Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 November 1884 — The Thirty-first Congress. [ARTICLE]

The Thirty-first Congress.

When members of the Thirty-first Congress commenced thoir second session, the conservatives found themselves much stronger than when they had left Washington for the recess. The business interests 6t the North had decreed that anti-slavery doctrines should be banished from the pulpit, ignored on the political stump, excluded from newspapers, and not tolerated in lecture halls. But the “incendiary ideas” could not be extinguished, and the repnblio was slowly drifting toward the impending crisis, though the Missouri compromise had not been blotted out, and “bleeding Kansas” was unknown. Even Mr. Seward became somewhat conservative, and he showed no devotion to anti-slavery measures. “I am with you entirely,” he declared to Bov. Mr. May, a pronounced abolitionist, “but prudenoe peaces me under restraint.”—Ben: Perley Poore.