years of warfare when there were not friends of freedom in each of the revolted States, and friends of slavery in each of the loyal States. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers, white and colored, fought for the Union and against negro slavery, whose home was, or had been till they were driven out, in the seceding States. These soldiers came from Virginia, both the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee (to the number of 30,000 or more), Louisiana, Arkansas, and even from Texas. Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland, States on which the supporters of slavery confidently counted, furnished soldiers to both sides, but, on the whole, more to the support of freedom than to the maintenance of slavery. On the other hand, hardly a Northern State that did not send recruits to the Southern armies; while in Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and even in New York and New Hampshire, were thousands of pro-slavery Democrats, whose wishes, if not their personal service and money, went to support the losing cause.

The repeal of the Missouri Compromise was the cause of the struggle in Kansas, and that, in turn, was the occasion of disunion and the Civil War. It was expressly declared that the exclusion of slavery from Kansas would be just cause for the South to secede, and this declaration was echoed from Alabama and South Carolina. A vigorous pamphlet lately published by the Secretary of the Kansas Historical Society, George W. Martin, gives the facts and citations on this point. The local leaders in the movement to force slavery upon Kansas were D. R. Atchison, president of the Senate at Washington, and B. F. Stringfellow, both of whom long survived the Civil War,- one dying in 1886 and the other in 1891. Of the former the St. Louis "Democrat," a paper in the interest of Benton and F. P. Blair, said in 1854:

The fraud by which the Missouri Compromise was repealed required to be consummated by another fraud, and a man (Atchison) who made a tool of Douglas for the perpetration of the first fraud, telling him that if he did n't introduce a bill for that purpose that he would resign his position as president of the senate and introduce it himself, has at last found it necessary to resign . . . in order to superintend the perpetration of the second fraud [Martin, p. 9].

Atchison in November, 1854, had made a speech at some point in Platte County, on the Kansas border, to his Missouri constituents. He said:

The people of Kansas, in their first elections, would decide whether or not the slaveholder was to be excluded. What is your duty? When you reside in one day's journey of the Territory, and when your peace, your quiet, and your property depend upon your action, you can, without any exertion, send five hundred of your young men who will vote in favor of your institutions [meaning negro slavery]. Should each county in the State of Missouri only do its duty, the question will be decided quietly and peaceably at the ballot-box. 1

1

This advice was taken, both then and at the spring election for a territorial legislature, when a thousand Missourians went to vote in Lawrence. By this means a wholly pro-slavery legislature was chosen, which enacted a slave code for Kansas, under which none but pro-slavery men could hold office; and if any person spoke, wrote, or printed his opinion that men had no right to hold slaves in Kansas, he was guilty of felony, and could be imprisoned for two years. This legislature quarrelled with its first Pennsylvania Democratic territorial Governor, and he was forced to flee from Kansas in disguise, in May, 1856. But long before that the killing and expulsion of freestate men had begun, recommended by Atchison and Stringfellow. The newspaper of the latter, called the "Squatter Sovereign," and published at the Kansas town named for Atchison, said (August 28, 1855):

We can tell the impertinent scoundrels of the (New York) Tribune that they may exhaust an ocean of ink, their Emigrant Aid Societies spend their millions and billions, their representatives in Congress spout their heretical theories till doomsday, and his excellency Franklin Pierce may appoint abolitionist after free-soiler as governor; yet we will continue to tar and feather, drown, lynch and hang every white-livered abolitionist who dares to pollute our soil [Martin, p. 15].

This threat was carried out as far as power and opportunity permitted. Samuel Collins was killed on October 25, 1855, Charles W. Dow on November 21, and Thomas W. Barber on December 6 following. R. P. Brown was murdered on January 17, 1856. In April following a Vermonter named Baker was taken from his cabin, whipped, hanged to a tree, cut down while living, and released on his promise to leave Kansas. In May a Massachusetts man named Mace was waylaid, and shot and left for dead. Two weeks after, on

1 See D. W. Wilder's "Annals of Kansas," p. 40.

May 21, 1856, the Lawrence hotel and the offices of two freestate newspapers were destroyed, the Lawrence shops pillaged, and the house of Dr. Charles Robinson, afterwards Governor of Kansas, burned. The next day Preston S. Brooks assaulted, and nearly killed, Charles Sumner in the Senate chamber at Washington. Not one of these crimes was punished, nor did the federal government make any effort to punish them. But John Brown had been in Kansas for six or seven months, and four or five of his sons for a year or two. Forming a small party, consisting of four of his sons, a son-inlaw, and two free-state settlers named Townsley and Weiner, he visited the Pottawatomie region, in the present town of Lane, where a gang of ruffians had been insulting and threatening peaceful settlers; there held a sort of drumhead court-martial on five of the offenders, and executed them on the spot.

From that time forward the murders of free-state men did not cease; but they were less common, and a state of active warfare took their place. Brown at the head of a few men attacked and routed a larger force of Missourians and others under the command of a Virginian named Pate, capturing and disarming twenty-three of them, including their captain and lieutenant. This was in June, 1856; in August, with his small force he resisted the attack made by several hundred Missourians upon the small town of Osawatomie; near which the cabins of his sons had been plundered and burnt; and two of them were then in prison as "traitors," but never were brought to trial. A third son was murdered by a Missouri preacher, Martin White, as the invaders came in over the high prairie early in the morning of the Osawatomie fight. The fiftieth anniversary of this skirmish was celebrated in 1906 in the presence of thousands, the Vice-President of the United States giving one of the addresses. But at an earlier celebration in 1877, when a monument was dedicated to the memory of Brown and his men who fought there, Governor Robinson had made the chief address, and had said:

This is an occasion of no ordinary merit, being for no less an object than to honor and keep fresh the memory of those who freely offered their lives for their fellow-men. The men whose death we commemorate this day cheerfully offered themselves a sacrifice for strangers and a despised race. They would fight injustice wherever found; if framed

into law, then they would fight the law; if upheld and enforced by government, then government must be resisted. The soul of John Brown was the inspiration of the union armies in the emancipation war; and it will be the inspiration of all men in the present and the distant future, who may revolt against tyranny and oppression.

Robinson, however, had not waited one and twenty years to express his satisfaction with Brown's course in Kansas. In September, 1856, a fortnight after the Osawatomie fight, Robinson, writing from Lawrence, gave Brown a letter, which Brown brought to me when he made my acquaintance here in Boston, more than half a century ago, and which ran thus: CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN.

MY DEAR SIR, I take this opportunity to express to you my sincere gratification that the late report that you were among the killed at the battle of Osawatomie is incorrect. Your course, so far as I have been informed, has been such as to merit the heartiest praise from every patriot; and I cheerfully accord to you my heartfelt thanks for your prompt, efficient, and timely action against the invaders of our rights and the murderers of our citizens. History will give your name a proud place on her pages; and posterity will pay homage to your heroism in the cause of God and humanity. Trusting that you will conclude to remain in Kansas, and serve during the war the cause you have done so much to sustain; and with earnest prayers for your health, and protection from the shafts of death that so thickly beset your path, I subscribe myself

Very respectfully your obedient servant,

C. ROBINSON.

To this letter, when Brown showed it to me, January 2, 1857, were appended the endorsements of Salmon P. Chase, then Governor of Ohio, and of Gerrit Smith, who had given $10,000 for the freedom of Kansas.

Now who was Governor Robinson? Born in Worcester County, Massachusetts, and educated as a physician, he had gone to California early to seek his fortune. He became an agent of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, organized in 1854 at the instance of Eli Thayer, Dr. Howe, Dr. Hale, then a young clergyman at Worcester, and other anti-slavery men, but which soon fell into the hands of men like Amos A. Lawrence, J. M. S. Williams, and Judge R. A. Chapman of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, who were not regarded by themselves or the public as fanatical anti-slavery men. One

of the earliest important papers in the collection lately given to this Society by the heirs of Patrick T. Jackson is an early document of the Emigrant Aid Company, which explains the manner of its management of capital. Dr. Robinson was one of several agents who took charge of its business in the Territory of Kansas by which agency he laid the foundation of his considerable fortune. He also became a political leader, in which function his agency materially assisted him, and received from the free-state people of Kansas almost every official title they could confer. As Major-General of the free-state militia in December, 1855, he commissioned John Brown as Captain, and I have, and will submit hereafter, a photographic copy of this document.

How these militia were supplied with the new Sharp's rifle by citizens of Boston has lately been set forth in an interesting paper by Mr. W. H. Isely of Wichita, Kansas, showing the names of the principal subscribers and the amount given by each. In a letter from my college classmate, the late Theodore Lyman, to Mr. Jackson, found among our Jackson Papers, Lyman, then (June 7, 1856) a scientific student, said, "I have already subscribed for saw-mills and rifles," and then enclosed $50 for Dr. Howe's Faneuil Hall Committee. I met Dr. Robinson, then known as "Governor" under the abortive Topeka Constitution, at a meeting which the State Kansas Committee, successors to the Faneuil Hall Committee, had organized for Robinson in October, 1856, and as a member of that Committee, assisted in collecting the $325 given at that meeting to the State Committee. At a later date, and in the same capacity, I attended a meeting at which Robinson's chief rival in Kansas, General James H. Lane, spoke in his fervid prairie manner; and for many years after I watched the career of the two men.

Twenty-five years after the death of John Brown, one of his friends in the critical period of Kansas history, the late Amos A. Lawrence, a member of this Society, presented it with early portraits of Brown and Robinson, and in so doing made certain statements which are not, in my judgment, in strict conformity with the ascertained historical facts. Speaking of Charles Robinson, at the May meeting of 1884, Mr. Lawrence said:1

1 2 Proceedings i. 181-183.