In the days of the Missouri-Kansas border war, a Missourian in the forefront of the battle to make Kansas a slave state wrote,
“I advised in a public speech the squatters in Kansas and the people of Missouri give a horse thief, robber or homicide a fair trial, but to hang a negro thief, or abolitionist without judge or jury. We will be compelled to shoot, burn and hang, but the thing will soon be over.”
The man who preached that kind of violence in advocating slavery in the Kansas Territory was one of our great U. S. senators. It was argued that he, as president pro tem of the Senate, was president of the United States for a day, March 4, 1849, which fell on a Sunday and thus delayed by twenty-four hours the inauguration of Zachary Taylor.