Black slaves were brought into what is now the State of Kansas several years before the territory was organized. Some writers believe that 20 slaves brought to Kansas by Mrs. Henry Rogers were the first, though the date when she settled in Kansas is uncertain. Reverend Thomas Johnson introduced slavery at the Shawnee Mission, and as early as the fall of 1843, ten black children were reported there. Immediately after the passage of the organic act, the fight to make Kansas a slave territory began in earnest, the slaveholders of Missouri becoming particularly active in their efforts to accomplish that end. On January 10, 1855, only a few months after the territorial government was inaugurated, four prominent pro-slavery members of Congress, headed by Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina, published in the Washington Sentinel a long letter from Benjamin F. Stringfellow, in which were the following statements: "Kansas is not suited for little farms; it cannot be settled by those who have not the command of labor . . . . In no instance has prairie been first settled by poor men. . . . Slavery exists in Kansas and is legal. . . . It will be found that Missouri is nearer to Kansas than Boston."

The last sentence referred to the efforts of the New England Emigrant Company to send to Kansas people who were opposed to slavery. Stringfellow no doubt thought that emigrants from the northern and eastern states would be deterred by distance, but in this he was mistaken, as subsequent events demonstrated. About the only advantage the slave power gained by the proximity of Missouri was in the election of the first territorial legislature, in March, 1855, when enough voters came over from that state to elect an assembly favorable to the introduction of slavery. That legislature passed stringent laws to punish offenses against slave property. Known as "Black Laws," the author of these laws was allegedly, Joseph C. Anderson, afterward the prosecuting attorney that conducted the cases against the free-state men who were captured at the Battle of Hickory Point. The objects of these laws were to encourage the introduction of slavery into the Territory of Kansas, and to provide severe penalties for the persons who interfered with slave property. Everyone inciting an insurrection or rebellion of slaves in the territory, furnishing arms to slaves or committing "any overt act in furtherance of such rebellion or insurrection," or advising by speech, written or printed matter slaves to rebel, or who would bring into the territory for circulation any book, pamphlet or circular for the purpose of inciting insurrection should suffer the death penalty. Persons enticing slaves away from their masters, or who aided in any way in persuading slaves to leave their owners were subject to imprisonment for ten years. Advising a slave to escape or harboring a runaway slave subjected the offender to imprisonment for five years, and there were some lighter penalties for minor offenses, but the above include the principal features of the so-called "Black Laws." In addition, persons opposed to slavery were disqualified from acting as jurors in the trial of those charged with the violation of the laws.

But something more than laws was needed to make Kansas a slave state, and that was the actual presence of slaves. Judging from the newspapers of that period the slaveholders were willing to do everything except take their slaves into Kansas. Under the headline -- "The Suicide of Slavery" -- the St. Louis Intellinger, a strong pro-slavery newspaper, made a vigorous attack on the methods of the slaveholders on August 30, 1855. In the course of that editorial the writer said: 

Thousands of pro-slavery men from Missouri crossed the

 border into Kansas to stuff the ballot boxes.

But, with all the stimulus that could be given to the cause, slavery was doomed to defeat in Kansas. In 1857 the tide of immigration brought from the northern and eastern states a large number of industrious, substantial men, who were attracted by the sales of public lands and the prospect of winning homes for themselves upon the western frontier. These men demanded a government that would enact just laws for the protection of person and property -- a positive government rather than a visionary or negative one -- and immediately began taking steps to establish such a government. Late in that year Governor Robert Walker wrote to William Marcy, Secretary of State in President James Buchanan's cabinet, deploring the admission of an abolition state, and expressing the fear that it would be taken as an act of unpardonable offense by the Southern leaders, who might thereby be driven to a dissolution of the Union.

Of the four constitutions made in Kansas, three prohibited slavery in positive terms, the language on the subject being almost identical in the Topeka, Leavenworth and Wyandotte Constitutions. In the Lecompton Constitution, section 16 of the schedule, relating to amendments, provided that "no alteration shall be made to affect the rights of property in the ownership of slaves."