Governors and legislatures stood by to call conventions to consider secession if Congress refused to admit Kansas under the “duly ratified” Lecompton constitution. “If Kansas is driven out of the Union for being a Slave State,” asked South Carolina’s Senator James Hammond, “can any Slave State remain in it with honor?” The southern people, declared a Georgia congressman, intended “to have equality in this Union or independence out of it.”45 These threats stiffened Buchanan’s backbone. On February 2, 1858, he sent the Lecompton constitution to Congress with a message recommending admission of a
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