I appear before you as the candidate of a great party, honored by its
confidence and proud to bear its standard, to ask you in its name for
your support. I have been a citizen of this State for nearly thirty
years. I came here, a boy of 18, when Kansas was a poor, weak,
distracted Territory, rent and torn by civil war, invaded by hordes of
ruffians and marauders, and suffering under all the evils of the worst
government that ever harassed and oppressed a free people. For more than
two years this intolerable lawlessness had prevailed—for nearly three
years longer it continued; and the party that confronts us to-day, and
is asking your support, is the same party that, from 1854 to 1861, held
Kansas by the throat, and by fraud, and murder, and arson, and
turbulence, and every crime that ever disgraced humanity, endeavored to
fasten upon it the curse of Human Slavery.
Beaten in its attempt to enslave Kansas, the Democratic party plunged
the whole country into civil war, and for four long and bloody years the
Nation struggled on to universal freedom and national unity; and this
young State, that had been fighting for five years to get into the
Union, now had to fight for four years more to preserve the Union.
Republicanism and Kansas were wedded together in this long and terrible
struggle. When Jefferson Davis marched out of the Senate, William H.
Seward moved to take up the Kansas bill, and as the coat-tails of the
Rebel chief disappeared through one door, young Kansas, smiling and
triumphant, marched in at the other.