Hi Cousins! We've been discussing Civil War service of the Rudds lately, and I was recently given an article on the details of how the Civil War was hastened by events in Kansas. I live in Lawrence, which is roughly ten miles from Lecompton, where most of the following true story took place. This isn't directly related to the Rudd research, but I hope you enjoy it. KANSAS CITY TIMES FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 1936 AN OBSCURE KANSAS CLERK MAY HAVE HASTENED OUTBREAK OF CIVIL WAR _________________________ The Great Frauds in Connection With the Adoption of the Lecompton Constitution Came to Light Through the Revelations of Charlie Torry-Were It Not for Him, Lincoln Might Never Have Gained the Presidency. _________________________ In celebrating the diamond jubilee of statehood this year, Kansas school children, teachers, editors, and orators have had no trouble in remembering the famous deeds of John Brown, Jim Lane, Charles Robinson and other early Kansas heroes; but they are practically unanimous in forgetting Charlie Torry. And who was Charlie Torry? He was the most obscure of the seventeen clerks in the office of the surveyor general at Lecompton, the Kansas territorial capital. But despite his obscurity, or perhaps because of it, he was able to thwart the plan of President Buchanan and Congress to fasten slavery on Kansas; by his uncovering of election frauds in Kansas, he split the Democratic party in two in 1860, which resulted in the defeat of Stephen A. Douglas for the presidency; by splitting the Democracy, he brought about the election of Abraham Lincoln, which in turn brought on the Civil War and ended slavery. To understand the great part Charlie Torry played we must go back to February 2, 1858, when President Buchanan sent his famous Kansas Statehood message to Congress in which he urged the admission of Kansas as a slave state. Congress was all set to do his bidding and the machinery was oiled in both the House and Senate to rush the admission bill through. But at the very moment while Buchanan’s message was being read, the election frauds in Kansas were being uncovered by Torry, and Congress dared not follow the President. Torry had been a sheriff and schoolmaster back in Berks County, Pennsylvania, before being appointed, because of his loyalty to the Democratic Party, as clerk, messenger and janitor in the office of the surveyor general. Torry had fallen on evil days back in Pennsylvania and was glad to accept any sort of a job, and so he came to Kansas and went to work. He never had anything to say, and his superior officers supposed him to be a dumb clerk, who knew only how to sweep out well and who wrote a fair hand and who did everything he was told to do. A BENEFACTOR OF LINCOLN The chief in the surveyor general’s office was John Calhoun, who is known to readers of the biographies of Abraham Lincoln from the fact that he gave Lincoln his boost up the ladder of fame by appointing him assistant surveyor of Sangamon County, Illinois, when Calhoun was county surveyor. Calhoun was a Jackson Democrat and Lincoln a Henry Clay Whig, but Calhoun recognized that the long, lean grocery clerk was quick at figures. He taught Abe surveying and gave him the job by which he earned money to buy law books and study law. Later Calhoun became ambitious. He ran for the governorship and for Congress and was defeated. Then he accepted the surveyor generalship of Kansas and laid his plans to become a political leader in the territory with the thought in mind that when Kansas should become a state he would be one of the senators. He picked the proslavery party as the one most likely to succeed, or perhaps he picked the proslavery party because he thought that Kansas should be a slave state. The proslavery party was running things in Kansas in those days, and when, in 1857, it was decided to write a constitution for Kansas and apply for admission as a state, the managers of the territory made no provision for registering voters in several of the counties where the free-state party was in the majority. Districts in the other counties were so gerrymandered that the proslavery delegates were bound to be elected. For that reason the proslavery party won the election and packed the convention, which met at Lecompton, with proslavery delegates. John Calhoun was elected president of the convention. While the constitution was being written another election was held to choose territorial legislators. This election, which was fairly conducted, resulted in the election of a free-state legislature. The Lecompton delegates, therefore, resolved to use other means to secure the adoption of their constitution than by submitting it to a fair election. The convention voted not to submit the constitution as a whole, but only the slavery question. The ballots were made to read: 1. For the constitution with slavery. 2. For the constitution with no slavery. If proposition No. 1 carried, Kansas would be admitted to the union as an unrestricted slave state. If No. 2 carried, then the right to import slaves from other states was denied, but all slaves within the state at the time of its admission, “and their increase,” should remain slaves. Since the voters had to vote for slavery no matter which proposition they chose, the free-state voters remained away from the polls a second time. ELECTIONS OF LITTLE VALUE The result was that the constitution with slavery won, the announced vote being 6,143 for the constitution with slavery and 569 for the constitution with no slavery. Of the votes recorded, 3,012 were fraudulent, as Charlie Torry was to uncover at the right time. Following the adoption of the constitution, Calhoun called a second election, January 4, 1858, to choose provisional state officers, who would serve in case Congress admitted Kansas under the Lecompton Constitution. In this election both proslavery and free-state candidates were nominated. According to unofficial returns, the free-state candidates won by about 300 majority, but Calhoun refused to announce the returns, and it was feared that if he was allowed to keep them for an indefinite period he could falsify the returns. The territorial legislature took two steps to prevent Congress from accepting the Lecompton Constitution as the voice of the people of Kansas. First they called an election on the constitution itself, at which it was defeated by a vote of 10,226 to 161. In that election the proslavery voters did not participate, contending that it was illegal. The second thing the territorial legislature did was to appoint a special committee to investigate the elections and to make an official report of the returns which Calhoun had refused to divulge. Before he could be subpoenaed by the legislative committee, Calhoun announced he would make public the official returns after Congress had acted on the Lecompton Constitution. He then departed for Washington, to lobby for Kansas statehood. This removed him from the jurisdiction of the Kansas legislative committee. MANY PROTESTS TO BUCHANAN President Buchanan apparently agreed with everything that Calhoun told him and prepared his message. Governor Robert J. Walker, a Mississippian, who had been Secretary of the Treasury in Polk’s cabinet when Buchanan was Secretary of State, hurried from Lecompton to Washington to warn the President that the Lecompton Constitution had been adopted by fraud and to have nothing to do with it. Buchanan, however, declined to heed Walker’s advice, and the Kansas governor resigned. Buchanan next appointed James Denver, a Californian and former Virginian, as territorial governor. Denver soon sensed that the Lecompton Constitution did not represent the will of the Kansas people and protested to Buchanan against his endorsing it. He sent Rush Elmore, a widely known Kansas slave holder, to Washington to warn the President that the constitution was full of dynamite. J.H. Stringfellow, editor of an Atchison newspaper, and a leader of the proslavery faction, also protested against it as a fraudulent document. Buchanan, however, foresaw that the proslavery leaders of the South wanted Kansas to be a slave state and that unless it was admitted as a slave state they would probably withdraw their states from the union. In the interests of harmony, or because he was playing politics, Buchanan sent his message saying that slavery already existed in Kansas and that “Kansas is therefore as much a slave state as Georgia or South Carolina.” Warning the congress against doing anything that would disrupt the union, the President ended his message with these words: “The dark and ominous clouds which now appear to be impending over the union, I conscientiously believe may be dissipated with honor to every portion of it by admission of Kansas during the present session of congress, whereas, if she should be rejected, I greatly fear those clouds will become darker and more ominous than any which have ever yet threatened the Constitution and the union.” Kansas, in those days, had no telegraph wires and Washington listened to the President’s message and after hearing it members of both houses of Congress began writing the Kansas Statehood Bill. But at Lecompton events were happening with dramatic suddenness. The legislative committee, foiled in its attempt to bring Calhoun before it, summoned his chief clerk, L.A. McLean. He testified before the committee on January 30 that Calhoun had taken the election returns to Washington with him to show them to the President. CHARLIE TORRY’S WORK But this selfsame McLean went at midnight with another of his clerks, John Sherrard, placed the returns in a candlebox and buried the box under a woodpile back of the surveyor general’s office. Charlie Torry was such a poorly paid clerk that he made ends meet by sleeping on a cot in the office. From a window he watched the burial of the box. He later went to the yard, removed the wood, dug up the box, and examined the contents. Here were the missing election returns. The next day Torry notified a friend who carried the information to both the legislative committee and the sheriff of Douglas County, Sam Walker. But before notifying anybody, Torry reburied the box and replaced the wood. On February 2, while Buchanan’s message was being carried to Congress, Sheriff Walker arrived with eight men and a search warrant to look for the ballots. Walker and his eight possemen were all stark warriors, who would rather fight than not. One of them was Joe Cook, who was to hang for being with John Brown at Harper’s Ferry. The others had all been prominent in the border warfare. When it became apparent to McLean that the eight were going to remove the woodpile, he signaled to the seventeen clerks to pick up their rifles and resist. Fighting was so common in those days in Kansas that each clerk kept a loaded rifle at his desk. These were old-fashioned muzzle-loaders with percussion caps. But as each of the clerks picked up his weapon to fight, he noticed, upon cocking the piece, that the percussion cap had been removed. Torry had removed the caps in the night and the guns were worthless. The sheriff’s posse exhumed the candlebox and galloped to Lawrence, where the legislative committee was in session. McLean and Sherrard, frightened at what might happen to them, especially to McLean, who had perjured himself, fled across the Kansas River, seized a pair of mules belonging to a farmer, threw off the harness and rode bareback to Missouri to be outside the jurisdiction of the Kansas authorities. When the election returns were examined it was discovered they had been padded outrageously. At Oxford, in Johnson County, a precinct with six houses, the returns showed that 1,266 votes had been cast. At Shawnee Mission, the returns had been padded to show 729 votes, although the number of voters there was less than a hundred. At Kickapoo, in Leavenworth County, which had only a few houses at a point where the trail crossed a creek, the returns showed 1,017 ballots had been cast. THE EFFECT ON THE NATION. When the news arrived in the eastern states, the newspapers were filled with the account of the fraud. Northern congressmen did not dare vote for the bill. Stephen A. Douglas was in a particularly bad spot. It was 1858 and he had to face Abraham Lincoln in a senatorial contest. The summer of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates was just ahead of him. Douglas could take no chances. He could not support the Lecompton fraud. Douglas led the opposition to the bill, but despite his opposition it passed the senate, but it failed in the house. Lincoln was beaten by Douglas for the senate, but the presidency was another matter. The South never forgave Douglas for his desertion. The southern Democrats bolted the Democratic National Convention in 1860 and nominated John C. Breckenridge as the candidate of the South. The northern Democrats nominated Douglas. With a divided party, the Democrats, although greatly in the majority, were unable to defeat Lincoln, the Republican nominee. With the election of Lincoln, the South did as Buchanan had feared. It withdrew from the union. Civil War followed and out of the Civil War came the end of slavery. Back in Kansas, Charlie Torry continued his service as clerk, messenger and janitor. Nobody suspected him. Calhoun dared not return to Kansas, and so Buchanan permitted him to remove his office to Nebraska City, Neb., and Torry followed him there. He needed the job. Not until after McLean, Calhoun, and Torry were dead, did the truth come to light that Charlie Torry had given the tip that revealed the candlebox under the woodpile. But there are documents in the archives of the Kansas Historical Society, including a letter from Charlie Torry, which reveal the true facts of the disclosure. Kevin K. Stephenson 1600 Kentucky St. #2 Lawrence, KS 66044 (785)865-1586 Data/Fax:(785)865-1586 e-mail: [email protected] website: http://falcon.cc.ukans.edu/~kevin2/homepage.html