[While the recent election fraud allegations have been rejected by
the courts due to lack of supporting evidence, there was a time in
American history when elections were stolen, their outcomes determined
by fraudulent votes, and their results certified by the federal
government.]
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WHEN TRULY STOLEN ELECTIONS CHANGED THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY  
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Stan Haynes
April 9, 2023
History News Network [[link removed]]

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_ While the recent election fraud allegations have been rejected by
the courts due to lack of supporting evidence, there was a time in
American history when elections were stolen, their outcomes determined
by fraudulent votes, and their results certified by the federal
government. _

U.S. Secretary of State William L. Marcy, Minister to the UK James
Buchanan, President Franklin Pierce, and US Senators Lewis Cass and
Stephen Douglas are depicted as participants in the violence committed
by pro-slavery Missourians, Image Boston Public Library

 

It has become a familiar cry over the past couple of years: The
election was stolen! Fraud! We were robbed!

Former President Donald Trump and his supporters allege that election
fraud in several states (Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin,
and others) resulted in the electoral votes of those states going to
Joe Biden, determining the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
The claims brought Trump supporters to Washington, D. C. on January 6,
2021, and led to the attack on the Capitol. Similar claims about the
2022 midterm elections have been made, most notably by the Republican
candidate for governor in Arizona.

While the recent election fraud allegations have been rejected by the
courts due to lack of supporting evidence, there was a time in
American history when elections _were _stolen, their outcomes
determined by fraudulent votes, and their results certified by the
federal government.

In 1854, Congress passed, and President Franklin Pierce signed into
law, the Kansas-Nebraska Act. It reversed the Missouri Compromise’s
prohibition on any northern expansion of slavery. Instead, whether
slavery would exist in the territories of Kansas and Nebraska would be
determined by what was called “popular sovereignty,” _i.e.,_ the
people of a territory would vote on whether to have slavery or not.
Nebraska, located farther north and sharing a border with the free
state of Iowa, was, most believed, destined to reject slavery. But the
status of slavery in Kansas, to Nebraska’s south and bordering on
the slaveholding state of Missouri, was uncertain. Both the North and
South rushed settlers into Kansas to try to gain the majority.

The major tests of each side’s strength occurred at the ballot box.
The first election was held on November 29, 1854, to select a delegate
to represent the territory in Congress. The rules for voting, as
determined by the territory’s Pierce-appointed governor, Andrew
Reeder, had been clear. To cast a ballot, an eligible voter must
actually reside in the territory of Kansas, to the exclusion of any
other domicile, and have the intention of remaining permanently.

So much for the rules. On election day, hordes of proslavery
Missourians crossed the border into Kansas and voted illegally.
Although most were not slaveholders, they had heard plenty of speeches
from their leaders inciting them to do whatever was necessary to stop
the “Yankee abolitionists” from making Kansas a free state. Dubbed
“border ruffians” by free-staters, these men were menacing in
appearance and behavior and arrived for election day armed with knives
and guns, as well as with ample supplies of barreled whiskey. They
came in groups across the border a couple of days before the election
and, a day or so after turned around and went back to Missouri.
Crowding the polling places, they demanded to vote and threatened poll
judges who refused to let them do so. Some of the judges, in fear for
their lives, quit on the spot; those who remained were helpless to
prevent ballot boxes from being stuffed. Worse, the ruffians used
intimidation and in some cases violence to keep legitimate
slavery-opposing residents of Kansas from casting their ballots.

It worked. The proslavery candidate for Congress, John Whitfield, won
the November election with almost 2,300 votes, compared to only around
300 for his closest challenger. Despite the widespread and obvious
fraud, Governor Reeder let the results stand. The Kansas-Nebraska Act,
the victors proudly declared, established that the people would vote
to decide all issues pertaining to slavery. And vote they had. A
congressional investigation later determined that more than 1,700
votes had been fraudulently cast.

Four months later, on March 30, 1855, another election was held in
Kansas to select a territorial legislature. This election was far more
important than the earlier one, which had only chosen a delegate to
represent the territory in Congress. The legislative body elected in
March would write the territory’s laws, put it on a course for
statehood, and have a large say in whether that would be with or
without slavery. In the months since November, hundreds more settlers
had arrived from New England and other northern states, most of whom
opposed slavery. Free-staters were confident that, if the election
were held fairly, a legislature with a majority opposing slavery would
be chosen.

Once again, however, thousands of Missourians crossed the border and
cast illegal ballots. A census of Kansas residents taken just a few
weeks before had documented fewer than 3,000 eligible voters. Yet,
more than 6,000 votes were cast and, of those, more than 5,400 were
for proslavery candidates. All but a handful of the seats in the
legislature went to them. As in November, many legitimate Kansas
residents who opposed slavery were unable to vote, due to
intimidation, threats, and violence. An appeal to Governor Reeder to
toss out the results ended in a revote in only a few precincts,
nowhere near enough to change the outcome. Fumed Horace Greeley in
the _New York Tribune_, “[A] more stupendous fraud was never
perpetrated since the invention of the ballot-box. The crew who will
assemble under the title of the Kansas Territorial Legislature, by
virtue of this outrage, will be a body of men whose acts no more
respect will be due . . . than a Legislature chosen by a tribe of
wander[ers] . . . .”

Although elected by fraud, the territorial legislature was recognized
by President Pierce as the legitimate government of the Kansas
Territory. When it met in the summer of 1855, harsh proslavery laws
were passed. These not only made slavery legal in Kansas, but also
imposed the death penalty for assisting a slave escape to freedom, and
even made speaking or writing in opposition to slavery in Kansas a
felony punishable by up to two years of imprisonment at hard labor. 

The free-staters in Kansas dubbed these “bogus laws” enacted by a
“bogus legislature.” They boycotted the machinery of the
territorial government, adopted a policy of repudiating its laws,
drafted a constitution for Kansas to enter the Union as a free state,
and set up their own shadow government. President Pierce, who called
these actions “revolutionary” and potentially “treasonable,”
ordered the commanders of federal forts in the territory to suppress
any armed resistance to enforcement of the laws. Over the next few
years, much blood was shed in Kansas on both sides. The town of
Lawrence, an antislavery enclave, was attacked by a proslavery mob,
abolitionist John Brown massacred proslavery men and boys at
Pottawatomie Creek, and there were battles between militia groups.
Some estimates of the death toll run into the hundreds.  

By 1859, settlers in Kansas opposing slavery were clearly in the
majority. A new governor, Robert Walker, vowed that elections would be
held fairly. When he threw out fraudulently cast votes in elections
for the territorial legislature held that fall, the free-staters were
finally in control. In January 1861, two months after the election of
Abraham Lincoln, and after the secession of several states in the Deep
South, Kansas finally entered the Union as a free state. Lincoln, a
former one-term congressman from Illinois, had left politics in the
late 1840s. It was his opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act that
caused him to reenter to political arena in the mid-1850s and put him
on a path to the White House. But for the controversy, election fraud,
and violence in Kansas, Lincoln may well have been just a footnote to
history.

_STAN HAYNES is the author of a new historical fiction book, And
Union No More
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which is set in Kansas in the 1850s and explores the battles there
over slavery. Visit his website at www.stanhaynes.com
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_HISTORY NEWS NETWORK depends on the generosity of its community of
readers. If you enjoy HNN and value our work to put the news in
historical perspective, please consider making a donation today! 
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* slavery
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* abolitionism
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* Kansas
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* election fraud
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* Kansas-Nebraska Act
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* Racism
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