CHAPTER XVIII.

"BLEEDING KANSAS"-THE KANSAS WAR-ROBINSON, LANE, WOODSON, COLONEL SUMNER, GOVERNOR SHANNON-LAWRENCE AND ITS FREE

ON

PRESS THE NEW GOVERNOR, GEARY.

N the 4th of March, 1856, the Free-State Legislature and officers of the government met at Topeka. The House elected a speaker, and the Senate was duly organized, all the members taking the oath of office. The president of the Senate administered the oath of office to Charles Robinson as Governor, and he delivered his inaugural address. Congress was then memorialized as to the admission of Kansas as a State. In a joint session the Legislature then elected Governor Andrew H. Reeder and James H. Lane to be United States Senators on the admission of the State into the Union, and after appointing a committee to prepare a code of laws, adjourned until the 4th of July. But these affairs did nothing towards producing peace in the Territory or settling the difficult problem before the country.

To the list of unwise and unsuitable Federal civil officers in the Territory was now added, as United States Marshal, I. B. Donaldson, another Ohio man, and a coarse, reckless, unreliable fellow, of the "Border Ruffian" style, who entered with uncommon

zeal into the strife, more as a pro-slavery partisan than an officer of an impartial and just government. On the night of the 23d of April the sheriff of Douglas County was shot by an unknown man whom he never made much exertion to discover, as has been said; and in this month the Southern contingent began to arrive at Kansas City, under J. Buford, H. T. Titus, and others, to engage in the work of driving the Yankees from Kansas. Early in May the grand jury under the instructions of Lecompte, one of the district judges of the United States, brought in indictments against the members of the Free-State government, nominally in force, for treason, and also declared the Free-State Hotel and the two Free-State newspapers of Lawrence to be nuisances and recommended their removal.

Matters grew worse. It was now fully believed by the Free-State men that the South had agreed to stand by Missouri in whatever course she took; and to make better provision for the future and have a better understanding with their Northern friends, Governor Robinson was commissioned to proceed at once to the East, with a view of returning to the Territory by the 4th of July. On the 10th of May, at Lexington, Missouri, he was arrested on the boat in which he was traveling and taken back to Lecompton, where he was held for several months as a prisoner. Lane was also out of the Territory; and although the Free-State men had men of courage and ability, the loss of their leaders was felt seriously.

The United States Marshal had called the "law

abiding" citizens to his aid in executing the indictments of the District Court, and the laws of the Territory, and by the 20th of May he had gathered a posse of seven or eight hundred men before Lawrence. These were called Kansas Militia, and were mainly "Border Ruffians" and Buford's men from Alabama, Georgia, and Carolina. At last on the 21st of May a considerable force, the "Law-and-Order" army, as its friends and the pro-slavery newspapers termed it, led by David R. Atchison and others, and headed by the Government of the United States and the Executive of Kansas, in the persons of the marshal and Sheriff Jones, who had already recovered from his severe wound in the spine, demanded the surrender of Lawrence. This demand was complied with, and the cannons and what other implements of war that could be found were delivered over to the sheriff. After which the pro-slavery army proceeded to batter and burn down the Free-State Hotel; and this work, at last, being finished, the presses of the Free-State papers were destroyed, and the type thrown into the Kansas River; and the house of Governor Robinson was burned. Ex-United States Senator Atchison and Sheriff Jones announced this as the happiest day of their lives; and the pro-slavery papers burst out in a general cry of triumph and joy over the lesson which had been taught the vile Abolitionists.

Although a great part of the "Law-and-Order" army now returned to Missouri, the Free-State men. felt that they must fight now instead of temporizing

and treating through their leaders; and the result was that a desperate guerrilla warfare sprang up, in which neither party stopped at any extreme. Murders, house-burning, rapine, and every kind of outrage were of almost daily occurrence. One of the most notorious of these partisan leaders on the Free-State side was old John Brown, of Ossawatomie, who taught the supporters of slavery everywhere to fear and hate him; and who alone of all the participators in the Kansas troubles left an imperishable name. However unsatisfactory it is, even now, to trace the course of this extravagant old man, his courage and deathless devotion to a principle must excite some admiration, while there may be a doubt as to his title to a place among the martyrs of human liberty; or, at all events, as to the real service he rendered that cause.

On the pro-slavery or "Law-and-Order" side there were numerous leaders who were like keen-scented bloodhounds in their pursuit of the "infernal Abolitionists." These were to a great extent legalized by the sheriff of Douglas County and the United States marshal; and even Governor Shannon in some of his drunken spasms appeared in the guerrilla raids. H. T. Titus, who was one of the most important executors of his will, was held in utter contempt by the filibuster Walker.

During the administrations of Reeder and Shannon, however, he who did most for the pro-slavery cause, and most on every conceivable ground of truth and misrepresentation to stir up strife and keep it from

dying out, was Secretary and often acting Governor, Daniel Woodson. This man appeared to be utterly unable to see two evils at one time. To him there were not two sides to the Kansas question. There was a Territorial organic law, and that, in his view, gave Kansas to slavery. There was a Legislature, and however that had been organized and composed, Congress had given the Territorial delegate, on the Legislature side, a seat, and the Administration had recognized that Legislature as legal; and the interests of slavery demanded it to be so recognized; and as an officer of the Territory by the appointment of the Administration, he was expected to take the same general view. The principle of "squatter sovereignty" was to him a farce in practice; and was only feasible and appropriate when it turned to the advantage of slavery, and then it was tolerable in whatever questionable shape it came. Stopping and sending back, and even robbing and maltreating Free-State emigrants and what not on the Missouri River, and even finally forbidding them to travel at all on that thoroughfare were matters of little consequence to him, and in keeping with the moral necessities of the occasion. The well-beaten pro-slavery trail to Franklin and Lawrence from Missouri he never saw only in the light of a good. He had neither writs nor words against murder, robbery, arson, persecution, misrepresentation, mob agitation, or any wrong, if it was perpetrated with an eye to the main cause. All his requisitions upon the military commanders in the Territory, and all his proclamations and appeals to