The conduct and the language of Walker and Stanton bear a remarkable significance when we remember that they had been citizens of slave States and zealous Democratic partisans, and that only hard practical experience and the testimony of their own eyes had forced them to join their predecessors in the political “graveyard.”  “The ghosts on the banks of the Styx,” said Seward, “constitute a cloud scarcely more dense than the spirits of the departed Governors of Kansas, wandering in exile and sorrow for having certified the truth against falsehood in regard to the elections between Freedom and Slavery in Kansas.”

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[1] January 12, 1857, Wilder, p. 113.  Bell, Speech in Senate, March
18, 1858.  Appendix “Globe,” p. 137.

[2] Geary to Marcy, Feb. 21, 1857, Senate Ex.  Doc.  No. 17, 1st Sess. 35th Cong.  Vol.  VI., p. 178.

[3] Bigler, Senate Speech, Dec. 9, 1857.  “Globe,” p. 21.  See also Bigler, Dec. 21, 1857.  “Globe,” p. 113.

[4] Walker, Testimony before the Covode Committee.  Reports of Committees H.R. 1st Sess. 36th Cong.  Vol.  V., pp. 105-6.

[5] “These fifteen counties in which there was no registry gave a much larger vote at the October election, even with the six months’ qualification, than the whole vote given to the delegates who signed the Lecompton Constitution on the 7th November last.”—­[Walker to Cass, December 15, 1857.  Senate Ex.  Doc.  No. 8, 1st Sess. 35th Cong.  Vol.  I, p. 128.]

[6] Walker to Buchanan, June 28, 1857.  Report Covode Committee, pp. 117-19.

[7] Buchanan to Walker, July 12, 1857.  Report Covode Committee, p. 112.

[8] The ingenuity which evolved 1600 Kansas votes from an old Cincinnati directory and 1200 more from an uninhabited county, was not exhausted by that prodigious labor.  The same influences, and perhaps the same manipulators, produced a companion piece known by the name of the “candle-box fraud.”  At the election of January 4, 1858, for officers under the Lecompton Constitution, the returns from Delaware Agency underwent such suspicious handling that an investigating commission of the Legislature, by aid of a search-warrant, found them secreted in a candle-box buried under a woodpile near Calhoun’s “surveyor-general’s office” at Lecompton.  A forged list of 379 votes had been substituted for the original memorandum of only forty-three votes which had been cut from the certificate of the judges; the votes on the forged list being intended for the pro-slavery candidates.  During the investigation Calhoun was arrested, but liberated by Judge Cato on habeas corpus, after which he immediately went to Missouri, and from there to Washington.  The details and testimony are found in House Com.  Reports, 1st Sess. 35th Cong.  Vol.  III, Report No. 377.

[9] Minority Report, Select Com. of Fifteen.  Report No. 377, page 109, Vol.  III., H.R.  Reports, 1st Sess. 35th Cong.

This “missing link,” no less than the remaining portion of the journal printed in the proceedings of the investigating committee, is itself strong circumstantial proof of the imposture underlying the whole transaction.  Many sections of the completed constitution are not even mentioned in the journal; it does not contain the submission clause of the schedule, and the authenticity of the document rests upon the signature and the certificate of John Calhoun without other verification.