I understand the force of the English language; and when I read in the Constitution of the United States that "Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort," I do not hesitate to brand that charge of Judge Lecompte, under which Governor Robinson was indicted for treason, and is now under confinement and refused bail, as grossly, palpably unjust, and wholly unauthorized by the Constitution. To concede his argument, that to resist, or "to form the purpose of resisting," the territorial laws is treason against the United States because Congress authorized a Legislature to pass laws, leads you irresistibly to the additional position, that to resist the orders of the country boards created by that Legislature is also treason, for these boards are but one further remove from the fountain-head of power. And thus, sir, "the extreme medicine of the Constitution would become its daily bread;" and the man who even objected to the opening of a road through his premises, would be subject to the pains and penalties of treason. No, sir, that charge is only another link in the chain of tyranny, which the pro-slavery rulers of that Territory are encoiling around its people. And when the defenders of these proceedings ask us to trust to the impartiality of courts, I answer them by pointing to this charge, and also to the judicial decrees of the Territory, by authority of which numbers of faithful citizens of the United States have been indicted, imprisoned and harassed—by authority of which the town of Lawrence was sacked and bombarded—by authority of which printing presses were destroyed, without legal notice to their owners, and costly buildings cannonaded and consumed, without giving the slightest opportunity to their proprietors to be heard in opposition to these decrees; all part and parcel of the plot to drive out the friends of freedom from the Territory, so that slavery might take unresisted possession of its villages and plains.
It might have been supposed that, one of those rights dear to all American freemen—the trial by an impartial jury—would have been left for the people of Kansas unimpaired. But when the invaders and conquerors of Kansas, in their border ruffian Legislature, struck down all the rights of freemen, they did not even leave them this, with which they might possibly have had some chance of justice, even against the hostility of Presidents, the tyranny of Governors, and the hatred of judges. No jurors, sir, are drawn by lot in the Territory. But the first section of the act concerning jurors (see page 377) enacts that "all courts, before whom jurors are required, may order the marshal, sheriff or other officer, to summon a sufficient number of jurors."
The whole matter is left to the discretion of these officers; and Marshal Donaldson or "Sheriff Jones" pack juries with just such men as they prefer, and whom they know will be their willing instruments. For a free-State man to hope for justice from such a jury charged by such a judge as Lecompte, would be to ask that the miracle by which the three Israelites passed through the fiery furnace of their persecutors unscathed, should be daily re-enacted in the jurisprudence of Kansas concede his argument, that to resist, or Nay, more, sir, to make assurance doubly sure, the same law in regard to jurors excludes all but pro-slavery men from the jury-box in all cases relating directly or indirectly to slavery; for her is its thirteenth section (page 378:)
"No person who is conscientiously opposed to the holding slaves, or who does not admit the right to hold slaves in this Territory, shall be a juror in any cause in which the right to hold any person in slavery is involved, nor in any cause in which any injury done to, or committed by, any slave is in issue, nor in any criminal proceeding for the violation of any law enacted for the protection of slave property, and for the punishment of crime committed against the right to such property."
I leave this dark picture of the jurisprudence of Kansas, and turn now to the laws themselves—"laws" that were, as late as the 9th of February. 1856, over two months after the opening of this session, thus spoken of by the Detroit Free Press, the organ of General Cass, and one of the leading Democratic papers of the Northwest:
"But the President should pause long before treating as 'treasonable insurrection' the action of those inhabitants of Kansas who deny the binding authority of the Missouri-Kansas Legislature; for, in our humble opinion, a people that would not be inclined to rebel against the acts of a legislative body forced upon them, by fraud and violence, would be unworthy the name of American. If there was ever justifiable cause for popular revolution against an usurping and obnoxious government, that cause has existed in Kansas."
The President of the United States has declared, in his special message to Congress, in his proclamation, and in his orders to Governor Shannon and Colonel Sumner, through his Secretary of State and Secretary of War, that this code of territorial laws is to be enforced by the full exercise of his power. He has, of course, read them, and knows of their provisions. He must know that they trample even on the organic law, which his official signature breathed into life. He must know that they trample on the Constitution of the United States, which he and we have sworn to support. Reading them as he has, he could have chosen rather to support the law of Congress and the national Constitution; but he preferred to declare publicly his intention of assisting, with all his power and authority, the enforcement of this code, which repudiates both. The National Democratic Convention also, at Cincinnati, denounced "treason and
