Horace Greeley, The American Conflict: A History of the Great Rebellion in the United States of America, 1860-65: its Causes, Incidents, and Results: Intended to exhibit especially its moral and political phases with the drift and progress of American opinion respecting human slavery from 1776 to the close of the War for the Union. Volume I.

[251] Convention at Wyandot was laid before the House, February 10th, 1860. On the 15th, Mr. Grow, of Pennsylvania, introduced a bill for the admission of Kansas into the Union; which was read a first and a second time, and referred to the Committee on Territories. This bill was reported to the House from that Committee, and, on the 11th of April, it passed, under the Previous Question: Yeas 134; Nays 73. But the Senate, which was very strongly Democratic, stubbornly refused (32 to 27) to take it up, and adjourned, leaving Kansas still a Territory: so that, though every way qualified for and entitled to admission, she was remanded into territorial vassalage by the very men who had been so eager to admit her, two years before, when her population and every other element of strength and stability were considerably less. She was thus denied a voice in the election for President in 1860. At the next session of Congress, however, her application was renewed; and on the same day¹ that Messrs. Jefferson Davis, Clement C. Clay, Fitzpatrick, Mallory, and others, abandoned their seats and the Capitol to take part in the Southern Rebellion, a bill admitting her as a Free State under the Wyandot Constitution was called up by Gov. Seward, and passed the Senate: Yeas 36; Nays 16. One week later, on motion of Mr. Grow, of Pennsylvania, it was taken up in the House, out of regular order, by 119 to 42, and passed.

And thus, on the very threshold of our great struggle — no serious effort having been made by the slaveholders to colonize or conquer Nebraska--the arduous contest opened by Mr. Dixon's proposition to repeal the Missouri Restriction, was closed by the admission of Free Kansas as the thirty-fourth State of our Federal Union.