African slavery for its corner-stone. This obstacle was to be removed.
Missouri furnished the prompter and agent of that wrong in David E.
Atchison, for many years Benton's colleague in the Senate. Atchison was
a man of only moderate talents, of dogged purpose, willful, wholly
unscrupulous in the employment of the influences of his position, and
devoid of all the attributes and qualifications of statesmanship. He was
a fit representative of the pro-slavery fanaticism of his State; had
lived near the Kansas line; had looked upon and coveted the fair lands
of that free territory, and resolved that they should be the home and
appanage of slavery. It is now a part of admitted history, that this
dull but determined Missouri senator approached Judge Douglas, then
chairman of the Committee on Territories, and, by some incomprehensible
influence, induced that distinguished senator to commit the flagrant and
terrible blunder of reporting the Kansas-Nebraska bill, with a clause
repealing the Missouri Compromise, and thus throwing open Kansas to the
occupation of slavery. That error was grievously atoned for in the
subsequent hard fate of Judge Douglas, who was cast off and destroyed by
the cruel men he had served. Among the humiliations that preceded the
close of this political tragedy, none could have been more pungent to
Judge Douglas than the fact that Atchison, in a drunken harangue from
the tail of a cart in Western Missouri, surrounded by a mob of 'border
ruffians' rallying for fresh wrongs upon the free settlers of Kansas,
recited, in coarse glee and brutal triumph, the incidents of his
interview with the senator of Illinois, when, with mixed cajolery and
threats, he partly tempted, partly drove him to his ruin. The
Kansas-Nebraska bill was passed. What part Atchison took, what part
Missouri took, under the direction of the pro-slavery leaders that
filled every department of the State government, the 'border-ruffian'
forays, the pillage of the government arsenal at Liberty, the embargo of
the Missouri river, and the robbing and mobbing of peaceful emigrants