The subject of burning interest in Congress was the condition of affairs in Kansas Territory. When the bill repealing the Missouri Compromise was pending, the opinion had been generally expressed by its supporters that slavery never would or could go into that region. Several Southern Senators and most of the Northern Democrats had held this view. Hunter, of Virginia, considered it utterly hopeless to expect that either Kansas or Nebraska would ever be a slaveholding state. Badger, of North Carolina, said that he had no more idea of seeing a slave population in either of them than he had of seeing it in Massachusetts. Dixon, of Kentucky, held a similar view. Nor is there any reason to doubt the sincerity of these men. Apparently the only Southern Senator who then cherished a different belief was Atchison, of Missouri, whose home was on the border of Kansas and whose opinions were based upon personal knowledge and backed by self-interest.
President Pierce appointed Andrew H. Reeder, of Pennsylvania, governor of Kansas Territory. Reeder was not unwilling to coöperate with the South in establishing slavery in an orderly way, but was quite unprepared for the tactics which had been planned by others to expedite his movements. He called an election for a delegate in Congress to be held on the 29th of November, 1854. An organized army of Missourians marched over the Kansas border, seized the polling-places, and cast 1749 fraudulent votes for a pro-slavery man named Whitfield. This was a gratuitous and unnecessary act of violence, since the bona-fide settlers from Missouri outnumbered the Free State men and the latter were, as yet, unorganized and unprepared. Governor Reeder confirmed the election and thus gave encouragement to the invaders for their next attempt.
A few immigrants had already gone into the territory from the New England States, moved by the desire of bettering their condition in life. Some of them had been assisted by the Emigrant Aid Company of Worcester, Massachusetts, a society started by Eli Thayer for the purpose of furnishing capital, by loans, to such persons for traveling expenses and for the building of hotels, sawmills, private dwellings, etc. These settlers from the East were as little prepared as Reeder himself for the sudden swoop of Missourians, and although they wrote letters to Northern Congressmen and newspapers protesting against the election of Whitfield as an act of invasion and a barefaced fraud, nothing was done to prevent him from taking his seat.
