"The quarrel was however, for a time composed by the adoption of Mr. Clay's compromise measures in 1850, but only to break out again with increased violence four years subsequently, on the occasion of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Its repeal was occasioned by the movements for establishing a territorial government in Nebraska.* With respect to the delicate but vital question of slavery, it was proposed to carry out the principle which had now become known as that of Congressional non-interference--that is, that the United States Congress should stand in a neutral attitude, doing nothing to prevent and nothing to promote the introduction of slavery, but should leave those points to be settled by the inhabitants of the Territory themselves. This was asserted to be the legitimate result of the compromise measures of 1850."*

"Under these circumstances, it was plain that a conflict between the two great parties must necessarily ensue; that the flood of free labor heretofore steadily overflowing the North, and the stream of slave labor from the South, would be precipitated against each other on the banks of the Kansas.*. . . Settlers from Missouri, with their slaves crossed over, every exertion being made not only to organize the territory on these principles, but to exclude the incoming free emigrants. In the Eastern States what were termed Emigrant Aid Societies were established, and settlers not only prepared for agricultural labor, but armed for conflict, forced in.* The disorders now became tenfold worse. Assassinations, murders, and all manner of brutal crimes were perpetrated. Skirmishes, resulting in great loss of life, occurred between the free and slave parties. A regiment of recruits from the Atlantic States, South Carolina and Georgia, arrived. The town of Lawrence was sacked; but the Free-soil emigrants steadily increased in number, and among them came one destined to future celebrity--John Brown, of Ossawatomie."*

Kansas and Missouri "bled" for ten years from 1856 to 1866. This image extends that bitter legacy of civil war into the lawless violence of the American West. Through much of the Civil War, Cole Younger served as a Confederate guerrilla under William C. Quantrill. On 21 August 1863 the band sacked and burned Lawrence, Kansas. Over 150 people died. After the war, Cole and his brothers, along with Jesse and Frank James, formed the most famous outlaw gang in history. In 1874, the youngest brother, John (sitting in front), died in a gunfight. In 1876, Cole, James, and Robert were wounded and captured in an unsuccessful attempt to rob the bank at Northfield, Minnesota. In 1889 Robert (on the right) died in prison. In 1902 James (on the left) committed suicide. Pardoned in 1903, Cole (in rear) traveled for a time with a Wild West Show. In this photo from early in their "career" of lawlessness, the four Youngers express their relationship as brothers and comrades in arms. Their hands are already bloodied by the turbulent times in which they live, but the full harvest of their violent lives lies unglimpsed ahead.

FAMILY PHOTOGRAPH OF ALL FOUR OF THE OUTLAW YOUNGER BROTHERS Given by Cole Younger to the family of Charles David Carter, Congressman from the Indian Territory cdv-size tintype photographer unknown c. 1869 (Click on the image to view further details)

"There can be no doubt that the South, in lending herself to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, committed a mistake. So long as all territory on her side of latitude 36 30' was delivered to slavery, she had security. In permitting the abandonment of that concession, she grasped at the shadow of equality with the North, and lost the substance; from that moment the anti-slavery party had her at their mercy.* An imperious necessity pressed upon the South to find deliverance from the difficulties hourly increasing around her. It seemed as if she was under the finger of Destiny. She had been constrained to surrender the Northwest Territory, the larger part of the Louisiana purchase, the Mexican acquisitions. Free labor was steadily encircling her in the West."*

"The Kansas-Nebraska struggle marks an epoch in the great controversy between the North and the South. It closes the period of Parliamentary or Congressional debate between them, and introduces one of violence and open war. The South clearly perceived that nothing more was to be hoped for from peaceable measures, and that, if it were its intention to perpetuate, or even to protect African slavery, it could do so only by force."*

"Toward the close of 1859 Virginia had been profoundly agitated by the attack of "old John Brown," who seized Harper's Ferry, in the northeast of the state, with the intention of liberating slaves.* But he greatly miscalculated the encouragement he would receive and the resistance he would encounter. After a desperate fight, in which most of his companions were killed, among them two of his sons, and himself severely wounded both with the sabre and bayonet, he was overpowered by the Virginia militia and United States troops.* He walked forth from the jail to execution, as an eye-witness said, with " a radiant countenance and the step of a conqueror. I have seen a very brave man die to-day," was the remark of a by-stander when the execution was over. The South complained that the Free States canonized him; in truth, however, it was they themselves who had made him immortal."*

"JOHN BROWN OF OSSAWATOMIE" Albumen Carte-de-visite Photographed by James Wallace Black 173 Washington Street, Boston c. 1859 (Click on the image to view further details) This early image of "Ossawatomie" Brown was probably issued in late 1859, perhaps about the same time that Brown hung for treason [2 December 1859].

James Wallace Black dissolved his famous partnership with John Whipple in the autumn of 1859 and opened a gallery at 173 Washington Street in Boston. On 16-18 October 1859 the militant abolitionist John Brown and a handful of followers seized the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia. This abortive attempt to free Southern slaves polarized and inflamed opinion North and South. By 1860 Black had formed another partnership and issued carte-de-visite photographs with the backmark of Black & Batchelder.

"In the South, the secession leaders took advantage of this state of affairs to draw many slaveholders to their views. In the North the Republicans, daily increasing in numbers and power, and tempted by the obvious division of their antagonist, the Democratic party, extended the sphere of their operations, and now aspired to the suppression of slavery in the states themselves."*

Southern society reacted to John Brown's raid with increased militarism in preparation for a war now thought inevitable. Militia units formed and swelled in counties of every state. Mary Dillard appears in the 1860 census for Roanoke County, Virginia as a 19 year old domestic servant in the household of Salem landowner Robert Sutphin. Despite his uniform, a sense of languid tranquility pervades this portrait of Mary and her beau. The same calm spirit infused the entire nation. They sit together just one short year before the beginning of warfare on a scale they can't yet imagine.

SOUTHERN MILITIAMAN & HIS LADY Sixth-plate ambrotype Photographer unknown Inscription with photo: "W.C. Wise & Miss M.I. Dillard Salem Va April 10th 1860" (Click on the image to view further details)

"In national controversies, such as that between the South and the North, each party may conscientiously feel that it is right, and that its antagonist is blinded by interest or deluded by fanaticism. Both may forget that the majority of men do not reason at all, but simply acquiesce in what they hear, or simply reject it, insensibly biased by interest, education, or association."*

"It is the physiological operation of a hot climate to produce languor and an indisposition for bodily exertion.* Whoever has the opportunity of so doing will seek to compel those less fortunate than himself to minister to his wants, and hence such a climate must tend to be a region of forced labor. This tendency depends upon temperature; it increases with the heat. From a physical cause there thus arises an individual predisposition; and since that individual predisposition is participated in by every member of such a community, an intellectual atmosphere, as it may be termed, is produced, through which all social problems must be seen. A belief in the lawfulness of slavery is thus not the result of reason--for slave holding is utterly indefensible; it is a delusion of the intellectual atmosphere of a slave holding society. To overthrow a social system believed to be right is therefore no easy affair. It can not be done by argument alone. Argument weighs little against social influences or personal interests. Men do not concern themselves to ascertain what is abstractly true; they are satisfied with what they think is passing currently for truth. The social repudiation of error is hence of slow progress. It commonly takes place by almost imperceptible degrees."*

"The South was converting a transitory necessity into a permanent political principle. She had persuaded herself that slavery had become every thing to her; that, if she desired to be a power at all, she must be a slave power. She dreamt of a great empire around that American Mediterranean, the Gulf of Mexico, holding possession of the mouth of the Mississippi, and thereby controlling the center of the continent, but ‘leaving out in the cold' the new England Puritans. A monopoly of the cotton trade would give her weight among the nations of the earth; a strong military government would enable her to more than rival the glories of ancient Rome. Slavery was her transient necessity; she sought to make it the permanent political principle, the ‘corner-stone' of enduring empire. In all this she reversed the remark of Montesquieu, that "a slave nation tends to preserve rather than to acquire, a free nation to acquire rather than to preserve."*

THE TOMB OF WASHINGTON Half-plate ambrotype Photographer unknown Mt. Vernon, Virginia c. 1860 (Click on the image to view further details)

One tenuous thread still binding the nation together was the memory of George Washington. Both sides revered their first president and were loathe to destroy the nation that he worked so hard to create. With the greatest irony Northerners AND Southerners defended their principles in the name of Washington because both sides were fighting for America as they believed it to be. The inscription above the entranceway reads: "Within this Enclosure Rest the remains of Gen'l George Washington"

"Such was the condition of things at the meeting of the Charleston convention (1860). The South had at last recognized that it could no longer depend on its old ally, the Democratic party of the North, which had been disorganized in consequence of the illogical position which it has been attempting so long to sustain. No human ingenuity could coordinate the doctrine of the equal rights of man in the North with the doctrine of human slavery in the South. The day must inevitably come in which that great party would have to accept the consequences of such a contradiction. The South saw this, and appreciated at once that henceforth it must rely on itself. The decomposition of the Democracy, the triumph of the Republicans, the election of Mr. Lincoln, and the secession of the Cotton States were the results."*

"On November 6th, 1860, the [presidential] election took place. The position of the candidates, the electoral vote being considered, was, Mr. Lincoln, 180; Mr. Breckinridge, 72; Mr. Bell, 39; Mr. Douglas, 12. When the electoral college met in the ensuing month, Mr. Lincoln was therefore chosen President of the United States."*

The photograph that made Lincoln President of the United States. Mathew Brady took this famous portrait in New York City on 27 February 1860, a few hours before Lincoln delivered his Cooper Union address. Lincoln later said that that speech and this portrait placed him in the White House. He was fifty-one years old in the photograph. In little over five years he was dead.

"OLD ABE" Carte-de-visite photograph taken by Mathew Brady and distributed by E. Anthony 501 Broadway, New York c 1860-61 (Click on the image to view further details)

"ABRAHAM LINCOLN was born of poor and illiterate parents, in Hardin county, Kentucky. His father could neither read nor write. When the future President was only eight years old the family removed to Indiana, floating down the Ohio on a raft. They built their humble log cabin in Spencer County. At the age of nineteen, having acquired the rudiments of a scanty education--reading, writing, ciphering---he hired himself as a flat-boatman on the Mississippi, receiving as wages ten dollars a month. His father removing to Illinois two years subsequently, he drove the cattle on the journey, and then split rails to fence in the new farm. Soon afterward he commenced shop-keeping in a small way, and added to his acquirements the art of land surveying. At twenty-five he was elected a member of the Legislature of Illinois. He had now begun studying law, and in due time was admitted to the bar. Subsequently he was sent to the national Congress, in which he uniformly and consistently vindicated the rights of freedom against slavery."*

"In the years of unparalleled political difficulty--through the horrors of an awful civil war, this man was the Chief of the Republic. He was found to be of spotless integrity, and equal to his task. He emancipated four millions of human beings from slavery, and gave to his country peace."*