the coercion of commercial interests, in defeating him even in the citadel of loyalty.  He tried once more to breast the tide that had borne down his fortunes.  He became a candidate for governor in 1856; but, though he disclaimed anti-slavery sentiments, and supported James Buchanan for President against Fremont, his son-in-law, he was defeated by Trusten Polk, who soon passed from the gubernatorial chair to Benton’s seat in the United States Senate, from which he was, in course of time, to be expelled.  Benton retired to private life, only to labor more assiduously in compiling historical evidences against the fast ripening treason of the times.

The Missouri senator was no longer in the way of the Southern oligarchs.  A shaft feathered by his own hands—­the doctrine of instructions—­had slain him.

But yet another obstacle remained.  The Missouri Compromise lifted a barrier to the expansion of the Calhoun idea of free government, having African slavery for its corner-stone.  This obstacle was to be removed.  Missouri furnished the prompter and agent of that wrong in David E. Atchison, for many years Benton’s colleague in the Senate.  Atchison was a man of only moderate talents, of dogged purpose, willful, wholly unscrupulous in the employment of the influences of his position, and devoid of all the attributes and qualifications of statesmanship.  He was a fit representative of the pro-slavery fanaticism of his State; had lived near the Kansas line; had looked upon and coveted the fair lands of that free territory, and resolved that they should be the home and appanage of slavery.  It is now a part of admitted history, that this dull but determined Missouri senator approached Judge Douglas, then chairman of the Committee on Territories, and, by some incomprehensible influence, induced that distinguished senator to commit the flagrant and terrible blunder of reporting the Kansas-Nebraska bill, with a clause repealing the Missouri Compromise, and thus throwing open Kansas to the occupation of slavery.  That error was grievously atoned for in the subsequent hard fate of Judge Douglas, who was cast off and destroyed by the cruel men he had served.  Among the humiliations that preceded the close of this political tragedy, none could have been more pungent to Judge Douglas than the fact that Atchison, in a drunken harangue from the tail of a cart in Western Missouri, surrounded by a mob of ’border ruffians’ rallying for fresh wrongs upon the free settlers of Kansas, recited, in coarse glee and brutal triumph, the incidents of his interview with the senator of Illinois, when, with mixed cajolery and threats, he partly tempted, partly drove him to his ruin.  The Kansas-Nebraska bill was passed.  What part Atchison took, what part Missouri took, under the direction of the pro-slavery leaders that filled every department of the State government, the ‘border-ruffian’ forays, the pillage of the government arsenal at Liberty, the embargo of the Missouri river, and the robbing and mobbing of peaceful emigrants from the free States, the violence at the polls, and the fraudulent voting that corrupted all the franchises of that afflicted territory, do sufficiently attest.  It is not needed to rehearse any of this painful and well-known history.