“Two great facts were plainly visible through the flimsy web of attorney logic and quibbling technicality, not very ingeniously woven to conceal them.  One of these facts was, that the people of Kansas were heartily and almost unanimously averse to slavery; the other was, that the Government was trying by every means in its power to impose slavery upon them.”

After describing the contemptuous rejection by the people of Kansas of the pro-slavery constitution, Mr. Fisher proceeds with an analysis of the Kansas-Nebraska fraud, so clear and so masterly that we must again quote his own language, with an occasional condensation or omission.

“It was clear, therefore, that the principle of Popular Sovereignty, introduced by the Kansas and Nebraska Bill, a principle before unknown to the law and practice of our government, would not suit the South.  It appeared too probable that not only the people to inhabit all the territory north of 36 deg. 30’, but also much territory south of it, would, like the people of Kansas, reject slavery, if left to regulate their domestic institutions in their own way.  What, then, were Southern politicians to do?  Invoke the ancient and long exercised, but now denied and derided power of Congress over the Territories?  This might prove a dangerous weapon in the hands of possible future Northern majorities.  It was obviously necessary to withdraw slavery alike from the control of Congress and of the people of a Territory.  Some ingenuity was required for this.  The doctrine that the Constitution extends to the Territories (a doctrine broached before by Mr. Calhoun, but always defeated on the ground that the Constitution, by its language and the practice under it, was made for States only, and that the Territories were subject to the supreme control of Congress,—­a control frequently exercised, not only independently of the Constitution, but in a manner incompatible with it) was introduced, with other innovations, into the Kansas and Nebraska Bill.  The Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court followed, by which the Constitution recognizes slavery as a national institution.  It recognizes slaves as mere property, differing in no respect from other merchandise.  The Territories belong to the nation.  Every citizen has equal rights to them and in them.  Why, therefore, may not a Southern man, as well as a Northern man, go into them with his property?  What right has Congress to place the South under an ignominious bar of restriction?  The Constitution declares that slaves are property; that all the States and the people have equal rights.  The Territories belong to all.  Therefore, under the Constitution, they should be enjoyed by all.

“By this ingenious logic the Kansas and Nebraska Bill is made to contradict itself.  It first declares that the Constitution extends to the Territories; in other words, slavery exists there by force of the Constitution, without reference to the will of the people.  It then says that the people of the Territories shall be ’perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way.’