Lecompton: Where Slavery Almost Came to Kansas

The small town of Lecompton, Kansas, sitting above the Kansas River west of Lawrence, looks today like a quiet backwater with a population of just a few hundred people. In the late eighteen fifties it was something else entirely: the capital of a territorial government that very nearly made Kansas a slave state, and the place where the political argument over slavery fractured the Democratic Party and set the stage for the Civil War.

Lecompton was designated the official capital of Kansas Territory in eighteen fifty-five, and it became the headquarters of the proslavery faction during the years of Bleeding Kansas. The critical moment came in the fall of eighteen fifty-seven, when delegates met in Constitution Hall and drafted the Lecompton Constitution, a document that would have admitted Kansas to the Union with slavery explicitly protected and with free Black persons excluded from the bill of rights entirely.

The process was fraudulent from the start. Free-State settlers outnumbered proslavery residents in Kansas by that point, but the convention was controlled by men who had no intention of letting the majority decide. When the constitution went to a referendum, Free-Staters boycotted it, and it passed with a fraudulent majority. When a second referendum was held with both sides participating, Kansas voters rejected the Lecompton Constitution by more than ten thousand votes to one hundred thirty-eight.

President James Buchanan nonetheless endorsed the Lecompton Constitution and sent it to Congress, arguing that Kansas should be admitted as a slave state. The resulting battle in Washington was seismic. The constitution passed the Senate thirty-three to twenty-five but was defeated in the House one hundred twenty to one hundred twelve. The fight split the Democratic Party between Northern and Southern wings and made the name Lecompton synonymous with the corruption of the proslavery cause.

The Lecompton Constitution is mentioned fifty-one times across the Lincoln-Douglas debates of eighteen fifty-eight. That is how much it mattered. Constitution Hall still stands in Lecompton today, a small limestone building that holds more American history than its modest appearance suggests.