In 1873 the number of Senators and Representatives, originally limited to 33 and 100, respectively, was increased to 40 and 125. In 1875 three propositions, each having in view biennial instead of annual sessions of the Legislature, were adopted. And in 1880 the Prohibition amendment was ratified. These are all the changes that have been made in our organic law during nearly a quarter of a century.

PARTING AT WYANDOTTE.

It would violate the proprieties of such an occasion to comment on the personal feuds or partisan broils which once or twice marred the general harmony and orderly progress of the proceedings. These were very few, indeed, and none of them, I think, outlasted the Convention. The members parted, when the final adjournment came, with mutual respect and good-will, and the friendships formed during the session have been unusually warm and enduring.

SUBSEQUENT HISTORY.

It seems fitting that, in concluding this sketch of the Convention and its labors, I should briefly narrate the subsequent history of its members. It was a small company, that which parted here twenty-three years ago to-day, and it was made up, as I have said, largely of young and vigorous men. But when this reunion was first suggested, and I came to look over the familiar names I had so often called during the long, hot days of that far-away July, it was painful to note the havoc death had made. It impressed me something as did a roll-call I once witnessed, in the red glare of bivouac fires after one of the great battles of the war, when surviving comrades answered “killed,” or “wounded,” to one-half the names of a regiment. Ten of the fifty-two members composing the Convention I have not heard of for many years. Of the remaining forty-two, twenty rest quietly in

—“The reconciling grave,

Where all alike lie down in peace together.”

The largest delegation was that from Leavenworth county, and only one of the ten gentlemen comprising it, R. Cole Foster, certainly survives. Rare Sam Stinson, whose genial wit and brilliant accomplishments won all hearts, was elected Attorney General in 1861, by a unanimous vote, and died in his old Maine home in February, 1866. William C. McDowell was chosen Judge of the First Judicial District at the first election under the Constitution, served four years, and was killed by a fall from an omnibus in St. Louis, July 16, 1866. John P. Slough removed to Colorado, was Colonel of a regiment raised in that State, and later a Brigadier-General; was appointed, after the war, Chief Justice of New Mexico, and was killed at Santa Fé. Samuel Hipple removed to Atchison county; served as Quartermaster during the war; was elected State Senator in 1867, and died in January, 1876. William Perry removed to Colorado, where he died. Paschal S. Parks returned to Indiana, and engaged in journalism and the law until his death, three years ago. Fred. Brown died in St. Joseph, Mo., and John Wright at his home in Leavenworth county. Robert Graham, of Atchison county, the oldest member, died in 1868. Three of the five members from Doniphan county, Robert J. Porter, Benjamin Wrigley and John Stairwalt, are dead. The members from Linn, James M. Arthur and Josiah Lamb, are both dead, as are also N. C. Blood and P. H. Townsend, of Douglas; H. D. Preston, of Shawnee; Allen Crocker, of Woodson, and T. S. Wright, of Nemaha. W. R. Griffith, of Bourbon, was elected the first State Superintendent of Public Instruction, and died February 12, 1862, before the completion of his term. James G. Blunt, of Anderson, who became a Major-General during the war, and won renown as a brave and skillful soldier, died, in Washington, a year or more ago. James Hanway, of Franklin, after a long life of usefulness, died at his old home only a brief while ago. President James M. Winchell returned to New York shortly after the outbreak of the Rebellion, and resumed his connection with the Times, first as war correspondent, and afterwards as an editorial writer. Until his death, a few years since, he was employed upon that great journal.

SURVIVING MEMBERS.

Of the surviving members, many have attained the highest distinction of the State, and all, I believe, are useful and honored citizens. At the first election under the Constitution, Samuel A. Kingman was chosen as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court; in 1866 he was elected Chief Justice, and reëlected in 1872. Benj. F. Simpson was elected the first Attorney-General of the State, but resigned the position to enter the army, in which he served throughout the war. He has since been Speaker of the House of Representatives, several times a State Senator, and is now serving his second term as U. S. Marshal. Solon O. Thacher was chosen District Judge at the first election under the Constitution, has since occupied many positions of honor and responsibility, and is a member of the present State Senate. J. C. Burnett, S. D. Houston and Sam’l E. Hoffman were members of the first State Senate, and Geo. H. Lillie was a member of the first House of Representatives. E. G. Ross was appointed United States Senator in 1866, and elected in 1867, serving until 1871. John J. Ingalls was chosen a State Senator in 1861; was elected United States Senator in 1873, and reëlected in 1879, and is still occupying that distinguished place. John T. Burris was Lieutenant-Colonel of the Tenth Kansas, and subsequently District Judge. Wm. P. Dutton, James Blood, L. R. Palmer, John P. Greer and John Ritchie have filled many positions of local trust and prominence, with credit and usefulness. R. C. Foster and John W. Forman are residing in Texas; William Hutchinson lives in Washington; Ed. Stokes in Arkansas, and C. B. McClellan, E. Moore and E. M. Hubbard are still prominent and honored citizens of the counties they represented. My old friend, Col. Caleb May, sole surviving member of the three Free-State Constitutional Conventions, lives in Montgomery county. If Dean Swift was right in saying that “whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow on a spot of ground where one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians,” what honor is due this sturdy Kansas farmer, who, during a residence of twenty-eight years in the State, has never—not even in the disastrous seasons of 1860 and 1874—failed to raise a good crop. Even the heroic service he rendered the cause of Freedom during the darkest days of the struggle in Kansas, was less valuable to the State than this practical and triumphant vindication of its soil and climate.

“LOST TO SIGHT.”

Stalwart, quiet Wm. McCullough I have not heard of for many years. John A. Middleton, of Marshall county, was a soldier in the Seventh Kansas, removed to Montana in 1864, and I have learned nothing of him since. R. L. Williams, of Douglas; A. D. McCune, of Leavenworth; J. H. Signor, of Allen, and J. T. Barton, of Johnson, have all disappeared and left no sign. I know not whether they are living or dead.

THE OFFICERS.

Of the officers of the Convention, queer old George Warren, Sergeant-at-Arms of nearly all the early Kansas Legislatures and Conventions, died many years ago. Ed. S. Nash, the Journal Clerk, was Adjutant of the first Kansas, and died some years since in Chicago. Robt. St. Clair Graham, one of the Enrolling Clerks, was elected Judge of the Second Judicial District in 1866, and died in 1880. Richard J. Hinton, also an Enrolling Clerk, is the editor of the Washington (D. C.) Gazette, and a widely known journalist. Werter R. Davis, the Chaplain, was a member of the first State Legislature; was Chaplain of the Twelfth and Colonel of the Sixteenth Kansas regiments during the war, and is one of the most prominent clergymen of his denomination in the State. S. D. McDonald, printer to the Convention, is still engaged in journalism. J. M. Funk, the Doorkeeper, and J. L. Blanchard, the Assistant Secretary, I have not heard from or of for many years.

CONCLUSION.

I wish I could sketch more in detail the work and history of the members of the Convention. But this paper is, I know, already too long. I have tried to tell how our Constitution was made. I could not narrate, within reasonable limits,

“What workman wrought its ribs of steel,

Who made each mast, and sail, and rope,

What anvils rang, what hammers beat,

In what a forge and what a heat

Were shaped the anchors of its hope.”

It is enough to say that the work has proved strong and enduring. Through the groping inexperience of our State’s childhood and the still more perilous ambitions of its youth, through the storm of civil war and the calm of prosperous peace, the Wyandotte Constitution has justified the confident hopes of its early friends. The most marvelous changes have been wrought in this country since it was framed. The huge brick building in which the Convention held its sessions, long ago crumbled and fell. The distracted, dependent and turbulent Territory has grown to be a peaceful, powerful and prosperous State. Its hundred thousand people have multiplied to a million. Upon its vast and solitary prairies, where then bloomed a wild and unprofitable vegetation, “wherewith the mower filleth not his hand, nor he that bindeth sheaves his bosom,” miles of green meadows now glisten with morning dew, and thousands of golden wheat-fields shimmer in the noonday sun, and millions of acres of tasseling corn, rustling in the sweet twilight air, tell of harvests so bountiful that they would feed a continent. Every quiet valley and prairie swell is dotted with pleasant homes, where happy children laugh and play and men and women go their busy ways in prosperous content. Eager learners throng eight thousand school houses. Church bells ring in nearly every county from the Missouri to the Colorado line. More than four thousand miles of railway bind town and country, factory and farm and store, into one community. And over all the institutions and activities of this great, intelligent and orderly Commonwealth, broods the genius and spirit of the Wyandotte Constitution. Under its ample authority and direction, just and generous laws have maintained the rights of citizenship, given protection to labor and property, stimulated enterprise, multiplied industries, opened to every child and youth the door of school and college, encouraged morality, fostered temperance, protected the weak, restrained the strong, and sternly punished outbreaking crime. And still the sunshine of popular confidence and favor falls upon the Constitution. It has outlived half of its framers, and when, a quarter of a century hence, the last surviving member of the Convention awaits the inevitable hour, the Wyandotte Constitution may yet be the chart and compass ordering and guiding the destinies of a State whose imperial manhood is foreshadowed by its stalwart and stately youth.

EIGHTH KANSAS VETERAN VOLUNTEERS.

Address, delivered at the reunion of the Eighth Kansas Veteran Volunteer Infantry, held at Fort Leavenworth, October 10th, 11th and 12th, 1883.

Surviving members of the Eighth Kansas Veteran Volunteer Infantry, to the number of about one hundred, assembled at Camp Pope, on the Fort Leavenworth reservation, on the 10th, 11th and 12th of October, 1883. The headquarters of the “Society of the Eighth Kansas” were established in a tent opposite the general headquarters for the soldiers’ reunion, designated by a banner bearing the following inscription:

HEADQUARTERS

Eighth Kansas Vol. Infantry.

3d Brigade, 1st Division, 20th Army Corps,

1st Brigade, 3d Division, 4th Army Corps,

Army of the Cumberland.

Beneath this was painted the badge of the Third Division, Fourth Army Corps—to which the regiment was longest attached—a blue triangle, bearing the names of the most prominent engagements in which the Eighth took part, viz.:

Perryville.

Lancaster.

Brentwood Pike.

Tullahoma.

Caperton’s Ferry.

Chicamauga.

Chattanooga.

Orchard Knob.

Mission Ridge.

Knoxville Campaign.

Dandridge.

Kennesaw Mountain.

Peach Tree Creek.

Chattahoochie.

Atlanta.

Lovejoy Station.

Nashville.

On the afternoon of October 10th the roll was called by companies, and the day was spent in social greetings, in revisiting Fort Leavenworth, and in reviving recollections of the campaigns in which the command took part.

The Society elected the following officers for the ensuing year, viz.:

President—Colonel John A. Martin.

Vice-President—Lieutenant-Colonel John Conover.

Secretary—Sergeant Chas. W. Rust.

Treasurer—Lieutenant David Baker.

At the conclusion of the exercises in the “big tent,” the President, Colonel John A. Martin, delivered the following address, which was ordered printed in pamphlet form, together with the proceedings of the reunion and the names of those in attendance:

Comrades of the Eighth Kansas: There is always a charm in revisiting once familiar places after a long absence, and to a Kansas soldier this reservation will ever possess a fascinating interest. Here nearly all the troops young Kansas sent to the war were organized or equipped. And to those who were mustered here; who slept for the first time under canvas in the old blue-grass pasture, and there ate for the first time a soldier’s fare, Fort Leavenworth will always be holy ground.

I have paid many visits to this Post since the far-away days of ’61, but never have the scenes and incidents of that period been so vividly recalled as during the present occasion. The white tents, the trampled grass, the groups of men, half uniformed, half in citizens’ dress; the straggling stacks of arms, the marching columns, the orderlies coming and going, the notes of bugles and the music of fife and drum—these scenes and sounds seem to belong to the turbulent past rather than to the peaceful and prosperous present. The alien and unfamiliar feature is this great tent, and the speech-making within its canvas walls. The days of ’61 were not distinguished for talk. They were days of action. The speech-maker did his work then, as now, but not here on this reserve. I fancy that if “Old Prince,” that terror of the Kansas recruits, had caught a man making a speech on the reservation, he would have organized a drumhead court-martial at once, for his prompt trial and execution.

The place and the surroundings, as I have said, are familiar. And yet how vast the changes that have been wrought since the mustering here twenty-two years ago! It is doubtful if the adult male population of Kansas at that time greatly exceeded the numbers present at this reunion. The poor, harassed and feeble Territory has grown to be one of the greatest States in the Union, rich in all the elements of substantial prosperity; richer still in the imperial manhood of a citizenship which includes representatives of every regiment in the Union army. Plodding along in all the walks and ways of our now peaceful and quiet Kansas life are men who have fought on every battle-field of the civil war; men who were active participants in all the events of the greatest and most stirring drama of the world’s history; men whose personal recollections embrace the story of every march, camp, bivouac, skirmish and battle in which the armies of the Union engaged; men whose blood has been poured out in every combat where patriotism maintained the supremacy of our flag.

Is it any wonder that Kansas has, in the nearly two decades that have elapsed since the war closed, grown to be one of the greatest, most intelligent, and most prosperous of the States? Of what achievements, in the enterprises of civil life requiring courage, energy and resourceful vigor, is such blood and bone, and heart and brain, as make up her population, not capable? From the most sterile and reluctant soil a manhood of this order would wrest plenty. Is it wonderful that, when earth and air combine to aid its labors, this population should have made Kansas one of the greatest and most prosperous States in the Union?

I need not say how glad and proud I am, my dear old comrades, to meet and greet you, one and all, once more. It seems but a brief time since the Eighth Kansas Volunteer Infantry pitched its tents in the blue-grass of this reserve and was mustered into the service of the United States, “for three years or during the war.” But the whitening locks of many of its survivors, gathered here to-day, tell the story of time’s flight. The youngest soldiers in its ranks have reached middle age; the oldest are now old men, nearing the sunsets of their lives. The hardships and privations of march and camp, and the casualties of battle, decimated its ranks again and again during its long term of service; very many have since died, their lives shortened by wounds, or by the wasting effects of the campaigns in which they participated; and the survivors, scattered all over the country, probably do not number one-third of the 1,081 men who have answered “here” at its roll-calls.

It is no vain-glorious or empty boasting to declare, as I do, that to have served in the Eighth Kansas is a fact of which any man has a just right to be proud. No regiment in the army of the Union during the civil war can cite participation in campaigns of greater magnitude, events of more romantic and exciting interest, or marches over a vaster scope of country. Nor did any regiment more conspicuously illustrate, in camp or field, a loftier devotion to duty, a more unselfish patriotism, or a more constant courage.

The Eighth Kansas served in four of the great armies of the Union. Its service began in what was afterwards known as the “Army of the Frontier;” thence, early in 1862, it was transferred to the “Army of the Mississippi;” in the summer of the same year it joined the “Army of the Ohio;” and in November became a part of the “Army of the Cumberland.” With this military division it served until its final muster-out, in January, 1866.

Its organization was commenced in August, 1861, and its first company was mustered in on the 28th of that month. By the 12th of October, eight companies had been recruited and mustered; in December, the ninth was added; and early in January the regiment had its full complement. In February, however, a reorganization of Kansas regiments was made. Companies D and H, of the Eighth, which were cavalry, were transferred to the Ninth Kansas; Companies F and K were consolidated, and three companies of Colonel Graham’s battalion were transferred to the Eighth, making it a full regiment of infantry.

From the date of its organization, in September, 1861, until May, 1862, four companies of the regiment did duty along the Missouri border, in Southern Kansas; others formed part of the post garrisons at Forts Leavenworth, Riley, Kearney, and Laramie. Early in May five companies were ordered to Corinth, Mississippi, and proceeding to Columbus, Kentucky, by steamer, they marched thence along the line of the Mobile & Ohio Railroad to Corinth. After a service of two months in that army, the Division to which the Eighth was attached was ordered to reinforce General Buell. By rapid marches through Eastport, Mississippi, and Florence, Alabama, it joined the “Army of the Ohio” at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and took part in the extraordinary campaign which ended at Louisville, Kentucky. Thence it moved southward again, with the command to which it was attached, through Perryville and Lancaster to Crab Orchard, and thence to Nashville. There it remained nearly six months, doing provost duty, and there, in February and March, 1863, the five companies left in Kansas joined headquarters, and for the first time in its history the regiment was united.

Early in June, 1863, the Eighth rejoined its Division at Murfreesboro. It participated, during that summer, in the campaign against Tullahoma, and, late in August, forming the advance guard of the Twentieth Corps, crossed the Tennessee river at Caperton’s ferry, in pontoon boats. It took an active part in all the movements of the campaign which followed, ending with the battle of Chicamauga and the siege of Chattanooga. On the 23d of November, covering the front of its brigade as skirmishers, the Eighth captured Orchard Knob, the headquarters of Generals Grant and Thomas during the battles of the succeeding two days. On the 25th it participated in the storming of Mission Ridge, and its flag was one of the first, if not the first, planted on the summit.

Two days later the Eighth marched, with its corps, to the relief of Burnside, at Knoxville; took part in all the movements of that dreadful winter campaign, and formed a portion of the rear guard on the retreat from Dandridge.

Early in January, 1864, at Strawberry Plains, East Tennessee, four-fifths of all the members of the Eighth then present reënlisted as veterans. Returning home in February, the regiment received a furlough for thirty days. Reassembling at this Post, early in April, it returned to the South, and took part in the campaign against Atlanta. Thence, with its corps, it moved back to Nashville, and participated in the battle which ground the Rebel army of the West to atoms.

During the first six months of the year 1865, the Eighth was stationed at various points in Alabama and Tennessee, but late in July it was ordered to Texas, where it remained until the 29th of November, when it was mustered out, and ordered home for final discharge. It reached Fort Leavenworth on the 6th of January, 1866, and on the 9th was formally disbanded.

Its career, it will thus be seen, commenced at a very early period of the civil war, and terminated long after the last hostile shot had been fired. From the date of its organization until its final muster-out, there were 1,081 names on its rolls. But its largest numerical strength at any one time was 877, in March, 1862. The largest aggregate force, “present for duty,” was 656, at about the same date.

The records of its service show that it traveled 10,750 miles; participated in fifteen battles and many skirmishes; and lost in battle three commissioned officers and sixty-seven enlisted men killed; thirteen commissioned officers and two hundred and seventy-six enlisted men wounded; and one commissioned officer and twenty enlisted men missing; or a total of seventy killed, two hundred and eighty-nine wounded, and twenty-one missing; and an aggregate of three hundred and eighty killed, wounded and missing. Of the missing, nearly all were killed, and of the wounded about one-fifth died of their wounds. The regiment’s loss by the casualties of battle, it will thus be seen, was nearly sixty per cent. of the greatest number it ever had present for duty.

In addition to these losses three commissioned officers and ninety-two enlisted men died of disease; one hundred and ninety-two were discharged for disabilities resulting from wounds or disease; and fifty-three died of wounds. The total loss by death, including the seventy killed in battle, was two hundred and eighteen, and by discharge because of wounds and disease, one hundred and ninety-two, making a total loss, by death or disability, of four hundred and ten.

The regiment brought back to the State, and deposited at Topeka, three flags. Under the first, carried until it returned home on veteran furlough, in February, 1864, it marched 3,681 miles, and lost three commissioned officers and forty-nine enlisted men killed, ten commissioned officers and two hundred and eighteen enlisted men wounded, and twenty enlisted men missing. Under the second, carried until after the battle of Nashville, it marched 2,660 miles, and lost three commissioned officers wounded and one captured, and eighteen enlisted men killed and fifty-eight wounded. Under the third it traveled 4,409 miles, but sustained no loss in battle.

The largest loss the Eighth sustained in a single engagement was at Chicamauga, where out of a total of four hundred and six officers and men present, its killed, wounded and missing numbered two hundred and forty-three, or sixty per cent. of all engaged.

A brief, dull sketch this is of the services of the Eighth Kansas, I know. But I am anxious to condense it into as brief a space as possible; and dull as it is, it will revive in your memory a thousand thrilling recollections; meager as it is, it will give any soldier or any intelligent civilian who was an interested observer of the events of the war, a fairly comprehensive idea of the part the regiment bore in that great struggle. This is all I have sought to do. It would require volumes to tell the story in full. For this regiment not only saw all “the pomp and circumstance of war,” but all its ghastly desolation, misery and despair as well. It sounded all the notes alike of war’s pæan and of its dirge. The tramp of its swift and steady march echoed in the highways of twelve different States. Its bayonets flashed from Fort Laramie to the Gulf, and from Kansas to North Carolina. At Nashville it did duty in white gloves; at Strawberry Plains it was shirtless, shoeless, and in rags. It was feasted in Kansas and starved in Chattanooga. It hunted guerrillas in Missouri, combatted Longstreet’s veterans at Chicamauga, stormed the blazing heights of Mission Ridge, fought a continuous battle from Kennesaw Mountain to Atlanta, and broke the lines of Hood at Nashville. It built roads, bridged rivers, convoyed trains, destroyed railroads, operated mills, policed cities, gathered crops, and made history. And wherever it was, or whatsoever it was doing, the calm and patient endurance, the magnificent courage, the splendid discipline, and the unfaltering patriotism of its soldiers could always be relied on.

It is pleasant to remember, too, and I am sure there is no true soldier of the Eighth who will not proudly recall the fact, that on many different occasions the drill, discipline and military appearance of the regiment were complimented in official orders, issued from corps and army headquarters. At Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in June, 1863, the following order was published:

Inspector General’s Office, 20th Army Corps, }

Murfreesboro, June 19th, 1863. }

I take pleasure in reporting to you the following extract from the report of the Inspector of the First Division, especially as the same regiments have attracted the notice of the Corps Inspector:

Extract—“The drill, military appearance and dress of the Eighth Kansas is the best observed in the Division; that of the Twenty-fifth Illinois next.

(Signed)          H. W. Hall,

Captain, and Inspector First Division.”

Very respectfully,       Horace N. Fisher,

Lieutenant-Colonel, and Inspector-General.

Headquarters, 20th Army Corps, }

June 20th, 1863. }

Respectfully referred to Colonel Heg, commanding Third Brigade, First Division, who will have this creditable compliment conveyed to the above-mentioned regiments.

By command of Major-General McCook.

A. C. McClurg,

Capt. and A. A. G.

On the 15th of July, 1863, the following order was issued:

Headquarters, Department of the Cumberland, }

Inspector-General’s Office, Tullahoma, July 15, 1863. }

Colonel: I have the honor to make the following extract from the semi-monthly inspection report of Lieutenant-Colonel H. C. Fisher, Assistant Inspector-General 20th Army Corps:

Extract—“The Eighth Kansas, lately attached to this corps, is splendidly equipped and well cared for. Its long stay in Nashville has enabled it to attain a polish to a certain degree impracticable in the field, but its example is valuable to the corps.”

Very respectfully,      A. S. Burt, Capt. and A. A. G.

To Lieutenant-Colonel Goddard, A. A. G.

Headquarters, Department of the Cumberland, }

Tullahoma, July 19, 1863. }

Respectfully referred to the commanding officer of the Eighth Kansas.

By command of Major-General Rosecrans.

Wm. McMichael, Major and A. A. G.

A few weeks later the following order was issued:

Headquarters, 20th Army Corps, }

Inspector-General’s Office, Winchester, Tenn., July 31, 1863. }

Colonel: I have the honor to call your attention to the following extract from the report of Captain H. W. Hall, A. I. G. First Division, on the camps of the Third Brigade:

Extract—“The camps of the Eighth Kansas and Twenty-fifth Illinois are the best in the Division. These regiments vie with each other in excellence in every respect, and are models worthy of imitation for any troops with which it has been my fortune to associate.”

Very respectfully,      Horace N. Fisher, Lieut.-Col. and A. I. G.

Headquarters 20th Army Corps, }

July 31, 1863. }

Respectfully referred to the commanding officer, Third Brigade, First Division. The General commanding the corps is pleased to hear so favorable a report of the regiments of this Brigade.

By command of Major-General Sheridan.

G. P. Thurston, A. A. G. and Chief of Staff.

With these extracts I may fitly close this brief story of a regiment whose career was alike creditable to the State it represented and to the men who served in its ranks. I do not claim for the Eighth higher soldierly qualities than belonged to many other regiments. I simply assert that, having great opportunities to serve its country, it was always equal to them, and that wherever it was placed it did its whole duty. It was the only Kansas regiment that served in the great “Army of the Cumberland.” Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, and many other States had scores of splendid regiments in that grand army, but the Eighth alone represented the martial spirit of Kansas in its ranks. It would not be fair to say that the regiment was ever treated unjustly because of this fact; but it is true that when it first joined the army the Eighth was regarded with some suspicion and a great deal of curiosity. Whatsoever respect it won, whatsoever reputation it made, whatsoever fame it afterward enjoyed in that great army as a well-disciplined, brave and patriotic body of soldiers, was squarely and fairly earned by honest deserving, for it had neither original good repute nor the kindly aid of other regiments bearing the name of the same State, to promote its fortunes and its reputation. Alone in a great army of two hundred thousand, this little body of seven hundred men kept stainless the honor and added luster to the fame of Kansas. In less than six months after it joined the Army of the Cumberland, no regiment was better or more favorably known; and until its final muster-out it steadily held the respect and confidence of its commanding generals and of the troops with which it was most intimately associated.

In the noisy and distracting political feuds which were so numerous in Kansas at that day, the Eighth had no part nor lot. It was so far away as to be beyond even their echo. No man who belonged to it ever made money out of the war. One and all, officers and men, they came out of the army as poor in purse as when they entered it; but they brought back and deposited in the State House at Topeka three torn and tattered flags that all the wealth of this year’s harvest could not buy. Kansas will preserve among her priceless treasures, as long as her government shall endure, these ragged and faded flags—all that remain of the Eighth Kansas Volunteer Infantry except its few hundred scattered survivors and the history with which it glorified the name of the State.

SPEECH

Accepting the Republican Nomination for Governor, before the Republican State Convention, July 17th, 1884.

Gentlemen of the Convention: I am profoundly sensible of the distinguished honor you have conferred upon me. To be selected for the Chief Magistracy of such a State as this, by even a bare majority of such a Convention as this, would be a distinction of which any citizen might justly be proud. To be nominated for that position, as I have been, with such unprecedented unanimity, and to know that your preference fairly voiced that of the great party you represent, is an honor which not only fills the measure of my ambition, but overwhelms me with anxiety. For how shall I deserve such generous confidence? How can I make return for your kindness, your trust, your friendship?

I can only say, at this time, that I accept your nomination with sincere gratitude, and that the duties and responsibilities it imposes on me I shall endeavor to discharge faithfully, honestly, and to the best of my ability, conscious that I have behind me, to guide, counsel and assist me, the best brain, the best thought, the highest and most enlightened intelligence, the purest and bravest purpose—in short, the Republican party of Kansas.

This State has been my home for nearly twenty-eight years. With its growth, its interests, its thoughts, my whole life, since boyhood, has been identified. I have watched, with anxious solicitude, every step and stage of its wonderful development, and every year my pride and confidence in its great future have been more than justified. I have, too, during all of that period, given my conscientious adherence to the Republican party. Doubt or question as to what party my allegiance was due, has never entered my mind. From the date of its admission into the Union until the present time, the Republican party has steadily controlled the destinies of this State. Can anyone truthfully assert that it has not governed wisely and well? Let the results of its rule—the abounding prosperity that fills the homes of Kansas; the peace, order and sobriety prevailing throughout its borders; its marvelous growth, unparalleled in the growth of any other American State—let these accomplished facts make answer. In its infancy the Republican party of Kansas enriched the history of a dark and troubled period with a record of duties bravely and humanely discharged. In its youth, when war-drums were throbbing and battle-flags were waving, the government it inaugurated not only protected the borders of the State against hostile invasion, but sent more men to the war, in proportion to population, than any other State of the Union. In its manhood it has given to the people an honest, economical, stable administration; has dotted every hill-top with schools; has made generous provision for the unfortunate; has sternly repressed outbreaking crime; and has made life and property as secure as they are anywhere under the shining stars. This is, briefly stated, the record of Republican administration in Kansas. Match it, if you can, with the history of any party in any other State.

This is not the time for a discussion of the broader issues of national politics. Blaine and Logan need no eulogy. For a quarter of a century, in war and in peace, their career has been inseparably associated with the grandest and most beneficent achievements of the Nation. The people know them, and love them, and propose to elect them.

And now, gentlemen, before you, the delegated representatives of the Republican party of Kansas, I renew my allegiance to Republicanism, to Kansas; to her constitution, her laws, and to the platform here adopted, which speaks for each and all of them.

SPEECH

Made before the Republican Convention of Atchison County, October 8, 1884.

Gentlemen of the Convention: Twenty-five years ago, on the 7th of the month of May, I called to order the first Republican convention ever held in this county. It was a mass convention, yet those in attendance hardly exceeded in number the delegates assembled here to-day, representing the Republican voters of Atchison county. It was called to organize the Republican party of the county, and to elect delegates to the first Republican Territorial convention, held at Osawatomie eleven days later. The Republican party of Atchison county and of Kansas has, therefore, just passed its twenty-fifth birthday. And to those who have been identified with its history during that long, eventful period, this rounding of a full quarter of a century of party life is an occasion of more than ordinary interest.

Our political opponents now and then sneer at the fact that Republicans “point with pride to the past.” But surely if the Republican party is to survive for another quarter of a century, its most ardent friends could wish for it no nobler record, no prouder history, no more beneficent and useful career, than that of the past twenty-five years. Kansas was, in 1859, a poor, weak, distracted, oppressed Territory. What a great, prosperous, imperial commonwealth it now is! A million and a quarter of people, living in the richest and most prosperous State of the Union—a State gridironed by railways, dotted with school-houses and churches, and growing steadily, not only in wealth and power and influence, but in all the elements of the most advanced civilization—the Kansas of to-day is alike the pride of her own citizens, and the wonder and admiration of the whole civilized world.

And why should not a political party, like an individual, proudly point to an honorable record of noble endeavors and great achievements? It is something to belong to a party that can be pointed to without blushing. It is something to have a record that does not have to be explained, denied, or lied about. When a man can say that he belongs to a party which crushed the Rebellion, abolished Slavery, preserved the Union, and made this a great Nation; a party that has dotted the land with school-houses; a party that gave to the people the Homestead Law, and established the best financial system the world ever knew, it is something to be proud of. And when he can add that he belongs to a party which intends to see that the civil rights of every American citizen are protected at home or abroad; that every legal voter shall have a right to cast one free, unintimidated ballot, and to have that ballot honestly counted; that the debt of gratitude the country owes to the soldiers and sailors of the Union shall be honestly remembered and repaid; that the people shall be protected against unjust extortions or discriminations by corporate power; and that laws enacted by the people, for the people, shall be respected and enforced—all this is also something to be proud of.

For twenty-five years I have annually, except during the period of the war and for about two years thereafter, called to order the Republican conventions of Atchison county. During all of that time I have been Chairman of your County Central Committee. To-day, probably for the last time, I discharge this pleasant duty, and I avail myself of the opportunity to return my sincere thanks to the Republicans of this county for their constant confidence and devoted friendship—a confidence and friendship that has never been denied me; that has never wavered or faltered during all the lights and shadows of twenty-five revolving years. Before I was a voter you made me the Chairman of your County Executive Committee, and annually, ever since, except during the years when I was absent in the army, you have reëlected me to this place. The measure of my gratitude to you, fellow-Republicans of Atchison county, cannot be expressed in words. I have tried to express it by ardent devotion to Republican principles, and by the most constant and enthusiastic efforts to promote and secure the triumph of the Republican party.

I want to add, as I think I can with entire truthfulness, that during all of this period I have never attempted to act the part of a political “boss.” I have avoided, rather than sought, authority or power to dictate nominations, or to control the action of conventions. No man can truthfully say that I have ever attempted to thwart a fair expression of Republican sentiment, or to force upon the party an unwelcome or an unworthy candidate, or to prevent the nomination of any man who was clearly the choice of the Republican voters. No man can truthfully say that I have ever provoked or encouraged factional feuds, or stirred up personal strife, in the party ranks. No man can truthfully say that I have ever refused to subordinate my personal interests, or my individual preferences or prejudices, in order to promote or secure Republican success. On the contrary, it has been my constant, earnest endeavor to harmonize, consolidate and strengthen the Republican party; to preserve peace in its ranks; and to make it a united, vigorous, and victorious party. To this end, and for these objects, I have often endured, without complaint, undeserved censure, and have preferred to be misunderstood and even misrepresented rather than to imperil Republican success by quarreling with those who misunderstood me. Time at last sets all things right, and I have always been content to await the just judgment of its final awards.

And now, gentlemen of the convention, invoking upon your deliberations the blessings of harmony and the saving grace of Republican common sense, and appealing to you to remember that your opponents alone rejoice over and are benefited by personal and factional feuds in your ranks, I await your pleasure.

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY.

Speech delivered at Washington, Kansas, October 24, 1884.

Ladies and Gentlemen: I must beg the charity alike of your silence and of your patient forbearance. I am not an orator. I make no pretensions as a public speaker. For while I have been talking to my fellow-citizens of Kansas for more than a quarter of a century, it has been through the medium of printed words, and not from the platform or on the stump. Only because I have been nominated by the Republican party of the State for an official position, and am thus, by the customs and usages of partisan politics, expected to attend and address such assemblages as this, do I appear before you. But I know the people of Kansas are as generous as they are intelligent, and hence, although fully conscious of my own deficiencies, I trust implicitly in their kindness, and shall endeavor as best I can to explain to you the reasons why I am a Republican, and why I think every good citizen should give his influence and his vote to secure the triumph to that party.

I am a Republican, first, because I believe the Republican party to be the most intelligent, progressive and beneficent political organization ever known in this or any other country. Its whole existence has been a blessing to the American people. It has enriched our history with a long record of splendid achievements. It preserved the Union. It abolished slavery. It enfranchised a race. It enacted the homestead law; and it has girded the continent with railways. It has given the people a sound currency, and it has protected, elevated and dignified American industries and American labor. It has glorified the history of the age with a long list of imperishable names—the names of Lincoln, and Seward, and Grant, and Sherman, and Sumner, and Garfield, and Blaine, and Logan, and a host of others, which will never fade from the recollections of a grateful people. In twenty-three years it has raised this Nation to the foremost place among the Nations of the earth, and made the American name respected all around the globe. It has elevated, improved and purified the civil service, and systematized all departments of the Government. It has collected the public revenue at a less percentage of cost than ever before, and handled the money of the Government at a far less percentage of loss than ever before. It has generously cared for the disabled soldiers of the Union, and for the widows and orphans of our dead heroes. The true Republican glories in his party’s history. He asks no man to forget a line or word of it.

I am a Republican because I am a Kansan. I came to this State when it was a Territory governed by the Democratic party. I learned something of Democratic methods, policies and principles during those years. I saw a free people denied their dearest political rights. I saw all the power and authority of the National Administration exerted to fasten slavery upon this State, against the will of a large majority of its citizens. I know the history of that period by heart, and there is no record so stained with usurpations, so crowded with wrong, injustice and tyranny, so sullied with crime, as is the record of the years from 1855 to 1861, when the Democratic party controlled the affairs of Kansas. Contrast that period with the Republican administration of the past twenty-three years, and the development, the enterprise, the prosperity, the world-wide fame, that have gone hand in hand with it. I have seen Kansas grow from a half-tilled, forlorn strip along the west bank of the Missouri, into a splendid, imperial State, with nearly a million and a quarter of inhabitants—a State with nearly eighteen million acres occupied as farms, with over four thousand miles of railway, seven thousand school-houses and a thousand churches, and with property aggregating in value nearly five hundred million dollars. All this growth, all this enterprise, all this marvelous prosperity, began with and has continued under Republican rule—clean, healthy, intelligent rule, worthily representing the brain and heart and energy of a Republican constituency.

I am a Republican because I was a Union soldier. I know that there were loyal Democrats, and I shall never fail to do full justice to their patriotism. I have served side by side with them, in camp, and march, and battle, and I honor their courage and their devotion to the flag of the Republic. But I know, also, that while thousands of Democrats proved themselves true patriots during the war, the Democratic party, as a political organization, was persistently and consistently disloyal. At the outbreak of the war, it denied the right of the Government to “coerce a sovereign State,” and from the first flash of the gun at Sumter until the last shot at Bentonville, it never ceased to predict failure for the Union arms, and to strive to make its prophecy a reality. It discouraged enlistments, resisted the draft, and denounced and slandered the patient, suffering, great-souled President, upon whom the sorrows of a stricken Nation hung so heavily. It encouraged foreign countries to interfere in our affairs; it assailed the greenback currency, issued to meet the expenses of the war, as “worthless rags;” and it did all in its power to break down the credit of the Government. And finally, just on the eve of our complete triumph, when Grant was slowly tightening his grasp around the throat of the Rebellion, at Richmond, and Sherman’s invincible army was preparing to enter Atlanta, and the guns of Farragut were thundering victory in Mobile Bay, the Democratic party, assembled in national convention at Chicago, formally resolved that the war was “a failure,” and clamored for a dishonorable peace.

This is the record, briefly told, of the Democratic party during the civil war, when the fate of the Republic, and of human liberty the world over, were trembling in the balance. I am a Republican, as I have said, because of these facts. And while I honor the Democrat who, severing all party ties, cast his lot with the Union during the war, I shall never forgive, and never cease to execrate, the man who, during that dark period, was, in his sympathies and his actions, that meanest of all created beings, a “Copperhead.”

A generation has grown up since the close of the Rebellion, and there are those in this audience, I have no doubt, who do not understand the full meaning of this detested name. For their instruction, I want to add a few words concerning it. The underlying cause of the civil war was the affirmation of the right of secession. The Southern idea—and it was one that had been taught for generations—was that the States were sovereign; that a citizen’s first allegiance was due to his State; that the Union was a mere compact of agreeing States, from which any one or more had a right to withdraw whenever longer association was not desirable to it or them. The Northern idea was that the Union of the States constituted a Nation; that the Republic could not be broken up by one or more of the States; that a citizen’s first allegiance was due to the Nation; and that the interests of all the States were so indissolubly associated that the Republic had a sovereign right to protect them against attack by one or more of the States.

Educated for generations to believe in the right of secession, it is not strange that Southern men who did not believe any real cause for a dissolution of the Union existed, went with their States when they determined to secede. Taught, from infancy, that their first allegiance was due to the State, it was not singular that they rallied to its standard when it called on them, and that, during four years of desperate war, they fought, with a courage and steadfastness that challenges the admiration of all men, for the idea, the principle, they had been educated to believe was right.

But the men of the Northern States who sympathized with the Rebellion, and did everything in their power to promote its success, had no such excuse. Their conduct cannot be palliated or defended on any possible ground. If they believed in the Northern idea, that a citizen’s allegiance was due to the Nation, it was their plain duty to support the Union cause. If they believed in the Southern idea, that a citizen’s allegiance was due to his State, it was equally their plain duty to stand by and defend their own State and the cause it maintained.

The most loyal man can, therefore, respect the motives of the men of Southern birth who followed their States. But what man, Northern or Southern, Union or Confederate, can respect the motives and actions of those malignant, crawling, venomous human reptiles known as “Copperheads”—the men of Northern birth and education who kept up a constant “fire in the rear” upon the soldiers from their own States, and whose conduct prolonged the war for years, made thousands of graves in the Southern valleys, and filled thousands of Northern homes—the homes of their neighbors and townsmen—with a grief whose shadow has never been lifted, even to this day.

I am a Republican because I am in favor of an honest ballot and a fair count. No right-thinking, rightly-educated American citizen will ever grumble at the adverse decision of an honest majority. But if our form of government is to endure, the right of every legal voter to cast one vote for which party he pleases to cast it, and to have that vote counted as it was cast, must be placed beyond doubt or dispute. For nearly ten years past, in no less than eight States of this Union, popular elections have been a cheat and a farce. The shot-gun or tissue-ballots have made the decisions recorded at the polls. In at least five States, Mississippi, Louisiana, South and North Carolina and Florida, there has not been even the pretense of a fair, free vote for ten years past. Each one of these States is Republican by as large and as reliable a majority as is Iowa, Nebraska, or Kansas. But the voice of their legal voters is systematically and regularly stifled, either by force or fraud. There is no issue in politics, no question before the American people, so momentous in the consequences of its decision as is this one of a fair, free, honest ballot-box. Because its settlement involves all other questions that the ballot-box should settle. If I am prevented from voting by terrorism; or if my vote, when cast, is not counted, or is swamped by two other ballots fraudulently put into the ballot-box, I am absolutely deprived of the highest privilege of American citizenship—the constitutional right of aiding to choose the men who make laws for my government and expend the money I pay in the form of taxes. I shall never cease voting the Republican ticket until there is a final end put to terrorism, and tissue-ballots, and false counting, in the States lately in rebellion. All other questions, in my judgment, are dwarfed in the presence of this all-embracing, all-controlling question of a free, pure ballot-box. For that is the very foundation-stone, not only of popular government, but of human rights. On its proper settlement depends the intelligent, rightful decision of all other questions, social, moral, economic, or political—more than that, the very existence of the Government itself. If elections are a cheat, the rule of the minority is substituted for that of the majority. Majorities do not cheat at the polls. Ballot-box frauds are always the work of minorities. And if they are successful and long continued, what results follow? First, and inevitably, contempt for the decision of elections; then a refusal to acquiesce in the results so obtained; then social turmoil, rebellion, and civil war.

I am a Republican because I am opposed to the domination of the “solid South.” For fifty years the Southern States dominated this country. They were feebler in numbers, in wealth, in enterprise, in commerce, in all the elements that make a nation strong and great, than were the Northern States. Yet until the outbreak of the war, they governed the country absolutely. They made a frantic appeal to arms when their domination was at last challenged, and were crushed by arms. They have for the past eight years been kept “solid” by the most atrocious crimes that ever disgraced a civilized nation—by terrorism, by the Ku-Klux Klans, by midnight murder, by tissue ballots, by wholesale cheating and false counting. A South made “solid” by such methods is a standing menace to free government, and should be confronted by a North made “solid” by love of justice, peace, fair play, and a free and unintimidated ballot. The Republican party should remain in power until a Republican is as safe and as free in Mississippi as a Democrat is in Kansas; until every citizen, white or black, can cast his vote without fear, and have it honestly counted; and until the South consents to accept the idea of political toleration, and gives up the idea that it can ever again be the master of this Government.

I am a Republican because the Republican party is not ashamed of its past. No Republican is afraid or ashamed to have his children read the history of the past quarter of a century. The Democratic party, when anything is said of its past history, pleads for the mercy of oblivion and forgetfulness. If the false disciple was to come back to earth, he would probably say: “What, are you fellows still harping about those thirty pieces of silver?” In very much the same mournful, injured tone, the Democrats say to the Republicans: “What, are you still flaunting the bloody shirt?” The faithful Republican has a right to be proud of his party’s history. It has never abandoned a position it has once taken, and it has never taken a position not in harmony with the greatest good of the greatest number. No Republican ever tore down his country’s flag, and spat upon it. No Republican ever called the soldiers of the Union “Lincoln hirelings” and “lop-eared Dutch.” No Republican ever mounted guard around the prison hell at Andersonville. No Republican ever rejoiced when the armies of the Union suffered a defeat, or grieved when the hosts of the Rebellion were driven from fields of battle. No Republican was ever a member of those traitorous, sneaking, cowardly Copperhead organizations, the “Knights of the Golden Circle” and the “Sons of Liberty.” No Republican belonged to Quantrill’s brutal gang of ruffians and assassins, who burned defenseless Lawrence, and murdered her unarmed citizens. No Republican ever rode at night with the bloody Ku-Klux. No Republican ever took part in such brutal massacres as those at Hamburg and New Orleans. No Republican ever attempted to win a National election by forging a letter, or blackguarding a good wife and mother, or defacing the tombstone of a little child. No Republican ever voted to disfranchise the soldiers of the Union while they were absent fighting the battles of the country. No Republican ever called Abraham Lincoln a “baboon and an ape,” or denounced Ulysses S. Grant as a “drunken tanner” and a “brutal butcher,” or was caught, at midnight, scrawling “329” on his neighbor’s doorstep. There is a splendid anthem which, during the war, was sung in every camp, and to whose majestic music a million soldiers marched—the Song of Old John Brown. There is another, no less thrilling in its glorious chorus, which warms and stirs the hearts of patriotic Americans whenever they hear its splendid music—the song which tells the story of the great March to the Sea. No Democratic Convention ever sang, no Democratic Convention can sing or dares to sing, either of these songs.

Twenty-one years ago this fall a regiment of Kansas soldiers was engaged, for two days, in a desperate conflict with the armed hosts of treason, in the tangled underbrush at Chicamagua. Two years before, they had marched away from the State, proud, happy, hopeful, each with the glad picture of a country saved imprinted upon his heart and lighting up the future of his imagination. Life was as dear and love as sweet to those Kansas boys as to any of you assembled here to-day. But when the sun went down on the second day of that fierce battle, over sixty per cent. of those Kansas boys—sixty out of every hundred—were lying, dead or wounded, on the blood-stained field. They had been, for more than two years, my comrades, my friends, my “boys,” and I loved them, one and all. Not a shot fired at them, not a bullet that laid one of them low, was fired by a Republican.

These are things which, for one, I never intend to forget. I don’t want to forget them. I take pride, as a Republican, in remembering that no Republican has to apologize for any such wrongs, or crimes, or outrages as these.

The Democrats sneer at this kind of talk as “waving the bloody shirt.” But this insulting sneer only illustrates the character of that party. The “bloody shirt” that is thus derided is the old gray army shirt that covered the breasts of patriot soldiers, and was torn and stained by bullets aimed at the life of the Republic. That old gray army shirt went over the Rebel works at Donelson, through the cedars at Stone River, into the tangled forest at Chicamauga, and up the blazing heights of Mission Ridge. That old gray army shirt was torn and stained at Corinth and Antietam, and sanctified at Prairie Grove, Gettysburg, and Atlanta. That old gray army shirt is as full of glory, and as beautiful, in every true patriot’s eyes, as are the stars and stripes of our splendid flag, because it typifies the loyalty, the heroism, and the sacrifices of the glorious men who wore it, and with whose patriotic blood it was reddened. This is “the bloody shirt” that is made, in every campaign, the stale joke of every Democratic orator and the cheap catch-word of every Democratic journal.

I am a Republican because I am opposed to a “change” merely for the sake of change. This restless, senseless clamor is the very essence of stupidity. A demand for a change should have back of it some substantial reasons. There are absolutely none in the present condition of the National Government. The country is substantially prosperous. Labor is in demand, and commands good prices; capital is busy and secure. The party in power has justified the confidence of the people. Money is as plenty now as it has ever been, and it has a steady value. The man who has a dollar in his pocket knows that speculators and gold-gamblers cannot, by some juggle, take five cents or ten cents from its value, in twenty-four hours, as they could a few years ago. The public burdens have been largely reduced. Our exports far exceed our imports, and our balance-sheet with the world shows an immense sum in our favor. The boom of business is heard in the land. The preachers of calamity are out of date. Commerce, industry, enterprise, capital, labor, all feel the impulse of substantial prosperity running through every artery of public and private activities. These are the evidences, on every hand, of the wisdom of Republican administration. And what are we offered as an inducement for “a change”? Absolutely nothing save the cheap protestations of cheap and hungry Democratic orators and newspapers that, should their party be returned to power, it does not intend, as it threatened a few years ago, to destroy the public credit, cripple manufacturing industries, debase the currency, and destroy our banking system. Only this, and nothing more.

I am a Republican because I am in favor of protecting American industries and American labor. The population of the United States is increasing at the rate of a million a year; the wealth of our country is augmenting at the rate of two hundred millions annually; its coal area is more than six times as great as that of all Europe; its iron mines are capable of supporting a prodigious manufacturing population; its railways aggregate nearly a hundred thousand miles; its agricultural and mineral resources are incalculable; and it can produce, within its own territorial limits, almost everything produced in any other country of the habitable globe. Such a country as this, with such vast and varied productions and resources, must legislate, not for the world, but for itself. During the twenty-four years of Republican rule it has had an unexampled growth. Its population has increased over sixty per cent.; its agricultural exports over six hundred per cent.; and its foreign trade from seven hundred millions to nearly twelve hundred millions of dollars annually. Under Republican administration opportunities for employment have enormously multiplied, and consumers and producers have constantly been brought nearer to one another, through the vast increase of manufacturing industries. At the same time nearly every manufactured article is cheaper, to-day, in the United States than it was thirty years ago, when ninety per cent. of our manufactured goods were made abroad, instead of only ten per cent., as now. The Republican policy of protection to home industries is making this a self-sustaining, self-relying country. It is giving muscle an equal chance with money. It is developing and enlarging all the sources of National prosperity. It has made all the people happier, healthier, and more contented than they ever were before, or could be under any other policy. Millions of men, who win their bread by the labor of their hands or brain, know this, and they are swelling the ranks of the great party that has always been the advocate and protector of American labor. The black banners of industry that float in the morning air from countless factories all over the land; the clangor of a hundred thousand trailing trains; the whirling clatter of a million wheels and spindles—these are the sign-manuals which the Republican policy of protection has written, in indelible letters, on the face of the busy land.

And now, having given you the reasons for “the faith that is in me”—having told you why I am a Republican, and why, in my judgment, every good citizen ought to be a Republican—I want to add a few words of personal import. I am the candidate of this great party for the highest executive office in the gift of the people of Kansas. I was nominated by the unanimous vote of the largest delegate convention ever held in the State; by a Convention representing every county, city and township in the State; by a Convention whose proceedings were distinguished for fairness, decorum, intelligence, and sobriety; by a Convention whose delegates were chosen with almost unprecedented unanimity, and who fairly, I think I have good reason for saying, voiced the preference of a vast majority of the Republicans of Kansas. I was nominated by this great Convention, not only with entire unanimity, but without pledges or promises from me, and without trades, combinations, or any manner of political trickery. I was nominated on a platform which any honest, self-respecting, law-respecting, law-obeying Republican can indorse, and ought to indorse. Yet I am told that there are men, claiming to be Republicans, who say they are going to vote against me, and vote for my opponent, because they don’t like the platform.

To this class of men, and to all others, I want to say a few words. All State officers are required to make solemn oath that they will support the Constitution of the State, and the Constitution specifically sets forth that the Governor “shall see that the laws are faithfully executed.” The Republican party, in its platform, simply affirms this plain Constitutional duty. The people of the State, in their sovereign capacity, and without distinction of party, have adopted a Constitutional provision known as the prohibitory amendment. It was voted for by nearly one hundred thousand citizens; it received a majority of nearly eight thousand of the votes cast on the question; and it received the support of nearly nine thousand more voters than cast their ballots for the present Governor, whose election has never been challenged. The Supreme Court of the State has affirmed the validity of this amendment, and of all the forms by which it was adopted. Yet it is asserted that because the Republican party recognizes, in its platform, these unchallenged, unquestionable facts, and demands that State officers shall faithfully and honestly discharge the duties imposed upon them by the Constitution and by their oath of office, I am to be opposed by men calling themselves Republicans.

If this be true, I shall make no complaint. I want to be fairly, explicitly understood. If I am elected Governor, when, in the presence of Almighty God and the sovereign people of Kansas, I raise my hand to take the oath of office, I shall not do so with falsehood on my lips and perjury in my heart. I will not equivocate. I will do my duty, under the Constitution and laws I have sworn to see faithfully executed. I make no apology to any person under the shining stars for holding this faith. I am grateful—sincerely grateful—to the Republicans of Kansas for the distinguished honor they have conferred upon me. I appreciate their confidence, their esteem, their friendship, and I shall try, earnestly try, to deserve it. But I should feel that I had dishonored the great party to secure whose triumph I have devoted all the years of my manhood; that I had brought deserved reproach upon myself, and the wife and little children who bear my name, if, having been honored by an election as the Chief Executive of this splendid, prosperous, intelligent Commonwealth, I should, by any act, or word, or deed, prove false to my oath of office, or to the duties I voluntarily assumed.

I did not vote for the prohibitory amendment. But I accept, as a law-respecting citizen, the decision of the majority on this question. Ours is a people’s government, a Republican government, in which the majority rule and ought to rule. And he is neither a good Republican nor a true American who refuses to subordinate his own opinions, his own preferences or prejudices, to the decision of the majority. This is the very foundation-stone on which the whole fabric of our government rests. Destroy it, remove it, and lawlessness, anarchy, civil war, are the natural and inevitable consequences. I believe in the right of the people to rule. I am for peace, for order, for liberty regulated by law, and for the conservators of all of them—popular education, intelligence, sobriety, and a Constitutional government which the chosen officers of the people administer in accordance with the expressed will of the people, for the people, and to promote the people’s interests.

If there is a Republican, here or anywhere in the State—a Republican who glories in his party’s glorious record, as I do; who is proud of the splendid achievements with which it has illuminated the brightest pages of the world’s progress, as I am; who believes it is the party of intelligence, of social order, of law, as I do—if there is a man here who is, or ever has been, a Republican of this order, and who is going to vote against this great, intelligent, beneficent, law-respecting party, in the present contest in Kansas, because it sustains the Constitution of the State, and demands that sworn officers shall faithfully and honestly execute the laws of the State, I should like to see him. If there is such a man here, I should like to see him stand up and be counted.

Such a man—if there is one—is not, and never was, a true Republican. He may have voted the Republican ticket now and then, and called himself a Republican; but he has never had, he has not now, the real grace of true Republicanism in his heart. More than this, he is not even a true American. The genuine American respects the decisions of majorities, and bows in humble submission to the majesty of law. He loves the flag of his country, not because it is red, white, and blue, but because it is the symbol of the people’s government, of social order, of the Constitution and laws of the land. When the soldier saw it, among the tangled underbrush at Chicamauga, or moving up the embattled heights of Mission Ridge, or half enshrouded in the sulphurous smoke at Gettysburg, or planted amid the dead and dying on the ramparts of Vicksburg, it was not a piece of striped cloth he saw, but his country’s body and blood—her education, her progress, her moral, social, commercial, and political systems, her Constitution and her laws—and this was why he was ready to follow the flag, and fight for it, and die for it if need be, that all it symbolized might be preserved, a priceless heritage for all the generations of men.

Alike as a citizen or as a public officer I shall at all times maintain and uphold these ideas of private and public duty, because the whole fabric of our American system of government rests upon them.

Now, my friends, I shall not detain you longer. In telling you why I am a Republican, I have stated the reasons why, in my judgment, every man who loves his country, every citizen who values good government, every citizen who appreciates the blessings of liberty regulated by law, should be a Republican. And a Republican, my friends, is a man who votes the Republican ticket. This little fact ought to be understood. The man who says he is a Republican, and in the same breath declares that he is going to vote the Democratic ticket, or for Democratic candidates, is—well, he need not be surprised if everybody mistakes him for a Democrat. As the old colored woman said: “It’s ’stonishin’ how dem pickanninies look like one anoder—’speshully Pomp!” If you are a Republican, stand by your party and its candidates. “Kicking” is the characteristic of a mule, but I never heard that it added either to the value of the animal or to the esteem in which he is held. The horse that has a habit of “bolting” when the race is on, may be a good-enough horse, but he never wins either confidence, cheers, or purses. The brood of “kickers” and “bolters” is not one that should be emulated. Stand up for your party, wholly, completely, or not at all. Keep in its ranks, or go over to the enemy. A beautiful spectacle—a spectacle for gods and men—is the Republican who says he is going to march through this campaign that is just opening, shouting for Blaine and Logan, but will march with a crowd that regards no slander too vile, no abuse too low, no denunciation too vulgar or too bitter to apply to Blaine and Logan! Just think of a Democratic procession with these “kickers” in its ranks—before them an old-fashioned Democratic banner, inscribed: “Do you want your daughter to marry a nigger?” And behind them other banners, bearing such inscriptions as: “Jim Blaine, the Tattooed Man—Read the Mulligan Letters;” or, “Jack Logan Enlisting Men for the Rebel Army;” or, “The Republican Party Must Go that Free Whisky May Come!” Don’t you think it would stir the heart and warm the blood of a true Republican to march with such a crowd? Could any genuine Republican do it?

With such a record as it can point to, the Republican party has a right to expect the continued devotion of the best minds and hearts of the country. It has a right to more than this. It has a right to expect of its members and friends that unity, concord and tolerance so essential to its success. It has a right to demand of its members that they shall not indulge in useless quarrels over differences which only the lapse of time can finally adjust and reconcile. Every soldier who followed the old flag will, I think, call to mind occasions when he firmly believed that the war was not conducted as it should be, and when the gravest differences of opinion concerning the methods and policy of his commanders were widely prevalent. But if he was a true soldier, he remembers also, and with justifiable pride, that while he occasionally indulged a soldier’s privilege, and did a little wholesome private growling, he never for an instant forgot his duty to his country, and abated no jot of his enthusiastic devotion to her cause. During the war there was only one Fitz John Porter. The Republican who thinks Porter was justly punished, should not, in politics, emulate his example. The true soldier was for his country, no matter how his commanders conducted the war; the true Republican, animated by the same spirit, aims his guns at the common enemy, and never at the soldiers of the Republican ranks.

THE CAMPAIGN OF 1884.

Speech delivered at Manhattan, Kansas, November 21st, 1884.

My Friends and Fellow-Citizens of Manhattan: I came to your jubilee, as some of you know, with grave reluctance. This was not because I failed to appreciate your generous kindness in desiring to celebrate my election. It was not because I was not sincerely thankful to you for your earnest support in the canvass just closed. It was not because I was not deeply and profoundly sensible of the great honor done me by the people of this intelligent and prosperous State. Nor was it because I would not willingly and gladly meet with the people of this enterprising, beautiful and growing city—the seat of one of the most important of our great institutions of learning—on the occasion of any social or political celebration to which their partiality and kindness might summon me.

But when I first received your invitation, the result of the great quadrennial struggle between the opposing and enduring forces of Loyalty, Liberty and Progress was not yet determined. And it seemed to me that no gratulation personal to myself, no celebration of a victory that embraced only the narrow confines of a State, was allowable while the tremendous issues of the National contest were involved in doubt.

I come now, in response to your summons, with a heavy heart. The Republican victory in Kansas was, I know, complete. The largest vote ever polled in the State shows the largest Republican majority, and the vote cast for me exceeds the wildest anticipations of my most sanguine friends. To receive nearly double the votes cast for the Republican nominee two years ago; to turn a minority of nearly ten thousand into a majority of nearly forty thousand; to be indorsed by a majority of the votes cast in all but about half a dozen counties of the State; to receive over twenty-five thousand more votes than were cast for the Republican candidate for President four years ago; and notwithstanding the fact that the whole force of the enemy’s attack was massed against me, to fall only a little more than six thousand votes behind the poll for James G. Blaine, who for ten years past has been the idol of the people of Kansas—this is indeed a victory, a triumph, of which any man would have a just right to feel proud.

And I certainly am proud of it, and as grateful as I am proud. I am grateful to the generous Republicans of the State, who, after nominating me with unprecedented unanimity, supported me with unparalleled earnestness and enthusiasm. I am grateful to the eloquent and vigorous speakers, who, in city, town, village and school-house, pleaded my cause with the people, defended me against unjust assault, and did far more than justice to my services or my deserving. I am grateful, especially, to the thousands of earnest, enthusiastic young men whose torches, for weeks, turned night into day from Doniphan to Barber, and from Cherokee to Cheyenne, and who, with flashing flambeaux, blazing rockets and loud hurrahs, often did what neither the logic, the eloquence nor the wit of orators could do, to arouse the sluggish and convert the doubtful. I am grateful to the bright, enterprising, enthusiastic journalists of Kansas—and no State in the Union can boast of brighter or better newspapers than can Kansas—who so ardently and intelligently supported me. I am grateful to hundreds of Democrats and Greenbackers in the State, who, believing that I stood for obedience to law, voted for me. I am grateful even to the opposition, who, as a general rule, treated me courteously and fairly. The exceptions to this rule only emphasized it.

There is in me, therefore, no lack of gratitude for the signal honor conferred upon me by the people of Kansas. Indeed, the measure of my gratitude is so full and overflowing that it weighs upon me. I feel under obligations to so many people, I am profoundly grateful to so many, that when I think of it all, and of how I am to testify my gratitude or requite the obligations I am under, I am overwhelmed with a sense of the poverty of my vocabulary of thankfulness, and of the vain aspiration of my desire to return even a tithe of my multitudinous obligations.

But, grateful as I am to the Republicans of Kansas for the signal honor they have conferred upon me—an honor which fills the full measure of my ambition—and proud as I am of the magnificent victory won in Kansas, I cannot forget that the Republican banner of the Nation is, for the first time in twenty-five years, trailing in defeat. If I loved the party merely for its gifts of honor and of office; if I cared nothing for its principles, and had no faith in their power to benefit and bless the people of America; if I regarded the contest between the Democratic and the Republican parties as a mere scramble for the spoils of office, I would be content with my own personal victory, and accept it as all that I was interested in. But I am a Republican, not only in name, but in fact. I am a Republican because I sincerely believe that the Republican party is the purest, the most intelligent, the most progressive, the most beneficent organization the world has ever known. I am a Republican because the Republican party saved the Union; because it abolished slavery; because it enfranchised the slaves; because it has made this Nation great, free, prosperous, and self-sustaining.

I am a Republican because the Republican party advocates the protection of American industries and labor; because it is the party of school-houses, of education, of social order, of liberty regulated by law; and because it is a party that has never feared to attack vice, however strongly entrenched it might be.

I am a Republican because the Republican party would be ashamed to prefer a Northern Copperhead to a Union soldier.

I am a Republican because the Republican party does not, for expediency’s sake, ignore its greatest and bravest advocates and statesmen, while it sits upon a pedestal, like a Gessler’s hat in the market-place, a preposterous political accident, who had lived throughout the tremendous events of the past quarter of a century, utterly unknown outside of the small place wherein he resided.

The Republican party has enriched the history of the age with a long list of imperishable names, and among them all no one shines with a more brilliant luster than that of its brave and glorious leader in the late campaign, James G. Blaine.

Is it strange, then, that even in the midst of our rejoicing over our victory in Kansas my heart turns to the man who should have been the central thought and figure of this jubilee—to the defeated leader—but still the leader of the Republican hosts, as much to-day as a month ago; to the Greatheart of the party, who never sulked in his tent when others were preferred; and who never treacherously stabbed his party in order to defeat a political rival.

There are to-day, all over the land, men who proudly boast that they voted for Henry Clay, who, in his day and generation, was the greatest, bravest and noblest of American statesmen, and who will be remembered and revered a thousand years after the eleventh President of the United States is forgotten. And so, a quarter of a century hence, the young Americans who this year cast their first votes for James G. Blaine and John A. Logan, the greatest statesman and the greatest volunteer soldier of this age, will boast of it as the proudest act of their lives.

The great West presented, in the contest just closed, a stainless record of unfaltering devotion to Republican principles. Here in the West, the land of freedom and loyalty, the home of school-houses and of soldiers, the Republican candidates received a support that was as enthusiastic as it was overwhelming. The best blood and brain and energy of America abide in the West. It is the bright boy of the family who leaves the old homestead to make a name and a fortune for himself. It is the mother of bright and energetic children who, when her husband talks of removing to a new and broader country, gives a brave and willing consent. These are the men and women who have peopled this goodly Western land and transformed it by the magic touch of industry, energy and intelligence into the granary of the world. And this is the land, the broad, rich, prosperous land, where a big-hearted, big-brained people gave the greatest and most brilliant of living Americans his largest and heartiest support. We can at least rejoice over this result of the campaign, and point with pride to the fact that Kansas, in her Republican majority, leads all the other States.

The Republican party has lost a battle. It lost some during the civil war. It is neither disheartened, dismayed, nor panic-stricken. It will rally its forces, form its lines, and prepare for the contest of 1888. It embraces within its ranks the best heart and brain of the American people. It is the party of proud memories and glorious aspirations. It has never done anything it has to apologize for or feel ashamed of. It has governed the country wisely, honestly, bravely. It is as great a party to-day as it was when Abraham Lincoln led it to victory, or when Ulysses S. Grant was its commander, or when James A. Garfield was its chosen candidate. Alike in fields of war, or finance, or administration, it has justified the highest expectations of the loyalty, the honesty and the intelligence of the Nation. Pharisees revile, demagogues denounce, cranks rail at, and traitors hate it. But it is the party of the honest, sensible, practical, logical people of the country, and to them it can safely trust for vindication and final victory. Four years of Democratic stupidity, dishonesty, arrogance and disloyalty, will nauseate the Republic, and the people will turn to the Republican party as the needle does to the pole, and gladly and proudly restore it to the public confidence it has done nothing to forfeit, and to the power it has never abused.

FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS.

Inaugural Address, delivered in the Hall of the House of Representatives, January 12, 1885.

Mr. President, and Ladies and Gentlemen: Many thousands of years ago it was said, “Let not him that girdeth on his harness boast himself, as he that putteth it off.” And upon an occasion of this character, such an admonition is peculiarly pertinent.

My predecessors can tell of duties performed, of purposes accomplished, of deeds and words that are now a part of the history of Kansas. I stand on the threshold of two years of official labor and responsibility, and look into the unknown future with grave anxiety and apprehension. A great State has signally honored me. A brave, intelligent and generous people have given me their confidence. How can I deserve this kindness and partiality? How may I acceptably fill a place so worthily occupied by a long line of able and eminent men? These are the questions to which I must make answer, not here and now, in the presence of this vast audience, but in the days that are to come, each bringing its new cares, duties, and responsibilities.

I have known all the Governors of this State, many of them intimately, and I take this occasion to say that I believe Kansas has, in the past, been fortunate in the choice of her chief Executive officers. First on the list, in eminence and usefulness as well as date of service, is the name of Charles Robinson. Long before Kansas was admitted into the Union, his splendid courage and comprehensive ability had made him the leader of the Free-State men. He enjoys the distinction of having been elected Governor under two Constitutions, and of having guided the State through the darkest and stormiest years of its history. The old War Governor is still hale and hearty, and as honored in private life as he was in public station.

Following him came Thomas Carney, a trained man of business, who, in a critical period of our history, performed the part that Robert Morris did in the infancy of the Republic—pledged his private fortune to save the financial credit of the State.

Samuel J. Crawford, a gallant and enterprising soldier, succeeded Carney. He served the State creditably, and is still in its service, employed as its Agent at Washington.

Then came James M. Harvey, a steadfast and sturdy soldier, plain and unpretentious, but of sterling honesty. Assuming high station without pride, he resigned it without murmuring. Yet he alone of our Governors reached the goal at which so many of them have aimed—the United States Senate.

Thomas J. Osborn, the most adroit and skillful politician of them all, followed Harvey. He stepped out of the Executive office into the diplomatic service of the country, in which he has grown gray and handsome.

George T. Anthony, a man of imposing presence, an eloquent and forcible speaker, and a thorough man of affairs, succeeded Osborn. He has, since retiring from office, borne a conspicuous part in the construction of a great National thoroughfare connecting the Republics of the United States and Mexico. Now, returned home, he is again in the service of the State, representing his district in the Legislature.

Then came John P. St. John. A ready and impressive speaker, he has since achieved a National reputation as an advocate of the temperance cause.

Last on the list is the name of my townsman and neighbor, George W. Glick, the first member of his party to be elected Governor of Kansas. A capable lawyer and an experienced legislator, always energetic and industrious, I think I may say, here in his presence, that even his political opponents will credit him with a sincere desire to promote the welfare of the State, however much they may disagree with him concerning the methods or policy by which such a result is best attained.