menace of public prosecution and private assassination.
These were the scenes of the first act, in a drama then commenced; and those of the next were not unlike. A second Governor (Shannon) having been procured, — a Governor chosen with a double fitness to the use, — on the ground of his sympathy with whatever was vulgar in border-ruffian habits and with whatever was obsequious in Presidential policy, — the deliberate game of forcing the settlers to submit to the infamous usurpation of the Missourians was opened. But, thank heaven! those brave and hardy pioneers would not submit! There was enough of the blood of the Puritans and of the Revolutionary Sires coursing in their veins, to make them feel that submission, under such circumstances, would have been a base betrayal of liberty, a surrender of honor, and a sacrifice of every honest sentiment of justice and self-respect. “Come,” they said to the marauders, — “come, hack this flesh from our limbs, and scatter these bones to bleach with those of so many of our friends and brothers, already strewn upon the unshorn and desolate fields, — but do not ask us to submit to wrongs so daring or to frauds so foul!” The marauders took them at their word, and hewed and hacked them with shameless cruelty; yet, with a singular forbearance, the friends of freedom did not hastily resent the outrages with which they had been visited. They loved freedom, but they loved law too; and they proceeded in a legal and peaceful spirit to procure the redress of their grievances, — in the first place by an appeal to Congress, and in the second, by the organization of a State government of their own. Both of these methods they had an indisputable right to adopt; for the first is guarantied to every citizen, even the meanest, — and the second, though informal, was not illegal, and had, time and again, been sanctioned by the highest political tribunals of the land. Congress had dismissed the subject of Territorial Government; and here it was again, in a more troublesome guise than it had ever before assumed. The ghost of the murdered Banquo would not down at its bidding. Nearly the entire session of 1856 was consumed in heated and virulent debates on Kansas. The House, fresh from the affections of the people, was disposed to do justice to the sufferers; it confirmed, by the investigations of its committees, the verity of every complaint, and it was not willing to allow a trivial technicality to stand in the way of the great cause of truth and right. But the Senate was dogmatic and hard, — full of whims, and scruples, and hair-splitting difficulties, — ever straining at gnats and swallowing camels; of the few there inclined to bear a manly part, one was overpowered by the club of a bully and the others by the despotism of numbers and of party-drill. As for the Executive, it was bound hand and foot to the Slave Power, and had no option but to let loose its minions, its judges, its sheriffs, its vagabonds, and its dragoons upon the poor Free-State men, whose only crime was a refusal to submit to the most outrageous abuses. Their towns were burned, their presses destroyed, their assemblies dispersed; and their wives and children brutally insulted. The debauched and imbecile Governor, who represented the Federal Power, hounded on the miscreants of the border to the work of destruction, so long as he was able; but he happily became in the end too weak even for this perfunctory labor; and he gradually sank into deliquium, till his final withdrawal into the obscurities whence he had emerged gave a momentary peace to the distracted and baffled settlers.
We pass over the administration of Geary, the third of the Kansas Governors, — a period in which the ravages of the marauders were continued, but under meliorated circumstances. The great uprising of the Northern masses, in the Presidential election, had impressed upon the most desperate of the Pro-Slavery faction the necessity of a restrained and moderated zeal. Geary went to the Territory with some desire to deal justly with
