The purpose of the subscription was to purchase, for one
thousand dollars, land with improvements to the number of
one hundred and sixty acres, of which eighty acres were to
go to Mrs. Brown's farm, and the other half to the farm of
Henry Thompson, who had married Ruth Brown, the only
daughter of Brown's first marriage. There were fifteen sub-
scribers, of whom one was anonymous; the others were A. A.
Lawrence, $310, G. L. Stearns, $260, John Bertram, of Salem,
$75, J. Carter Brown, $100, W. R. Lawrence, J. M. S.
Williams, and W. D. Pickman, each $50, Wendell Phillips
and John E. Lodge, each $25, R. P. Waters, S. E. Peabody,
John H. Silsbee, and "Cash" each $10, and B. Silsbee, $5.
My own subscription took the form of my travelling expenses
(about $50), to visit both Gerrit Smith in central New York,
to whom $112 was due, and from whom the title deeds were to
come, and the Brown and Thompson families at North Elba, to
examine the land, satisfy the claims, and pay over the money.
This I did in the first two weeks of August, 1857, writing
to Brown at Tabor, Iowa, August 14, that I had so done. To
this he replied, August 27, substantially thus:

I cannot express all the gratitude I feel to all the kind friends who contributed towards paying for the place at North Elba, after I had bought it; as I am thereby relieved from a very great embarrassment, both with Mr. Smith and the young Thompsons; and also comforted with the feeling that my noble-hearted wife and daughters will not be driven either to beg, or to become a burden to my poor boys, who have nothing but their hands to begin with.

Some of the meaner of Brown's enemies have charged him with personal dishonesty. All this time that he was waiting, to have Mr. Lawrence and others make good their promise to pay for the land they authorized him to buy, Brown was at liberty to draw on G. L. Stearns for thousands of dollars, for military uses in Kansas, - but made no use of this permission, though sadly distressed that the young men to whom he had promised payment (one of whom was afterwards killed at Harper's Ferry), and his own wife and daughter, had not received their due. Brown was, in truth, of the most scrupulous pecuniary honesty, though twice unfortunate in large business operations. I am afraid the same cannot be said of Governor Robinson, Pomeroy, Lane, or G. W. Brown.

--

The effort of many writers of late years, and among them I am sorry to rank our associate Professor Spring, seems to have been to show that the men contending on the two sides in Kansas from 1855 to 1859 were equally low in mental and moral qualities. Nothing could be further from the truth. No doubt some of the leaders on the free-state side were men without what John Brown called "principle," — that is, men who had not seriously taken their position on moral and political issues and could not be swerved from it by selfish considerations. This was certainly the case with General Lane, the most popular leader of our friends there for some ten years; as it was with Dr. Robinson and with his associate, General Pomeroy, the two chief agents of the Emigrant Aid Company. With these three men the controlling consideration usually was what moves the second grade of politicians everywhere their own political or personal interest, whether of ambition or of pecuniary profit. Some others, of less prominence, could be named among the free-state men whom I knew, and I knew most of those on the side of freedom that achieved any distinction, who sometimes let their selfish interests mislead them. But the mass of the free-state settlers were not, what a recent English novelist styles them, "the riff-raff of Northern towns [meaning cities], enlisted by the Emigrants' Aid Societies, and most of them unused to bear arms of any kind." On the contrary, they were generally from small country places in most of the northern States, and from the southern States of Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri in particular. They were not in the habit of carrying concealed arms, whether bowie knives, pistols, or whiskey flasks; but they had been trained to the use of shotguns and rifles, and many of them were of the local militia in their several States. What Mr. Gladstone, the London "Times" correspondent, said of them in November, 1856, agrees wholly with my own observation, substantially as follows:

Contrasting the towns built by the free-state population with Leavenworth and other places, where the majority are from the South, one remarks in the former a greater number of mechanics, shopkeepers, useful artisans and laborers, and in the latter an excess of lawyers, doctors, rumsellers, and barkeepers.

Let me name a few of these "riff-raff." Two brothers, Jefferson and Martin F. Conway, were born in Maryland,one a carpenter, the other (afterwards judge and Congressman) a law-student. Two brothers, John Montgomery and

Samuel T. Shore, were born in North Carolina, farmers who worked as such in Kansas, and fought under or in association with John Brown, afterwards Union soldiers in the Civil War.

James Montgomery, the famous partisan leader, was born in Ohio, a school-master in Kentucky, then a farmer in Missouri and in Kansas, a distinguished officer in the Civil War. Professor Spring, who probably never knew him, disparages him as "not devoid of craft and stratagem, but without large mental or executive force." I knew him, and so did many others still living. In a life of unusual risks and exposure, and with a courage that never flinched, he fought through six or seven years of war, succeeded in most of his campaigns, and died, a veteran of the Civil War, in his bed in Kansas. I am incapable of measuring the amount of mental and executive force in a man, simply by reading about him, but those who knew his career were the best judges of it.

Six brothers, sons of John Brown, five of whom I knew, born in Ohio or Eastern New York, were farmers and woolgrowers, and occasionally merchants, all skilled in their business, whatever it might be; trained from childhood to the use of arms and the management of horses, - admirable horsemen, like their father, and with most of the moral and domestic virtues, like him. Two of them were slain in Virginia, one in Kansas; two others enlisted in the Union army, but soon were incapacitated. The widow of one of them has a captain's pension, which John Brown, Jr., would never draw, preferring to support himself. Finally, there was John Brown himself, with the qualities the world knows.

Here then are twelve of the early fighters in Kansas on the free-state side; and no man who ever knew them could for a moment rank them with the hard-drinking, swearing, gambling, slaveholding men on the other side, or put the men on both sides in the same scoffing category. Perhaps the worst example of this false judgment was that of a col

lege professor in the Kansas State University, F. H. Hodder, who, in a book called "Civil Government in Kansas," published more than ten years ago, said in substance:

A third class consisted of adventurers of various sorts from both sections: broken-down politicians, restless, lawless men, to whom the restraints of civilization were irksome; gamblers, ruffians, and fugitives from justice, a class of men who always drift to new countries. They cared not whether slavery was voted up or down, but were ready to embrace any party that promised them office and power; and welcomed a state of society in which murder, arson, and robbery would go unpunished. It was the presence of this class, ranged as they were on both sides of the political contest, that accounts largely for the disorder and bloodshed in the early history of the State.

Now, if this professor were confining himself to what happened literally "in the early history of the State,"that is, after the admission of Kansas in 1861, a measure of truth might be found in his picture. But then actual Civil War had supervened on the occasional civil war of the territorial period; and there is no evil like civil war to create, as well as to attract, the characters thus described. When that woe comes, it is as Ulysses says in "Troilus and Cressida":

Strength should be lord of imbecility,

And the rude son should strike his father dead:
Force should be right; or, rather, right and wrong
(Between whose endless jar justice resides),

Should lose their names, and so should Justice, too.
Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;

And appetite, an universal wolf,

So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And, last, eat up himself.

But in the territorial period not more than two or three of the free-state men could be described, as dozens on the other side might be, in the terms employed by Hodder. General Lane was in some respects such a person, but with certain redeeming and popular qualities. Dr. Robinson might be so portrayed by his enemies; but it was not a fair description of him until after Kansas became a State.

George W. Brown, in his changing from one side to the other early in the territorial struggle, deserved some of the Hodder epithets. He was denounced by Dr. Robinson in 1857, and by most of the sincere free-state men in 1857 and 1858. His letters to Mr. Lawrence in the possession of this Society sufficiently disclose his character. The course of the national administration at Washington, whether directed by Jefferson Davis under the authority of President Pierce, or by the southern leaders under President Buchanan's authority, was a combination of force and fraud, which the chosen instruments, one after another, gradually revealed to the public. An important witness in 1856 and 1857 was John W. Geary, the Pennsylvania friend of Buchanan, sent out as Governor in August, to prevent the possibility of Buchanan's defeat, threatened by the continuance of the fighting in Kansas. In his private correspondence with President Pierce (printed in 1904, by a kinsman of General Pierce), Governor Geary said (December 22, 1856) substantially this:

The censure which has been heaped upon your administration, for mismanagement in Kansas affairs, is not attributable to you; but is the consequence of the criminal complicity of public officers, some of whom you have removed, the moment you were clearly satisfied of their true position. I could not have credited it unless I had seen it with my own eyes, and had the most conclusive evidence of the fact, that public officers would have lent themselves to carry out schemes which at once set at naught every principle of right and justice upon which the equality and existence of our government is founded. You know that there is no man in the Union that more heartily despises the abolitionists than I do, or more clearly perceives the pernicious tendency of their doctrines; and on this question I trust I am an impartial judge. The persecutions of the Free State men here were not exceeded by those of the early Christians. . . . The men holding official position have never given you that impartial information ... which your high position so imperatively demanded.... I am satisfied that there was a settled determination in high quarters, to make this a Slave State at all hazards; that policy was communicated here, to agents, and most of the public officers sent here were secured for its success. The consequence was that when Northern emigrants came here at an early day, even before the Emigrant Aid Societies began to excite public attention, - certain persons along the borders of Missouri began to challenge unexceptionable settlers. Finding many not for a slave State, they were subjected to various indignities, and told that this soil did not