outside the annals of missionary effort. The chief promoter of this
enterprise was a thrifty, Massachusetts Yankee, who saw no reason why
crusading and business should not go hand in hand. Kansas might be
wrested from the slave-power at the same time that returns on invested
funds were secured.

The effect of these developments upon the aggressive pro-slavery
people of Missouri is not easy to describe. Hitherto they had assumed
that Kansas would become a slave Territory in the natural order of
events. This was the prevailing Southern opinion. At once the people
of western Missouri were put upon the defensive. Blue lodges were
formed for the purpose of carrying slavery into Kansas. Appeals were
circulated in the slave-holding States for colonists and funds.
Passions were inflamed by rumors which grew as they stalked abroad.
The peaceful occupation of Kansas was at an end. Popular sovereignty
was to be tested under abnormal conditions.

When the election of territorial delegates to Congress occurred, in
the late fall, a fatal defect in the organic law was disclosed, to
which many of the untoward incidents of succeeding months may be
ascribed. The territorial act conferred the right of voting at the
first elections upon all free, white, male inhabitants, twenty-one
years of age and actually resident in the Territory.[536] Here was an
unfortunate ambiguity. What was actual residence? Every other act
organizing a territorial government was definite on this point,
permitting only those to vote who were living in the proposed
Territory, at the time of the passage of the act. The omission in the
case of Kansas and Nebraska is easily accounted for. Neither had legal
residents when the act was passed. Indeed, this defect bears witness
to the fact that Congress was legislating, not for actual, but for