On this day in 1856 Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke "On the Affairs in Kansas" at a Kansas Relief Meeting in Cambridge, Mass. Two years earlier, the Kansas-Nebraska Act had repealed the Missouri Compromise banning slavery in the new territories and granted residents the right to choose for themselves on the issue. Pro-slavery gangs had been shooting and even scalping Abolitionists, and the Cambridge Relief Meeting was one of many such, as was Emerson's appeal: "The people of Kansas ask for bread, clothes, arms, and men, to save them alive, and enable them to stand against these enemies of the human race ... FULL STORY »
