“Fear & excitement”

John Stringfellow, Speaker of the House of Kansas

John Stringfellow’s Squatter Sovereign advised that good proslavery men must somehow silence their antislavery counterparts. John Brown’s murders proved the point and he did not shy from connecting them to anyone who gave them aid and shelter, however uninvolved in the killing itself. That didn’t mean they should go out of their way to murder people in the dark of night, but then the proslavery party had the territorial government on its side. They didn’t need to skulk about quite so much as Brown and company.

They didn’t need Stringfellow’s advice or permission to get going either. A resident of Osawatomie wrote his Cousin Sidney on Wednesday, May 28,

Osawatomie is in much fear & excitement. News came tonight that a co. of Georgians and Alibamians were coming to make this their headquarters. All work is nearly suspended, the women are in constant fear.

Jefferson Burford’s Georgians and Alabamans already camped nearby. It wouldn’t take much to move them in and they had come all this way to murder abolitionists. Seeing what could come their way, the residents of Osawatomie and the vicinity got together in a public meeting which published conciliatory resolutions. (I haven’t been able to find a copy, Gentle Readers.)

Those resolutions received the unanimous acclaim of the meeting, but in person the members differed on whether Brown and his men had committed a grave offense or acted in some kind of tragic self-defense. Certainly the local proslavery men had not made for the best of neighbors, but efforts to show that Brown knew of the Shermans’ threats against Squire Morse and others have yielded no clear evidence that he did. If he had those incidents specifically in mind, he wouldn’t have hesitated to bring them up. Rather he seems to have acted from a general conviction that the free state party needed to avenge itself and terrorize their enemies. His heroic act of murder would do that open the floodgates of antislavery anger.

Charles Lawrence Robinson

Brown may well have gotten the latter, though it’s hard to separate the impact of his killings from the sack of Lawrence. Later on, free state leaders like Charles Robinson said that they always had a considered position in favor of armed nonviolence. The events of the Wakarusa War and the sack of Lawrence demonstrated that not everyone agreed with that. Robinson often struggled to contain the more militant antislavery Kansans, who counted more than just Brown and his intimates among their number. They never liked all this backing down and talking things out. The fall of Lawrence and Robinson’s arrest removed the leading voice for a more diplomatic solution from the board, at least for a time.

Furthermore, even though Robinson paints himself as the consistent man of peace and had a reputation to back it, his party consistently explained their preference for diplomacy as situational. They did not want to strike the first blow, nor strike United States troops. Keeping their noses clean helped politically, at least so long as political violence in Kansas remained intermittent and small-scale. If the fate of Lawrence hadn’t changed that permanently, then Brown’s murders may well have done the trick. As long as no one on your side goes hunting the enemy, refraining feels normal. Once someone has, the question must naturally arise for men reared in nineteenth century masculinity as to why they haven’t themselves gone in? Were they cowards? Boys playing soldier? Women? Even if they had a sincere objection to the use of force before, the proslavery reaction would make Brown’s claims of self-defense more plausible to others in retrospect. Now they really did have proslavery men coming for them, so they had best stand ready.

“There must be no night work”

John Stringfellow, Speaker of the House of Kansas

The Squatter Sovereign advised its reader that in response to the Pottawatomie murders,

Every pro-slavery men in Atchison county ought immediately to call at Atchison, and learn the news and course determined.

They had abolitionists to hunt. It wouldn’t take a psychic to see the solution the paper had in mind, though coordinating our of Atchison made good logistical sense and would bring some paying customers by the newspaper office. However, John Stringfellow’s paper also intended to help its readers learn the news. Right after the call to arms came a report on John Brown’s massacre under the headline Civil War in Kansas:

Since the organization of the Territory the abolitionists have proposed various games by which they hoped tow in Kansas, at all of which, so far, they have been defeated. Failing to carry the elections by fraudulent voting-by packing upon us unscrupulous census takers, by which we were defrauded of our just representation-by placing abolition judges to preside over the elections-by an attempt to swindle us out of our representatives after they were elected-by attempting to defeat all our legislation after we had met in the Legislature-by attempting to defy the officers of the law in enforcing its requirements, they have commenced a new game-that of midnight murder.

Before we get into the murdering, remember all the other reasons the antislavery party deserves the hatred of all good proslavery men. They did the fraudulent voting. They tried to cheat honest Kansans out of fair representation. They packed the election staff with their partisans. Atchison, Kansas studiously observed Opposites Day. This level of perversity, while depressingly common, still deserves recognition. Stringfellow, like people of every era who know their own tactics can’t stand the light of day, outsourced them to the opposition.

That long sentence to outrage the reader primed them for the actually new news

armed bands of assassins are prowling about, murdering men at midnight for no offence except their political opinions.

Remember, Gentle Readers, Stringfellow’s brother Ben argued that one should murder abolitionists for abolitionism. John might say that the overt act of preaching antislavery justified the difference, but he would have undermined himself in the previous piece where he said that those who tried to sit out the slavery fight would get attacked from both sides.

The Sovereign went on to a bit of self-praising, reminding readers that the proslavery side treated the contest “in a bold, manly, open manner”. By that we should not think that they killed no one, only that they did most of their murders in broad daylight and with pride; proslavery men had standards. Stringfellow urged that their side should not sink to John Brown’s level:

There must be no night work, but in the face of day we must hunt these banded outlaws to death or out of the Territory.

The paper asked where this would end, if they let it go on? Brown’s victims, per the Sovereign’s lights, did nothing wrong. Some of them hadn’t even marched against Lawrence once. If the antislavery party would martyr such innocents, then the proslavery side must show them that they played “a losing game.” Only then would they stop. Thus:

Every man who is known to have taken any active part with these lawless traitors, should be silenced in some way.

Reckless murderers, assassins and thieves

John Stringfellow, Speaker of the House of Kansas

 

Set on the notion that the proslavery party should obey the law, unless self-defense came into it, John Stringfellow’s Squatter Sovereign situated itself on well-trod ground. Most everyone in any era thinks that the law doesn’t bind them in a suicide pact. If you have to run a red light to get away from someone who stuck a gun in your face, no one is going to fault you for doing it. It’s not a safe choice, but neither is sticking around. Stringfellow, and his brother Benjamin, considered the mere presence of antislavery men a similar situation. John Brown proved them, at least this once, right by hauling men out of their homes at night to hack them to death with swords.

Had Stringfellow’s paper confined itself to that point, it would hardly warrant our attention. Like his brother Ben, John Stringfellow would not so constrain himself. He argued that they would hold up their end of a civil war if the Free State party saw fit to throw one and furthermore cast his net far wider than Brown’s eight men:

Hundreds of the Free State men, who have committed no overt acts, but have only given countenance to those reckless murderers, assassins and thieves, will of necessity share the same fate of their brethren. If civil war is to be the result in such a conflict, there cannot be, and will not be, any neutrals recognized. “He that is not for us, is against us” will of necessity be the motto

Stringfellow sounds like his brother here, bent on wiping out the enemy and keenly attentive to the aid that non-militant collaborators give to the militants. People who looked the other way or shared their roof with John Brown and company did involve themselves in the fray, whether they bore arms or not. By aiding the enemy, they joined the ranks. This may sound extreme, but the logic holds. People who make it easier for a murderous enemy to carry on are helping that enemy murder you. The distinction between the gunman and the person who sold them the gun and wished them well doesn’t matter much from the victim’s perspective. John Brown knew the same thing and acted on it much as either Stringfellow might have expected themselves to act if it came to a shooting war.

A good politician doesn’t finish without suggesting a course of action in these things, so Stringfellow continued:

Every pro-slavery men in Atchison county ought immediately to call at Atchison, and learn the news and course determined.

In other words, the boys had best come on in. They had abolitionists to hunt. Maybe this time they would suffer no disappointments.

The Crime Against Kansas, Prologue

Charles Sumner (R-MA)

Charles Sumner saw the way out of his political difficulties in the direction his conscience pointed and where he had proven talents: a big antislavery speech. He had previously inveighed against the Fugitive Slave Act, but the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and more than a year of increasing troubles in the nation’s newest territory gave him good cause to change subjects. Letters full of proslavery horrors filled his correspondence. Of course the Democrats in the Senate got the other side of the story and in an era before live news feeds and swift long distance travel, no one could much tell beyond the Kansas-Missouri border which side lied more often. Neither the Herald of Freedom nor the Squatter Sovereign would shy away from inventing suitable news or slanting real stories to serve the cause.

Kansas debates opened up with Stephen Douglas making an impassioned attack on the free state movement. They only made trouble for the law-abiding citizens of the territory, who ought to have their legal government recognized at once. Never a fan of Douglas, Sumner found his aggressive tone nearly intolerable. William Seward answered him with a proposal that the Topeka government be admitted to the Union at once. Things went downhill from there, but more and more northerners lined up against Douglas and his allies as the debate went on.

Sumner stayed out of it, instead sitting down for one of his research sessions. He took a copy of Don Quixote out of the Library of Congress to make sure he got his insults right and busied himself with histories of Georgia and the Carolinas to check his facts. He wrote more than a hundred pages, gilded with quotations from Antiquity, the British parliament, and past American debates. Then Sumner memorized the whole thing, so he wouldn’t have to check his notes as he spoke. He did a dry run with Seward and then deemed himself ready.

At one in the afternoon on May 19, as Marshal Donaldson’s proslavery army gathered at Lecompton and dreamed of razing Lawrence for good, Charles Sumner gained the floor in the United States Senate. He would hold it (PDF) for three hours:

Mr. President: You are now called to redress a great transgression. Seldom in the history of nations has such a question been presented. Tariffs, army bills, navy bills, land bills, are important, and justly occupy your care; but these all belong to the course of ordinary legislation. As means and instruments only, they are necessarily subordinate to the conservation of government itself. Grant them or deny them, in greater or less degree, and you will inflict no shock. The machinery of government will continue to move. The State will not cease to exist. Far otherwise is it with the eminent question now before you, involving, as it does, liberty in a broad territory, and also involving the peace of the whole country with our good name in history for evermore.

A Closer Look at David Rice Atchison, Part Four

David Rice Atchison (D-MO)

Parts 1, 2, 3

We left David Rice Atchison’s senate seat empty, as it would remain until 1857, and the man himself fully engaged with Kansas affairs. He won the apparently permanent emnity of Thomas Hart Benton’s wing of the Missouri democracy by orchestrating the senior senator’s involuntary retirement in coalition with the Whigs. Atchison probably considered Kansas the more important matter, and likely a road to finding himself in Washington again someday. He had refused to actively seek reelection. But Bourbon Dave still found time to resent the situation. On December 14, 1855, he wrote that the Missouri legislature lacked

the moral courage to elect me, a majority of them would prefer my election to that of any other person yet they have not the moral courage to do it

Atchison had the votes but failed, somehow, to have the votes. He went on to tell his correspondent that the press would implicate him in the late Wakarusa War. He doesn’t seem to have minded that so much, as a man who led two hundred armed men into Kansas on that occasion might well have. Atchison couldn’t help himself,

but when I do move in earnest here will be a noise louder than thunder or I am mistaken.

And furthermore:

Before the moon shall fill her hours twelve times you shall hear more from me.

More from Atchison, thunderous or not, included a public statement declaring he would not accept any elected office. Bourbon Dave’s papers explained that he withdrew from the Senate race in order to help the Missouri Democracy reunite. But if Atchison wouldn’t answer Missouri’s call, which he probably would not have received anyway, then at least a few in the South would answer his. In the fall of the year, the emissaries that his people had chosen to fan out across the South looking for proslavery settlers. They had some success, if never as much as they dreamed.

Georgia’s governor recommended a Southern convention if Congress failed to accept Kansas as a slave state, a proposal Atchison endorsed. A Southern convention naturally invoked memories of Nashville. Get enough angry southerners together and they might decide to do something drastic, so the nation had best concede the territory. Everyone, except the slaves, would win:

This course on the part of the South will save Kansas to the South-save bloodshed, civil war, and perhaps a dissolution of the Union itself.

In January, Missouri’s former senator followed that letter up with another, repeating the call for immigration:

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. One hundred true men would be an acquisition; the more the better. I do not see how we are to avoid 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. Indeed, we of the border counties are prepared. We must have the support of the South. We are fighting the battles of the South. Our institutions are st stake. You far Southern men are now out of the nave of war; but if we fail it will reach your own doors, perhaps your hearths. We want men-armed men. We want money-not for ourselves, but to support our friends when the come from a distance.

Atchison may have intended to follow his own advice. He mentions that he might soon move to Kansas and the Squatter Sovereign reported the news the same month. According to them, he would arrive with two hundred of his closest friends. There his slaves would farm and he would collect the profits. The paper even claimed that Atchison had moved to the territory.

Robert S. Kelley

Parrish looked into the matter, noting that Stringfellow and Kelley kept up that story through 1856. For a Kansan, Atchison did a great deal of living in Missouri. With no family of his own, he kept rooms at a Platte City hotel. He probably also rented rooms in Atchison and may have used them, but Parrish looked deep into the land records and never found evidence that Atchison bought a parcel. In my own research, Atchison always comes over from Missouri rather than down from his namesake town. The Sovereign could claim that the senator had the same basis for residence in both jurisdictions, but it doesn’t look like he lived that way.

Whether Atchison ever had serious plans to make himself a Kansan or not, others did. Late April brought the largest group of southern colonists, Jefferson Buford’s organization, arrived to do their part in saving Kansas for slavery. When Southerners came through, Atchison took an interest in them. South Carolinians particularly drew his eye and he personally housed the children of friends and others who came in their company. Corespondents asked him to advise the young men they sent on “where to settle, how to vote, and if necessary, when to fight.” Atchison the man did as asked, showing new arrivals around Atchison the town. When they came with money for him to use, he let them keep it but stood ready with advice on how to best spend their funds. In turn, the new arrivals admired Atchison well enough to honor him at banquets.

 

Further Action from Lecompte’s Grand Jury

Samuel Lecompte

Samuel Lecompte, the slaveholding Chief Justice of Kansas Territory, instructed his grand jury about treasonable behavior. If anybody in Kansas did something so wild as placing themselves in opposition to and resisting the laws of the territory, then they resisted the laws of the United States too. That made them traitors and the jurors must act even if they had no evidence that treasonable action had occurred. Organization and intent to resist counted just as much. The judge went so far as to practically order his grand jury to indict free state leaders by name, running down a list of the offices they occupied in the wildcat government. They acted accordingly, ordering the arrest of the free state leadership.

In itself, that made for a tremendous attack on the free state movement. Jailed leaders would have a difficult time leading anything. They would face considerable personal danger, both from the results of legal process and any convenient accidents that might transpire. The mere fact of their imprisonment might deter support from elsewhere in the nation, as it would then necessitate collision of a kind with the authority of the United States. But the grand jury did one better than that. It found

that the newspaper known as The Herald of Freedom, published at the town of Lawrence, has from time to time issued publications of the most inflammatory and seditious character, denying the legality of the territorial authorities, addressing and commanding forcible resistance to the same, demoralizing the public mind, and rendering life and property unsafe, even to the extent of advising assassination as a last resort

George Brown’s paper had done all of that, with the possible exception of the assassination business. So had The Kansas Free State, with whom he often feuded. The grand jury advised “their abatement as a nuisance.” In other words, the law should shut them down. The nineteenth century didn’t have our First Amendment scruples. People across the political spectrum agreed that speech of certain sorts did not suit public order and deserved suppression, much as some of us still believe of what we consider obscenity. Under that theory, southern states had often acted to keep antislavery publications from circulating.

Furthermore:

we are satisfied that the building known as the ‘Free-State Hotel’ in Lawrence has been constructed with the view to military occupation and defence, regularly parapeted and portholed for the use of cannon and small arms, and could only have been designed as a stronghold of resistance to law, thereby endangering the public safety, and encouraging rebellion and sedition in this country; and respectfully recommend that steps be taken whereby this nuisance may be removed.

I don’t recall seeing that claim except in proslavery sources, but given that the free state men had erected earthworks in Lawrence and used the hotel as a redoubt back in December, it sounds reasonable.

All of this comes together for a comprehensive program of suppression. The proslavery party would arrest the leaders of the opposition. In the nineteenth century, newspaper editors served as important agents for political parties too. Thus the papers must go as well. Then the proslavery side would take even the means of armed resistance away. A majority of Kansans might still oppose them, but without leaders or a voice to organize that resistance they could not hope to prevail.

The Chief Justice’s Instructions to the Jury

Samuel Lecompte

A grand jury acting under the instructions of Chief Justice Samuel Lecompte, a Pierce appointee and slaveholder, issued warrants to arrest Charles Robinson, Andrew Reeder, James Lane, and several other prominent free state men. The proslavery party now had the legal weaponry it needed to decapitate their enemies, end the free state government, and complete their paper conquest of Kansas Territory. No one could have mistaken Lecompte’s end, but his reasoning bears looking into. William Addison Phillips has the text of Lecompte’s “most remarkable charge”. It deserves a look.

Lecompte began with an ordinary statement of what a grand jury needed to do: look into any possible lawbreaking that came up and issue what indictments seemed proper. As it happened, the Chief Justice had one in mind.

Your attention will naturally be turned toward an unlawful, and before unheard-of organization, that has been formed in our midst, for the purpose of resisting the laws of the United States.

The jurors must proceed “calmly,” without concern for “the exciting state of affairs.” They had a duty to stick to their oaths and act without respect to party or person, taking only the law as their guide. In the unlikely event that someone thought Lecompte meant antislavery militia companies or some other threat to good order, he laid it out so no one could mistake him:

You will take into consideration the cases of men who are dubbed governors […] lieutenant-governors […] secretaries and treasurers, and men who are dubbed all the various other dubbs with which this territory is filling

When weighing the cases against such men, essentially the entire free state government, Lecompte told the jurors that they must take the territorial laws seriously. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, a federal statute, made the territory and established its government. The purloined territorial legislature and its officers, as well as federal appointees like Lecompte and Governor Shannon, derived their authority from that statute. The laws of the territory and acts of its officials thus inherited the authority of the United States itself. As Phillips puts it:

the United States makes laws by proxy, employing the borderers of Missouri to make the laws, inasmuch as being way out West it is inconvenient for her to come herself

To resist those laws meant to defy the Union, not some mere territorial government. To fly in the face of the authority of the United States made men disloyal and “guilty of high treason.” Thus, should the jurors find any such men who had defied the laws, by the strength of their oaths they had a duty to indict them. If the jurors found no active resistance, but organizations devoted to it all the same, then they must indict for the crime of “constructive treason”. Treasonable intention in itself sufficed.

We might take all of this as so much bluster. Talk about treason has permeated Kansas affairs in one way or another for as long as antislavery Kansans have chosen to resist their illegitimate government and Lecompte’s instructions to the jury fit neatly into that tradition. But we should not forget that he occupied a federal office of real authority. The Squatter Sovereign could gas about treason all it wanted and never have it come to much. When a federal judge deemed a person a traitor, they stood a good chance of soon decorating a gallows.

 

“It was a cold, bleak day.” The Return of Pardee Butler, Part Five

Pardee Butler

Parts 1, 2, 3, 4

We left Pardee Butler having a bad day. He came back to Atchison, months after his previous near-murder, hoping to make a quick stop and get on to his claim and his family. The mob which had taken him proposed shooting and hanging, the ringleader had other plans. Robert S. Kelley, now on his second proslavery, anti-Butler mob, preferred to humiliate and torture Butler. He had taken the same route previously and Butler believed, reasonably enough, that Kelley preferred to keep his hands clean once things had proceeded to a proper fake trial instead of a spontaneous mobbing. Kelley’s name ran right under John Stringfellow’s on the Squatter Sovereign’s masthead, so attaching it to a murder might complicate the paper’s appeal to slavery’s friends outside the Kansas-Missouri border.

Kelley did not preside over Butler’s show trial, but the man who did recognized his motion

by saying, “It is moved that Butler be tarred and feathered and receive thirty-nine lashes.” A majority said “Aye,” though a number of voices said “No.”

Butler recalled that he wondered “how that sort of thing of thing would work as far north as the latitude of Kansas, which sounds like one of those incongruous thoughts one has in trying times.

The mob consulted amongst themselves, whispering and exhibiting “dark, threatening, and ominous looks.” When their judge came out again, he declared that they would strike the whipping. That made it a less apt punishment for a man who earned Kelley’s wrath in part for refusal to endorse the whipping of another. Butler didn’t know what inspired the change, however welcome. He then had other things to think about, as the court remanded him to the unhappy South Carolinians.

They muttered and growled at this issue of the matter. They said, “If we had known it would come out this way, we would have let —- —- shoot Butler at the first. he would have done it quicker than a flash.” One sharp-visaged, dark-featured South Carolinian, who seemed to be the leader of the gang, was particularly displeased. With bitter curses he said, “I am not come all the way from South Carolina, spending so much money to do things up in such a milk-and-water style as this.”

Cruel disappointment all around. They abided by the rituals the Kansans and Missourians liked in their lynch mobs and got no lynching for their trouble. All the same,

They stripped me naked to my waist, covered my body with tar, and for the want of feathers applied cotton. Having appointed a committee of seven to certainly hang me the next time I should come into Atchison, they tossed my clothes into my buggy, put me therein, accompanied me to the outskirts of the town, and set me naked out upon the prairie. It was a cold, bleak day.

“They were going to hang me” The Return of Pardee Butler, Part Three

Pardee Butler

 

Parts 1, 2

At the end of April, 1856, Pardee Butler returned to Kansas. He still had a claim and family in the territory and had promised on the occasion of his near-lynching that he would come back. A brief visit in November had the minister pass through Atchison, the sight of his previous travail, with no difficulty. This time around, a contingent of newly-arrived South Carolinian militants led by Robert S. Kelley seized Butler almost on arrival. They hauled him out of his buggy and into a saloon, demanding his execution. For the second time in less than a year, Butler faced a proslavery mob in Atchison headed by Kelley. Sometimes you just can’t catch a break.

In the saloon, a man quizzed Butler. He wanted to know if the minister had come to Atchison with a gun. Butler had not.

He handed me a pistol and said, “There, take that, and stand off ten steps; and —-, I will blow you through in an instant.”

The Reverend Butler did not consider it any part of his Christian duty to oblige, telling them he had no use for their guns. He reports that this exchange pleased the mob, as it satisfied their sense of honor. His questioner didn’t take it so well

but his companions dissuaded him from shooting me, saying they were going to hang me.

That distinction mattered. Duels took place between equals, so to challenge Butler recognized him as a gentleman. To simply seize and hang the minister instead would show his inferiority as well as his mortality. You hanged criminals and, per the law, living while antislavery in Kansas did constitute something near to a crime all in itself.

Robert S. Kelley

The mob didn’t need to explain this, to Butler or themselves. They just proceeded with the plan, pinning the minister’s arms behind his back and getting a rope. Then a Missourian, Judge Tutt of St. Joseph, stepped in. He introduced himself as a good southerner and an elder who deserved their attention. From Virginia originally, he had long lived in Missouri and owned slaves there. He wanted Kansas as a slave state. He agreed with the mobs ends completely, but

you will destroy the cause you are seeking to build up. You have taken this man, who was peaceably passing through your streets and along the public highway, and doing no person any harm. We profess to be ‘Law and Order’ men, and ought to be the last to commit violence.

If Butler had broken some law, then the mob should see him tried properly. Otherwise they would discredit their cause and so betray Kansas and Missouri alike. The invocation of law and order didn’t convince anyone to do something crazy like hand Butler over to a sheriff, but it seems to have persuaded some that they had more work to do before fitting the minister with a hemp necklace:

They dragged me into another building, and appointed a moderator, and got up a kind of lynch law trial.

 

“Kill him! Kill him!” The Return of Pardee Butler, Part Two

Pardee Butler

We have the election today, Gentle Readers. I hope you will cast your ballots, however you cast them, untroubled by any forceful echoes of the history we deal with here.

Into the presently brewing Kansas strife returned Pardee Butler. He had followed the news out of Kansas since departing the territory in the fall of 1855, but come April he returned all the same. The minister had a money and time invested in a claim On that claim, Butler had built a house where his wife, their children, and her brother lived in his absence. Samuel Wood slept there the night after he escaped from Jones’ custody.

What befell Pardee Butler next, we have from his Personal Recollections by a circuitous route. Butler wrote it all down in a letter to the Herald of Freedom, just as he had the story of his previous mistreatment. He presents it as the original letter, but Butler’s daughter finished the book and adds a note that the minister had not retained a copy of the letter he sent. Due to events we will soon come to, Butler didn’t get a full copy of that edition of the Herald, but rather “only a mutilated copy of it.” Another paper reprinted the letter in part and Butler reassembled the original from the two.

Butler told the Herald that he had first come back to Kansas in November, where he visited Atchison in the full light of day, declared himself, and went about his business without trouble. Tempers seem to have cooled since his near-lynching in August. Despite the dire news, he seems to have thought he would have the same reception again. On April 30, he crossed the Missouri river and called at Atchison again. This time, Butler didn’t do much to draw notice to himself. He touched base with two businessmen who he had dealt with previously.

Having remained only a few moments, I went to my buggy to resume my journey, when I was assaulted by Robert S. Kelley, co-editor of the Squatter Sovereign, and others, was dragged into a saloon, and there surrounded by a company of South Carolinians, who are reported to have been sent out by a Southern Emigrant Aid Society. In this last mob I recognized only two that were citizens of Atchison or engaged in the former mob.

The speed of Butler’s seizure suggests that Kelley had advance word of his arrival. He doesn’t say it in as many words, but he seems to intend us to understand the man who passed him on the road as carrying the news ahead.

Robert S. Kelley

Butler stressed the novelty of most of his attackers. The Squatter Sovereign speaks of the same group in other contexts, so we have good reason to believe Butler didn’t change the facts to further dramatize the story or spare himself the enmity of anyone still in Atchison. He understood them as another species of border ruffian, not interested in claims or making new homes for themselves, eschewing legitimate business in favor of proslavery militancy. That also roughly matches the Sovereign’s description.

These worthies

yelled, “Kill him! Kill him! Hang the —- Abolitionist.”