THE BORDER RUFFIANS HOLD AN ELECTION

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.