Heading: (Anti-Slavery)
Author: Rickard, L. H.
Title: Autograph Letter Signed by Future Gun Company Magnate foreseeing the end of Abolitionism
Place Published: Washington, DC
Publisher:
Date Published: August 8, 1856
Description:

2 pp. + original mailing envelope. To Horace Briggs, Connecticut.

Rickard, who called himself a "staunch old Jeffersonian democrat", held a patronage position as a clerk in the Treasury Department during the Pierce Administration. After the presidential election of 1856, he went to work for the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, later joining Horace Briggs in the Hopkins & Allen Firearms Company.

"I returned to Washington the last of July. I found things about the same as when I left the City. About the same amount of howling continues to be made over Kansas as usual. But they are nearly through. The principles of the Nebrask Bill will become the policy of this nation and then farewell to Abolitionism - not a straw will be left in the ruck of the fanatical scoundrels..."

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, drafted by Democratic Senator Stephen Douglas, opened up lands in newly-created territories, allowing the question of the status of slavery in those lands to be decided by popular sovereignty rather than by Congress. While Democrats like Rickard expected that the Act would bring an end to the national debate over slavery and silence the radical Abolitionists, it only inflamed the conflict between pro- and anti-slavery forces, leading to armed conflict in "Bleeding Kansas", to creation of the new Republican Party, and ultimately to Civil War.

Good.