The Territory of Kansas was saved to its prescriptive freedom.  The slavery propagandists sullenly withdrew and gave up the contest.  The last days of the dynasty that had meditated the conquest of the continent to slave-holding government were evidently at hand.  The result of the struggle in Kansas had reversed the relation of the contesting powers.  The oligarchs, who had always before been aggressive, and intended to subordinate the Union to slavery, or destroy it, found themselves suddenly thrown on the defensive; and, with the quick intelligence of a property interest, and the keen jealousy of class and caste which their slave-holding had implanted, they saw that they were engaged in an unequal struggle, that their sceptre was broken, and that, if they continued to rule, it would have to be over the homogeneous half of a dismembered Union.  From this moment a severance of the Slave States from the Free was resolved on, and every agency that could operate on governments, State and National, was set to work.  It was not by accident that Virginia had procured the nomination of the facile Buchanan for President in the Baltimore Convention of 1856; it was not by accident that Floyd was made Secretary of War, or that, many months before any outbreak of rebellion, this arch traitor had well-nigh stripped the Northern arsenals of arms, and placed them where they would be ‘handy’ for insurgents to seize.  It was not by accident that John C. Breckenridge headed the factionists that willfully divided and defeated the National Democracy, that perchance could have elected Judge Douglas President; nor was it by accident that Beriah Magoffin, a vain, weak man, the creature, adjunct, and echo of Breckenridge, filled the office of governor of Kentucky, nominated thereto by Breckenridge’s personal intercession.  And lastly, to return to the special theatre of this sketch, it was not by accident that Claiborne F. Jackson, the original mover for Benton’s destruction, was at this remarkable juncture found occupying the governor’s chair, with Thomas C. Reynolds for his lieutenant governor, a native of South Carolina, an acknowledged missionary of the nullification faith to a State that required to be corrupted, and that he had, during his residence, zealously endeavored to corrupt.

We have now reached the turning point in the history of Missouri.  The State is about to be plunged into the whirlpool of civil war.  Undisguised disunionists are in complete possession of the State government, and the population is supposed to be ripe for revolt.  Only one spot in it, and that the city of St. Louis, is regarded as having the slightest sympathy with the political sentiments of the Free States of the Union.  The State is surely counted for the ‘South’ in the division that impends, for where is the heart in St. Louis bold enough, or the hand strong enough, to resist the swelling tide of pro-slavery fanaticism that was about to engulf the State?  Years ago, when it was but a ripple on the surface, it had overborne Benton, with all his fame of thirty years’ growth.  What leader of slighter mold and lesser fame could now resist the coming shock?  In tracing the origin and growth of rebellion in Missouri, it is interesting to gather up all the threads that link the present with the past.  It will preserve the unity of the plot, and give effect to the last acts of the drama.