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NOW I WILL TELL in proper sequence what happened to the congressional memorial for statehood, even though it took a while longer for us to hear about it. And it was very Jim Lane, very Jim Lane, indeed.

When he first got to Washington, "Senator" Lane had a hard time finding someone to present the memorial to Congress, but he managed to find General Cass. The oldest man still working, General Cass must have been quite dim of sight, because after he presented the memorial, the other members of Congress told him that it was full of crossings-out and interlineations. And all the signatures were in one person’s handwriting! General Cass was embarrassed, of course, but Jim Lane wasn’t. He told them in an affidavit that he’d been given the authority by the Topeka convention to revise some of the phraseology, and then, well, he had lost the signatures, so he and his assistant had put their heads together and tried to remember who had signed and just appended those names.

The southern congressmen were incensed, of course. On the one hand, they declared the whole thing a forgery, and on the other, they said that the names appended were all names of "fugitives from justice."

"Senator" Lane continued unembarrassed. He now turned in another document, and this time he got the attention of Senator Douglas himself, who saw that he had crossed out some bits about the exclusion of free Negroes from the state, something Thomas, of course, was glad he crossed out, even if he had done so just to win some northern senators’ votes and not out of principle. But Senator Douglas’s views were different from Thomas’s, and he pronounced the whole procedure a fraud and roundly chastised "Senator" Lane, and the whole effort made the Free State party in K.T. look both wrong and foolish. The Robinsons and their friends were said to be royally upset, but there was nothing for it. Jim Lane was Jim Lane, as Louisa and Charles and everyone else said. If the Robinsons wanted it done their way, they should have left off building their house and gone to Washington, D.C., themselves.

Jim Lane would never admit that he’d done a thing wrong. He did what he had to do, he told everyone, and in the end, he did get Congress to vote for admission, because the northern states were more populous and had more congressmen than the southern states. "But," he said when he came back, "no one can get around the ’Little Giant,’ or, as I prefer to call him, the ’Little Tyrant,’ or the weight of the slave power in the Senate and in the cabinet." Everyone knew this was true, even the Robinsons and their supporters. We all ended up agreeing that no doubt we looked somewhat foolish, after all, but "Senator" Lane had gotten as far with his memorial as anyone else would have, given what he was trying to do and where. The result was that Jim Lane went on as before, and so did everyone else. You couldn’t get rid of Jim Lane. What some senators and congressmen said of us began to trickle back, through newspapers, letters, and talk. More than one thought the Free Staters were moving toward treason, were acting outside the law, were criminals, but this was so patently untrue that we looked to the source—always a voice from the southern side—and laughed. Mr. Thayer, in Boston, and the other men back in Massachusetts thought sentiment was flowing, even surging, our way in the north, especially the northeast. We just had to sit tight and wait, they said. Do this, don’t do that. And there was a lot of discussion in Lawrence, especially once the Free State Hotel was completed and everyone had a place to gather.

Could things have gone another way? I’ve often wondered that since. What if Jim Lane had not been a factor, or if he’d been a quieter, less flamboyant man, never carried into bungling by his own rhetoric? What if instead of Lane and Robinson there had been two like Robinson—two conservative, thoughtful, and cautious men, content to wait, build, and do business? But then, when I think this,