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Indiana University 
may be written on all the country, so deep and disastrous has been the 
fall from the high hopes of the past year.‘“’ 
What this observer noticed at the end of the summer of 
1855 was in general true of the entire period from 1854 to 
1860. The expectations in regard to Kansas were not realized. 
The number of colonists reaching the Territory was com- 
paratively very small. Northern pioneers went elsewhere for 
the most part, while southern pioneers failed to respond to 
appeals to go to Kansas. Even emigrants from the upper 
South, including Missouri, failed to arrive in numbers suffi- 
cient to balance the limited number of northerners and 
foreigners who reached the Territory. 
The struggle for Kansas had great political significance. 
The birth of the Republican party was an outcome of the 
passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The growth of the 
party was partly due to the championship of a homestead 
policy and to the support of a protective tariff policy, but it 
was tremendously stimulated in almost every part of the 
North by the constant agitation of the Kansas question. The 
belief that the Kansas conflict proved the necessity for a 
general application of the Wilmot Proviso principle to all 
federal Territories took thoro possession of the minds of a 
majority of the people of the North. Even after Kansas had 
decided against slavery, the demand for the prohibition of 
slavery in the Territories by Congress remained the leading 
issue and served to attract voters as well as before. 
Except for a brief period of confusion during and follow- 
ing the Lecompton contest in Congress in which Stephen A. 
Douglas played such a conspicuous role. Republican leaders 
were generally in favor of clinging to the Wilmot Proviso 
principle. It is true that the party was much disturbed over 
the friendliness of Horace Greeley and other leaders for 
St. Louis Intelligencer, quoted in the Wabash Courier (Terre Haute, Ind.), 
September 1, 1855. Many of the “much vaunted Kansas towns” mentioned were mainly 
on paper. An editor of a territorial newspaper, writing in 1858, presented the following 
facetious argument as proof that a correspondent, who had asserted that Kansas was 
not populous enough to become a state, was in error: “Our correspondent is misin- 
formed. We have population enough to entitle us to admission to the Union. Assum- 
ing that every city in Kansas has a population of two persons, that alone (as there are 
at least 50,000 cities in the Territory) would give 100,000 souls. Besides that, we have 
a man or two in the rural districts. Leavenworth, Lawrence, and Atchison, if they 
have not the population above stated as an average for our cities, are abundantly counter- 
balanced by the populous and mighty municipalities of Oxford, Minneola, and Sacra- 
mento.” Freedom's Champion (Atchison, Kas.), June 5, 1858. 
