No fair-minded reader of history can doubt, in glancing over the
records of that time, that the South took the first bloody and brutal
offensive in their attempt to force slavery on Kansas. Later, the
Free State men from the north, under leaders like John Brown, General
Lane and Captain James Montgomery, took up arms, too, and defended
themselves bravely; but at first, they were victims of the South’s
determination to carry its point.
The Southerners began the attack by stealing the elections for the
Territorial legislature. Thousands of Missourians, on horseback and
in wagons, with guns, bowie-knives, revolvers and plenty of whisky,
poured over the line in November, 1854, and encamped near the polling
places. The ballot boxes were extravagantly, even humorously, stuffed;
the elections were carried for the South. There was nothing concealed
about the affair; in fact, the Missouri newspapers had gaily whipped up
recruits for the raid.
Many of these men, Border Ruffians, as the North called them, were
hired for the work. Others came for the fun; others because they hated
Yankees; others because they were devout believers in Slavery.
“They wore the most savage looks and gave utterance to the most
horrible imprecations and blasphemies,” said Thomas Gladstone, a
relative of the great statesman of that name, who was in Kansas at the
time. “In groups of drunken, bellowing, blood-thirsty demons, armed to
the teeth, they crowded about the bars and shouted for drink, or made
the night hideous with noise on the streets.”
Their fraudulent Pawnee legislature convened and passed a code of
punishments for Free State men. Under the code, no one opposed to
slavery in any manner could serve on a jury, or hold any office in
Kansas.
Death itself was the penalty for advising slaves to rebel, or even
supplying them with literature that would have that effect.
The mere voicing of a belief that slavery was illegal in Kansas was
made a grave crime. Any person who said in public that slavery was
wrong, or any person who even “introduced into the Territory, any
book, paper, magazine, pamphlet or circular,”--saying this, was to be
punished by imprisonment at hard labor for a term of not less than
five years.
This notorious Clause 12 was obviously aimed at the New York Tribune
and other anti-slavery journals, and was meant to shut off every
whisper of free speech. And it did not work.
For the Free State settlers would not recognize the legality of the
Legislature, and held an election of their own. And so there were two
legislatures in Kansas Territory, two governors and governments. All
the fighting that followed centered about this dualism, and about the
mad, desperate butcheries and burnings begun by the Southerners, when
they saw they could not cow the Northerners into submission.
President Pierce, who was pro-slavery, sent a message to Congress in
which he sided with the fraudulent legislature and its code, declaring
it legal, and threatening the Free State men, whom he called traitors,
insurrectionists, and seditionists against the United States government.
In all the Kansas conflict, he threw federal troops and federal
politicians against the Free State men. The South rejoiced at his
stand, but the Free State men went on with their work. And John Brown
and his sons took a leading position in the fight.