Having, like Walker, frequently and earnestly assured the people of their ultimate right to ratify or reject the work of the convention, he was personally humiliated by the unfairness and trickery of which that body was guilty.  Under the circumstances he could not hesitate in his duty.  By proclamation he convened the new Legislature in extra session.

The members respected the private pledge they had given him to engage in no general legislation; but provided by law for an investigation of the Oxford and McGee frauds, and for an election to be held on January 4, 1858 (the day fixed by the Lecompton Constitution for the election of State officers and a State legislature), at which the people might vote for the Lecompton Constitution or against it.  Thus in the course of events two separate votes were taken on this notorious document.  The first, provided for in the instrument itself, took place on the 21st of December, 1857.  Detachments of troops were stationed at several points; the free-State men abstained from voting; the election was peaceable; and in due time Calhoun proclaimed that 6143 ballots had been cast “for the constitution with slavery,” and 589 “for the constitution with no slavery.”  But the subsequent legislative investigation disclosed a gross repetition of the Oxford fraud, and proved the actual majority, in a onesided vote, to have been only 3423.  The second election occurred on January 4, 1858, under authority of the legislative act.  At this election the pro-slavery party voted for the State officers, but in its turn abstained from voting on the constitution, the result being—­against the Lecompton Constitution, 10,226; for the Lecompton Constitution with slavery, 138; for the Lecompton Constitution without slavery, 24.[12]

This emphatic rejection of the Lecompton Constitution by a direct vote of the people of Kansas sealed its fate.  We shall see further on what persistent but abortive efforts were made in Congress once more to galvanize it into life.  The free-State party were jubilant; but the pro-slavery cabal, foiled and checked, was not yet dismayed or conquered.  For now there was developed, for the first time in its full proportions, the giant pro-slavery intrigue which proved that the local conspiracy of the Atchison-Missouri cabal was but the image and fraction of a national combination, finding its headquarters in the Administration, first of President Pierce, and now of President Buchanan; working patiently and insidiously through successive efforts to bring about a practical subversion of the whole theory and policy of the American Government.  It linked the action of Border Ruffians, presidential aspirants, senates, courts, and cabinets into efficient cooeperation; leading up, step by step, from the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, through the Nebraska bill, border conquest, the Dred Scott decision, the suppression of the submission clause in the Toombs bill, and the extraordinary manipulation and machinery of the Lecompton Constitution, towards the final overthrow of the doctrine that “all men are created equal,” and the substitution of the dogma of property in man; towards the judicial construction that property rights in human beings are before and above constitutional sanction, and that slavery must find protection and perpetuity in States as well as in Territories.