Vindication of the Policy of the Administration. Speech of Hon. J.H. Lane, of Kansas, in the Senate…On the Special Order, being Senate Bill No. 45, to set apart a Portion of the State of Texas for the Use of Persons of African Descent.

“Emancipation leaves them in the midst of unfriendly influences…”

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Issued after the Emancipation Proclamation, a scarce pamphlet calling for the establishment of a separate territory for freed African Americans, carved out of the State of Texas. This effort was promoted by “Bleeding Kansas” partisan and Radical Republican, U.S. Senator James Henry Lane (1814–1866) of Kansas, a long-time opponent of slavery who helped organize Black regiments to fight for the Union in the Civil War.

Part of Lane’s argument was that the African-American would not be welcome in a Reconstruction-era South: “The colored man is to be freed. To place this beyond question or doubt we must guard against his being re-enslaved upon the reconstruction of the Union. This can only be done by an amendment of the Constitution, ‘declaring that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except for crime, shall be permitted in the land.’ The black man freed, and his re-enslavement rendered impossible by fundamental law, then comes the last step in the programme to answer safely, correctly, and forever, the question: What is our duty as legislators legislating for posterity? What is our duty toward this disfranchised race?”

“Lane was the pivotal political figure in Kansas after the Kansas-Nebraska Act focused America’s sectional disputes on that territory. The proslavery attacks made on Free State settlers radicalized him and unleashed his militant disposition. His name came to strike terror into slavery advocates in Missouri and in Kansas.” (ANB)

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