The Life of Lyman Trumbull. Horace White
one hundred and fifty voters from this county, one hundred and seventy-five from Howard, one hundred from Cooper. Indeed, every county furnished its quota, and when they set out it looked like an army. They were armed. And as there were no houses in the territory they carried tents. Their mission was a peaceable one—to vote, and to drive down stakes for their future homes.
After the election some 1500 of the voters sent a committee to Mr. Reeder to ascertain if it was his purpose to ratify the election. He answered that it was, and said that the majority at an election must carry the day. But it is not to be denied that the 1500, apprehending that the governor might attempt to play the tyrant, since his conduct had already been insidious and unjust, wore on their hats bunches of hemp. They were resolved, if a tyrant attempted to trample on the rights of the sovereign people, to hang him.
It was not conscious brigandage that prompted this movement, but the simplicity of minds tutored on the frontier and fashioned in the environment of slavery. The fifteen hundred Missourians, who gave Governor Reeder to understand that they would hang him on the nearest tree if he did not ratify their invasion of Kansas, had homes, farms, and families. They supported churches and schools of a certain kind and considered themselves qualified to civilize Africans. They were types of the best society that they had any conception of. Far from concealing anything that they had done, they boasted of it openly in their newspaper organ, the Squatter Sovereign, which published the following under the date of April 1:
Independence, Mo., March 31, 1855.—Several hundred emigrants from Kansas have just entered our city. They were preceded by the Westport and Independence brass bands. They came in at the west side of the public square and proceeded entirely around it, the bands cheering us with fine music, and the emigrants with good news. Immediately following the bands were about two hundred horsemen in regular order. Following these were one hundred and fifty wagons, carriages, etc. They gave repeated cheers for Kansas and Missouri. They report that not an anti-slavery man will be in the Legislature of Kansas. We have made a clean sweep.20
This invasion was as needless as the former one, since the Free State men were still in the minority, counting actual settlers only; but the pro-slavery party were determined to leave nothing to chance. Senator Atchison, in a speech at Weston, Missouri, on the 9th of November, 1854, had told his constituents how to secure the prize:
When you reside in one day's journey of the territory, and when your peace, your quiet, and your property depend upon your action, you can, without an exertion, send five hundred of your young men who will vote in favor of your institution. Should each county in the state of Missouri only do its duty, the question will be decided quietly and peaceably at the ballot-box. If you are defeated, then Missouri and the other Southern States will have shown themselves to be recreant to their interests, and will deserve their fate.21
A little later we find him writing letters like the following to a friend in Atlanta, Georgia:
Let your young men come forth to Missouri and Kansas. Let them come well armed, with money enough to support them for twelve months and determined to see this thing out! I do not see how we are to avoid a civil war;—come it will. Twelve months will not elapse before war—civil war of the fiercest kind—will be upon us. We are arming and preparing for it.
Atchison was constantly spurring others to deeds of lawlessness and violence, but he always stopped short of committing any himself. He was probably restrained by the fear of losing influence at Washington. It was by no means certain that President Pierce would tolerate everything. The sad fate of one of the companies recruited in the South for immigration to Kansas is narrated in the following letter, addressed to Senator Trumbull by John C. Underwood, of Culpeper Court House, Virginia:
Soon after the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854, in the neighborhood of Winchester and Harper's Ferry the project of sending a company of young men to Kansas to make it a slave state was much agitated. Subscriptions for that purpose were asked, and the duty of strengthening our sectional interest of slavery by adding two friendly Senators to your honorable body, was urged with great zeal upon my neighbors. This was long before I had heard of any movement of the New England Aid Co., or of anybody on the part of freedom. It was my understanding at the time that Senator Mason was the main adviser in the project. This may not have been the case. The history of this company will not be soon forgotten. Its taking the train on the Baltimore and Ohio R. R. at Harper's Ferry, its exploits in Kansas up to the fall of its leader (Sharrard) at the hands of Jones, the friend of the Democratic Gov. Geary, are all still well remembered. The return of the company with the dead body of their leader, and the blasted hopes of its sanguine originators, was a gloomy day in our beautiful valley, and created a sensation throughout the country.
Another letter among the Trumbull papers deserves a place here, the author of which was Isaac T. Dement, who (writing from Hudson, Illinois, January 10, 1857) says that he was living in Kansas the previous year and had filed his intention on one hundred and sixty acres of land where he had a small store and a dwelling-house:
On the 3d of September last [he continues] a band of armed men from Missouri came to my place, and after taking what they wanted from the store, burned it and the house, and said that if they could find me they would hang me. They said that they had broken open a post-office and found a letter that I wrote to Lane and Brown asking them to come and help us with a company of Sharpe's rifles (this is a lie); and also that I had furnished Lane and Brown's men with provisions (a lie), and that I was a Free State man (that is so).
Mr. Dement hoped that Congress would do something to compensate him for his losses.
Governor Reeder ought to have been prepared for the second invasion. He had had sufficient warning. Unless he was ready to go all lengths with Atchison and Stringfellow, he ought to have declared the entire election invalid and reported the facts to President Pierce. But he did nothing of the kind. He merely rejected the votes of seven election districts where the most notorious frauds had been committed, and declared "duly elected" the persons voted for in others. Eventually the members holding certificates organized as a legislature and admitted the seven who had been rejected by Reeder. The latter took an early opportunity to go to Washington City to make a report to the President in person. He stopped en route at his home in Easton, Pennsylvania, where he made a public speech exposing the frauds in the election and confirming the reports of the Free State settlers. Stringfellow warned him not to come back. In the Squatter Sovereign of May 29, 1855, he said:
From reports received of Reeder he never intends returning to our borders. Should he do so we, without hesitation, say that our people ought to hang him by the neck like a traitorous dog, as he is, so soon as he puts his unhallowed feet upon our shores. Vindicate your characters and the territory; and should the ungrateful dog dare to come among us again, hang him to the first rotten tree. A military force to protect the ballot-box! Let President Pierce or Governor Reeder, or any other power, attempt such a course in this, or any portion of the Union, and that day will never be forgotten.
The "Border Ruffian" legislature proceeded to enact the entire slave code of Missouri as laws of Kansas. It was made a criminal offense for anybody to deny that slavery existed in Kansas, or to print anything, or to introduce any printed matter, making such denial. Nobody could hold any office, even that of notary public, who should make such denial. The crime of enticing any slave to leave his master was made punishable with death, or imprisonment for ten years. That of advising slaves, by speaking, writing, or printing, to rebel, was punishable with death.
Reeder was removed from office by President Pierce on the 15th of August, and Wilson Shannon, a former governor of Ohio, was appointed as his successor.
The Free State men held a convention at Topeka in October, 1855, and framed a state constitution, to be submitted to a popular vote, looking to admission to the Union. This was equivalent merely to a petition to Congress, but it was stigmatized as an act of rebellion by the pro-slavery party.
On the 24th of January, 1856, President Pierce sent a special message to Congress on the subject of the disturbance in Kansas. He alluded to the "angry accusations that illegal votes had been polled," and to the "imputations of fraud and violence";
Edited by B. F. Stringfellow, author of
Cited in Villard's