BILL. On February 2, 1853, William A.
Richardson, member of the House from Illinois, and who,
after the death of Douglas in 1861, was elected to fill a
portion of his unexpired senatorial term, introduced house
bill No. 353, "to organize the territory of
Nebraska."22 This bill, which made no reference
to slavery, passed the house February 110, 1853, by a vote
of 98 to 43. The northern boundary of the territory
described in this bill was the 43d parallel, the present
boundary of Nebraska on that side, its eastern limit was the
west line of Missouri and Iowa, its southern, the territory
of New Mexico and the parallel of 36o 30', and
its western, the summit of the Rocky mountains.23
The bill underwent an extended and spirited debate which
throws an interesting light on the condition of the
territory and of politics at that time. It appears from the
debate that the Indian affairs of the territory were under
the jurisdiction of the superintendent at St. Louis, and
that all Indians located immediately along the Missouri
frontier had been removed there from their eastern
habitat.24 Mr. Brooks of New York objected
strongly to the bill on the ground that the government had
no right to take possession of the territory because the
Indian title to it had not been extinguished. 25
In reply to this objection, Mr. Hall of Missouri, who was an
ardent lieutenant of Douglas and Richardson in their
enterprise, said that a tract forty miles wide and three
hundred miles long, running along the border of Missouri,
had been set aside for the Indians by treaty and was
occupied by twelve thousand to fourteen thousand of them; a
strip of about the same extent, called neutral, was not
occupied; as to the rest of the territory it was in the same
situation as that of Oregon, Utah, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and
Iowa when they were organized. Mr. Hall said that by the act
of 1834 all the territory west of the Mississippi river,
except the states of Missouri and Louisiana and the
territory of Arkansas, was erected into what was called
Indian territory. Under the operation of that law our people
were not permitted to enter that territory at all without a
license from the executive of the government or his agent.
As a result the occupants were limited to about five hundred
licensed persons, and yet as many as fifty or sixty thousand
people passed through this country annually on the way to
Oregon, California, Utah, and New Mexico, under the
protection of no law, and murders and other crimes were
perpetrated. If we desired to protect this travel we must
organize the territory and extinguish the Indian title. When
Mr. Brooks insisted that this was the first time that a
territorial bill had ever been introduced to establish
government over territory to which the Indian title had not
been extinguished in any part and over a people who do not
exist there, Phelps, Richardson, and Hall held out that the
Indian title had not been extinguished in any of the
territories when they were organized. Brooks persisted in
his demand to know the population of the proposed territory,
and Richardson replied that it was not over one thousand two
22 Cong. Globe, vol. 26, p. 474.
23 House Roll, 353.
24 Cong. Globe, vol. 26, pp. 442-443.
25 Ibid., p. 543.
the part of the bill which provided for the making of
treaties with Indians to extinguish their title, because it
was time "to let the country know that it is our policy to
plunder these people; not make a mockery anew by the
pretense of a treaty," Hall protested that while Sweetzer
might be correct in holding that the Indians should be
incorporated as citizens, yet a territory large enough for
two or three large states should not be given up to ten or
twelve thousand Indians. He thought a portion of the
territory had been secured by treaty with the Kansas
Indians, but that so far there was no controversy between
the Indians and the government. Mr. Howard said that the
treaty of 1825 had given the Ohio and Missouri Shawnees
fifty miles square, and the Kansas Indians had also selected
a tract of the same area on the Missouri river under
27 Cong. Globe, vol. 26, p. 544.
28 Ibid., p. 556, for names of tribes.
29 Ibid., p. 558.
take in more lands and encourage emigration from the
states which were still so largely unoccupied, The eleven
landed states, as he called them, of Alabama, Arkansas,
Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan,
Mississippi, Missouri, and Wisconsin, had 137,000,000 acres
of unimproved lands in the hands of private owners and
200,000,000 acres of public lands. Richardson retorted that
this was the argument of Fisher Ames over again, and charged
the eastern members with fear of opening the better lands of
the West in competition with their own. He thought the best
way was to give the people a chance to make their own
30 General Sam Houston, the hero of San Jacinto.
31 Cong. Globe, vol. 26, p. 1020.
32 Ibid., p. 1113.
33 Ibid., p. 1115.
but it seems scarcely possible that finesse could have
been so adroitly spun and spread so far as to have concealed
the consideration of the admission of more free territory as
the real objection on the part of the South. On the other
hand, the prompt report which Douglas made from his
committee early in the next session of Congress,
recommending the squatter sovereignty compromise, indicates
that he had discovered not only that the South, in part at
least, had decided to press the slavery objection, but the
way to meet it -- unless indeed this compromise was a
gratuitous sop thrown to the South as a bid for its favor to
his political fortunes. In a speech at Atchison during the
vacation, September 24, 1854, Senator Atchison, in a
bibulous burst of confidence, said that he had forced
Douglas to change his tactics and adopt the
compromise.34 While this claim shames the wily
senator's frank disclaimer at the last session, alluded to
above, it is entirely consistent with his leadership in the
subsequent attempt to make the most of the compromise by
forcing Kansas into the Union as a slave state.
34 Rhodes, History of the United States, vol. i, p. 431.
35 Rhodes, History of the United States, vol, i, p. 432.
36 Senate bill No. 22, 1853.
37 Cong. Globe, vol. 28, pt. 1, p. 239.
White Earth rivers on the south and west and Fort
Leavenworth, then a military station, was designated as the
capital.38 A leading historian commits the error
of including within this proposed territory of Nebraska the
area now comprised in the states of Kansas, Nebraska, the
Dakotas, Montana, and, part of Colorado and Wyoming, which
"contained 485,000 square miles, a territory larger by
thirty-three thousand square miles than all the free states
in the Union east of the Rocky mountains."39 That
larger part of the Dakotas lying east of the Missouri,
however, belonged to Minnesota, and a corner of Wyoming was
not included in the purchase. But the area in square miles
as given is approximately correct.
38 Cong. Globe, vol. 28, pt. 1, p. 222.
39 Rhodes, History of the United States, vol. i, p. 426. There are also two material errors in the description of the boundaries of the territories of Nebraska and Kansas in p. 222, pt. 1, vol. 28, Cong. Globe. The boundaries given in the bills here referred to have been obtained by examination of the bills on file in the capitol at Washington, as none of them, excepting the last one, which passed, were officially published.
40 Senate reports, 1st sess., 33d Cong., no. 15.
41 Rhodes, History of the United States, vol. i, P. 433.
territory affected by it except the part of the Dakotas
lying east of the Missouri river, and which would be
hopelessly anti-slavery under the popular choice. Moreover,
this very area had been embraced in the territory of
Wisconsin by the act of 1836, in which was incorporated the
slavery interdiction of the Ordinance of 1787; and this
interdiction seems to have been passed on when the territory
fell to Minnesota in 1849, where it remained when the
Missouri Compromise was repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska act.
It seems still less accurate, or still more misleading, in
the attempt to exaggerate the importance of the formal
repeal of the Missouri Compromise, to say, touching
Douglas's 4th of January bill, that,
42 Macy, Political Parties in the United States, p. 189.
43 Rhodes, History of the United States, vol. i, p. 428.
44 Ibid., Vol. i, p. 431
45 Ibid., p. 430.
46 Schouler, History of the United States, vol. v, p. 285.
47 Rhodes, History of the United States, vol. i, p. 471.