The people of the Military Tract were, almost all of them, Kentuckians.
There were evidently impending storms in the political horizon.

I could not bend my sails to suit every favoring gale; and if, in the future, there should come a time that my conscience should lie in one direction, and my popularity and pecuniary interest in the other, I did not like to invite such a temptation.

At any rate, I did not like to place myself in such a position that to bring down on my head popular odium would be to invite pecuniary ruin.

These counties in the Military Tract were old settled counties, and land was high; and I was not rich.

At this time the Kansas-Nebraska bill had been adopted by Congress, and Kansas had been opened for settlement.