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.
[Sidenote] Cass to Stanton, December 2, 1857.