THE THIRD LEGISLATURE -- THE THIRD CONGRESSIONAL CAMPAIGN -- RICHARDSON SUCCEEDS IZARD -- THE FOURTH LEGISLATURE -- FLORENCE SESSION -- DEATH OF GOVERNOR CUMING

HE third territorial assembly convened January 5, 1857. Among the members of the council, Samuel I. Rogers of Douglas is serving his third term; A. A. Bradford of Otoe and S. M. Kirkpatrick of Cass were members of the second council; William Clancy and John A. Singleton were members of the first house; and Charles McDonald and A. F. Salisbury had served in the second house. Of the members of the house W. A. Finney of Nemaha had served in the second house and A. J. Hanscom of Douglas had been speaker of the first house. R. W. Furnas, a familiar name in Nebraska, is on the list of councilmen.
   L. L. Bowen, of the southern or Bellevue district of Douglas county, was chosen president of the council, and I. L. Gibbs of Otoe county was chosen speaker of the house without opposition. The South Platte was in the saddle, which meant that Douglas county was to be loser in the struggle against her dismemberment to form Sarpy county, and that Omaha was to lose the capital by a clear majority vote of the representatives, and would hold it only by the purely arbitrary veto of the executive. Morton's lampooning of Governor Izard's message had been without practical effect, for this year's fulmination excelled the other in grandiose verbosity. The message contrasts the disturbed condition of Kansas, "torn by internal dissension, her virgin soil overrun and desecrated by armed and hostile factions, her people murdered and pillaged by roving bands of lawless marauders, betrayed by mercenary demagogues and unprincipled politicians," etc., with the peaceable aspect of Nebraska, where "the people led by the councils of wisdom and moderation have succeeded in frowning down all foreign interference and in resisting the earliest encroachments of domestic difficulty, and have added, in their example, another bright testimonial of man's capacity for self-government to the many which already adorn the annals of the republic." These rhetorical bouquets, with which the governor was showering his administration, were in fact as artificial as they seem. Kansas was, by virtue of her contiguity to a slave state, the natural and the chosen battleground of the pro-slavery and the anti-slavery colonizers. There was bleeding enough going on in Kansas to satisfy all the requirements of both factions of the squatter sovereignty dogma, and so Nebraska was left in a condition of necessary peace. There was here no serious political question to fight over, and no force of any consequence to fight. In fact, no political question ever arose on the Nebraska horizon more heroic than the economic sectional question of the location of the capital, primarily raised and kept alive by the inconvenient barrier of the Platte river.
   In his chronically optimistic survey of economic conditions, which there was little to justify, the governor notes that there are more than fifteen thousand people in the territory. He finds it necessary to urge again the need of a better system of laws in place of the crude and unsatisfactory productions of the first two legislatures. He asks the legislature to urge Congress to place at once the school lands reserved by the organic act at the disposal of the legislature, an appeal which the Congress was for many years wisely to disregard. He again urges that Congress should

[NOTE -- Geo. P. Tucker was a Union soldier during the Civil War and a prominent legislator from Johnson county, Nebraska.]

be memorialized to grant lands to the "literary institutions" chartered by the first assembly, namely: Simpson University, Nebraska City Collegiate and Preparatory Institute, and Nebraska University. "The Simpson University," he says, "has been permanently located, and donations to a considerable amount have been received to aid in its erection. I am informed that some degree of progress has been made by the corporators of each of the others." Even at this comparatively recent date Nebraska pioneers were looking to the private or semi-private schools for the means of secondary education. They had no thought then that the state university and its coadjutors, the high schools in every county, wholly supported by public tax and administered by public authority, were so soon to supersede those early objects of their deep solicitude and fond hope.
   The message goes contrary to the preponderance of public opinion at that time in urging that a part at least of the public land should be put on the market without delay. In the Advertiser of December 6, 1856, Mr. Furnas contends that the settlers are not ready to buy their lands yet, and that the sales should be put off for two years, at least; and again in the issue of January 29, 1857, he urges that they should be put off ten years, though in the meantime those settlers who have the money should be allowed to make their entries. "But if the president listens to the pleadings of land sharks, and hastens the sales we believe it will be productive of untold injury to the pioneer settler and to the future growth of Nebraska territory." The message gives the information that the Omaha and Otoe Indians had been removed to their respective reservations during the past year. The Omahas still remain on their reservation, but the Otoes were recently removed and their reservation sold and it now forms part of Gage county.
   The message was a paean to prosperity. "No citizen of Nebraska," it avers, "can look around him and contemplate the unexampled degree of prosperity which has crowned the efforts of our infancy without feelings of the profoundest gratitude and satisfaction." The governor -- in an oblique sense -- emulated the part of the elysium in Richter's comforting conceit, "Heaven lies about us in our infancy."
   Under this dazzling halo the matter-of-fact territorial treasurer, W. W. Wyman, in his annual report, dated December 18, 1856, sets up a dark and dismal financial figure. He had been able to negotiate the bonds to the amount of four thousand dollars, whose issue. the last legislature had authorized, only by agreeing to pay interest semi-annually at the rate of fifteen per cent per annum. Of the demands the proceeds of these bonds were calculated to meet, $350.45 remained unpaid with only $92 of the $4,000 on hand. The treasurer had bound himself personally to pay the first installment of interest -- $300 -- on the coming first of January, so that the necessity of advancing $208 of his own money was impending. Only three counties of the territory -- Cass, Dodge, and Nemaha -- "had paid into the treasury any portion" of the territorial levy of two mills on the dollar for the year 1856, "the two wealthiest and most thickly populated counties (Douglas and Otoe) having made no payment at all during the present year." Dodge county had loyally paid her quota of the territorial tax -- $20.20 -- but this loyalty does not appear so conspicuous when Mr. Wyman shows, as an illustration of his official woes, that after the county treasurer had also faithfully deducted his legal commission -- $1 -- and his mileage for transferring his county's largess to the capital -- $13.50 -- the net balance for the territorial treasury was $5.70. We do not wonder that the treasurer lugubriously remarks that this was the only instance in which mileage was charged by a county treasurer, and suggests that in future such small sums be sent by mail.
   The report of the auditor, Chas. B. Smith, is of course in no better spirits. It shows the indebtedness of the territory to be $10,457.51, and of this $8,062.01 is represented by warrants from the beginning, July 1, 1855, to January 2, 1857. That the territorial government had failed thus far to provide for the meager public expense in excess of that paid from the federal treasury was evidently due

in part to its own inefficiency, but in the main to the unsettled, uncertain social conditions which, it has been heretofore pointed out, were unusual or exaggerated as compared with any former beginning and early growth of our commonwealths.
   The work of the third session of the legislature was to be no better, but probably worse than that of its predecessors. The session centered on four principal objects -- the removal of the capital, the division of Douglas county, the hatching of a new brood of wildcat banks, and the rascally repeal of the criminal code. The first two were purely and spitefully sectional; after the expenditure of the first fifty thousand dollars appropriation in building the state house at Omaha there was no level-headed reason for removing the capital until the need should arise of placing it at some more convenient point in the interior. No excuse arose on that score before the removal was accomplished -- if it did then. The division of Douglas county was based on a neighborhood feud, Bellevue -- plus the sympathetic South Platte -- against Omaha. And yet contemporaneous authority informs us that "this and the capital question are the great features of the present session." The division bill passed the council by a vote of 7 to 6, Furnas and McDonald being the only South Platte members who voted on the Omaha side; it passed the house by a vote of 19 to 17, only two members from the South Platte, Finney of Nemaha and Sharp of Pawnee, voting no.
   In the original bill -- introduced by Councilman Allen -- the name of the proposed county was Omaha, but Sarpy was substituted in committee of the whole. In the bill introduced into the first legislature for the organization of Douglas county it was named Omaha, but on motion of Dr. M. H. Clark, and after sharp opposition by leading members of Douglas county, the change was made. Secondarily to the local and natural name -- Omaha -- both Douglas and Sarpy were appropriate. The mistake was recognized and corrected by allowing the metropolitan city of the territory and state to retain the Indian name. Restitution of the natural claim or right of the name of Douglas to have been perpetuated in that of the capital of the state was only partially made in its retention as the name of the county of which Omaha is the seat of government. Through the inexorable and inevitable course of events Lincoln succeeded his great rival, Douglas, in national political leadership. But if there had been untrammeled expression of the wish of the majority through its representatives in the legislature of 1857, the name of the great democratic and Union leader would have been rightfully and most appropriately perpetuated in that of the capital of the commonwealth of which he was the founder, and whose political birth was the precursor if not the cause of his own political death.
   In editorial correspondence with the Nebraska Advertiser, January 16, 1857, R. W. Furnas, member of the council and public printer, complains of attempts of the Omaha members of the house to interfere with expression of opinion in that body in favor of the removal of the capital; and he predicts that the governor will veto the removal bill, as "he could do nothing else under the circumstances." The governor's veto was sent to the council January 19th, and, whatever the mysterious "circumstances" which Mr. Furnas hints were to influence his act in derogation of the will and wish of a clear popular majority, he justifies it with cogent if not unanswerable reasoning. We are led, by the absence from the veto message of much of that tedious verbosity and buncombe which abound in his regular messages, to suspect that the greater delicacy and importance of this task may have brought to its execution a clearer head and more skilful hands than Governor Izard's. The message is a plausible defense of an act bearing on its face suspicion of sectional and perhaps other improper bias, and is a realistic picture of the conditions and methods of that day.
   Capital Removal Appears Again. Although the capital had been located under strong contest and a considerable amount of money expended upon the building of the new state house, factionalism and local jealousies determined that the question should not rest. The removal bill called for the location of the