Editing David Rice Atchison (section)

==Senate career==
[[File:Atchison-statue.jpg|thumb|upright=.83|Statue in front of the [[Clinton County, Missouri|Clinton County]] Courthouse, [[Plattsburg, Missouri]]]]
In October 1843,<ref name="house.mo.gov"/> Atchison was appointed to the [[United States Senate|U.S. Senate]] to fill the vacancy left by the death of [[Lewis F. Linn]].  He was the first senator from western Missouri to serve in this position.<ref name="house.mo.gov"/> At age 36, he was the youngest senator from Missouri up to that time.<ref name="house.mo.gov"/> Atchison was re-elected to a full term on his own account in 1849.<ref name="house.mo.gov"/>

Atchison was very popular with his fellow Senate Democrats. When the Democrats took control of the US Senate in December 1845, they chose Atchison as [[President pro tempore of the United States Senate|president pro tempore]],<ref name="trivia-library.com"/> placing him second in succession for the presidency.<ref name="preslib">[http://www.oznet.ksu.edu/news/sty/KSProfileDavidRiceAtchison020806.htm Kansas Profile – ''Now That's Rural''] {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060912134055/http://www.oznet.ksu.edu/news/sty/KSProfileDavidRiceAtchison020806.htm |date=September 12, 2006 }}</ref><!--Note that this was under the Presidential Succession Act of 1792, not the Presidential Succession Act of 1947. The 1792 act placed the President pro tempore after the VP and before the speaker of the house, unlike the 1947 act--> He also was responsible for presiding over the Senate when the [[Vice President of the United States|vice president]] was absent. At 38, he was a young man with low seniority in the Senate after two years to gain such a position.

In 1849, Atchison stepped down as president pro tempore in favor of [[William R. King]].<ref name="trivia-library.com"/>  King, in turn, yielded the office back to Atchison in December 1852, after being elected Vice President of the United States. Atchison continued as president pro tempore until December 1854.<ref name="trivia-library.com"/>

As a senator, Atchison was a fervent advocate of slavery<ref name="trivia-library.com"/> and territorial expansion. He supported the annexation of Texas and the [[U.S.-Mexican War]]. Atchison and [[Thomas Hart Benton (senator)|Thomas Hart Benton]], Missouri's other senator, became rivals and finally enemies, although both were Democrats. Benton declared himself to be against slavery in 1849. In 1851 Atchison allied with the [[Whig Party (United States)|Whigs]] to defeat incumbent Benton for re-election.

Benton, intending to challenge Atchison in 1854, began to agitate for [[organized territory|territorial organization]] of the area west of Missouri (now the states of [[Kansas]] and [[Nebraska]]) so that it could be opened to settlement. To counter this, Atchison proposed that the area be organized ''and'' that the section of the [[Missouri Compromise]] banning slavery there be repealed in favor of [[popular sovereignty]]. Under this plan, settlers in each territory would vote to decide whether they would allow slavery.

At Atchison's request, [[Stephen A. Douglas|Senator Stephen Douglas]] of [[Illinois]] introduced the [[Kansas–Nebraska Act]], which embodied this idea, in November 1853. The act was passed and became law in May 1854, establishing the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska.

===Border Ruffians===
Both Douglas and Atchison had believed that Nebraska would be settled by [[Free-Stater (Kansas)|Free-State]] men from [[Iowa]] and [[Illinois]], and Kansas by pro-slavery Missourians and other Southerners, thus preserving the numerical balance between free states and slave states in the nation. In 1854 Atchison helped found the town of [[Atchison, Kansas]], as a pro-slavery settlement. The town (and county) were named for him.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.kancoll.org/books/cutler/atchison/atchison-co-p2.html|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20030627075200/http://www.kancoll.org/books/cutler/atchison/atchison-co-p2.html|url-status=dead|archive-date=June 27, 2003|title=History of the State of Kansas by William G. Cutler – 1883 |publisher=Kancoll.org|access-date=November 21, 2014}}</ref>

While Southerners supported the idea of settling in Kansas, few migrated there. Most free-soilers preferred Kansas to Nebraska. Furthermore, anti-slavery activists throughout the North came to view Kansas as a battleground and formed societies to encourage free-soil settlers to go to Kansas, to ensure there would be enough voters in both Kansas and Nebraska to approve their entry as free states.<ref name=Billings>{{cite book |last=Billings |first=R. A. |title=Westward Expansion|year=1949 |publisher=Macmillan |location=New York |pages=599–601 }}</ref>

It appeared as if the Kansas Territorial legislature to be elected in March 1855 would be controlled by free-soilers and ban slavery. Atchison and his supporters viewed this as a breach of faith. An angry Atchison called on pro-slavery Missourians to uphold slavery by force and "to kill every God-damned abolitionist in the district" if necessary.<ref>David M. Potter, Don E. Fehrenbacher, ''The Impending Crisis 1848–1861'' at 203 (Harper, 1976)</ref> He recruited an immense mob of heavily armed Missourians, the infamous "[[Border Ruffian]]s". On election day, March 30, 1855, Atchison led 5,000 Border Ruffians into Kansas. They seized control of all polling places at gunpoint, cast tens of thousands of fraudulent votes for pro-slavery candidates, and elected a pro-slavery legislature.<ref name=Billings/>

The outrage was nonetheless accepted by the Federal government. When Territorial Governor [[Andrew Reeder]] objected, President [[Franklin Pierce]] fired him.

Despite this show of force, far more free-soilers than pro-slavery settlers migrated to Kansas. There were continual raids and ambushes by both sides in "[[Bleeding Kansas]]". In spite of the best efforts of Atchison and the Ruffians, Kansas rejected slavery and finally became a free state in 1861.

Charles Sumner, in the epic "Crimes Against Kansas" speech on May 19, 1856, exposed Atchison's role in the invasion, tortures, and killings in Kansas.  Speaking in the flamboyant style he and others used, lacing his prose with references to Roman history, Sumner compared Atchison to Roman Senator [[Catiline]], who betrayed his country [[Second Catilinarian conspiracy|in a plot]] to overthrow the existing order.  For two days, Sumner listed crime, after crime, in detail, complete with documentation by newspapers and letters of the time, showing the tortures and violence by Atchison and his men.<ref name=sumner-1856>{{cite web|title=Full text of 'The crime against Kansas. Speech of Hon. Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts. In the Senate of the United States, May 19, 1856'|url=https://archive.org/stream/crimeagainstkans00sumn/crimeagainstkans00sumn_djvu.txt|website=archive.org|access-date=16 March 2017|language=en}}</ref>

Two days later, Atchison gave his own speech, totally unaware that he had been exposed on the Senate floor in such a fashion. Atchison's speech was to the Texas men he had just met, hired, and paid for, Atchison reveals in his speech, by "authorities in Washington".   They are about to invade [[Lawrence, Kansas]].  Atchison makes the men promise to kill and "draw blood," and boasts of his flag, which was red in color for "Southern Rights" and the color of blood. They would press "to blood"  the spread of slavery into Kansas.   He revealed in this speech that the immediate goal of the invasion was to stop the newspaper in Lawrence from publishing anti-slavery material.  Atchison's men had made it a crime to publish anti-slavery newspapers in Kansas.<ref>{{cite web|title=Copy of David R. Atchison speech to proslavery forces – Kansas Memory|url=http://www.kansasmemory.org/item/90822|website=www.kansasmemory.org|access-date=16 March 2017|language=en}}</ref>

Atchison made it clear the men were to kill and draw blood, told the men they would be "well paid," and encouraged them to plunder from the homes that they invaded. That was after the hundreds of dozens of tortures and killings that Sumner had detailed in his Crimes Against Kansas speech. In other words, things were about to get much worse since Atchison had his hired men from Texas.<ref name=sumner-1856/>

===Defeated for re-election===
Atchison's Senate term expired on March 3, 1855. He sought election to another term, but the Democrats in the Missouri legislature were split between him and Benton, while the Whig minority put forward their own man. No senator was elected until January 1857, when [[James S. Green]] was chosen.

===Railroad proposal===
When the [[first transcontinental railroad]] was proposed in the 1850s, Atchison called for it to be built along the central route (from [[St. Louis, Missouri|St. Louis]] through Missouri, Kansas, and [[Utah]]), rather than the southern route (from [[New Orleans, Louisiana|New Orleans]] through Texas and [[New Mexico]]). Naturally, his suggested route went through Atchison.