Yet he never bore arms. He sternly held the people to their loyalty to the Government [the administration of President Pierce] against the arguments and the example of the "higher law men, who were always armed, who were not real settlers, and who were bent on bringing about a Border war.

The fact is, Robinson not only "bore arms" in the " Border war," already existing by act of Atchison and his Missouri followers, but he commanded as major-general the free-state militia at Lawrence in the little "Wakarusa war" of December, 1855; and as such he commissioned John Brown to command a company there, consisting in part of Brown's six sons. and a son-in-law, who had been real settlers, several of them for a year preceding. Brown, with his usual prudence, had carried along his own arms in October, 1855; but there is a story of the Sharp's rifles which Robinson had received and distributed, which a citizen of Kansas in the present year tells. Mr. Isely, having had access to the Lawrence and Cabot papers, printed this important information in "The American Historical Review" (XII. 546-566) for April, 1907. Till then, although the general facts were known, the details were allowed to remain concealed. There is no reason to doubt the accuracy of these recent revelations. April 2, 1855, six months before John Brown had reached Kansas, Charles Robinson, an agent of the Emigrant Aid Company, wrote to Eli Thayer, an officer of that company, as follows:

Our people have now formed themselves into four military companies, and will meet to drill till they have perfected themselves in the art. Also companies are being formed in other places [than Lawrence, he means], and we want arms. Give us the weapons and every man from the North will be a soldier and die in his tracks if necessary, to protect and defend our rights. . . . Cannot your secret society send us 200 Sharps rifles as a loan till this question is settled? Also a couple of field-pieces? . . . I have given our people encouragement to expect something of the kind, and hope we shall not be disappointed.

A week later Robinson sent an almost identical letter to Dr. Hale, then of Worcester, and now a member of this Society; but not content with this, he sent on from Kansas his clerk, George W. Deitzler, who was in the pay of the Emigrant Aid Company, as Robinson was, to hasten the forward

ing of the arms. said:

Mr. Deitzler, in 1879, in a published speech

Within an hour after our arrival in Boston, the executive committee of the Emigrant Aid Company [of which Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Thayer were both members] held a meeting and delivered to me an order for one hundred Sharps rifles and I started at once for Hartford, arriving there on Saturday evening. The guns were packed on the following Sunday and I started for home on Monday morning. The boxes were marked "Books." . . . Those rifles did good service in the "border war." . . . It was perhaps the first shipment of arms for our side.

General Deitzler (such was his rank in the Civil War) may have mistaken a date or two; for my old friend Dr. Webb, dating on May 8th from the office of the Emigrant Aid Company, No. 3 Winter Street, Boston, said, writing to Robinson. in Lawrence:

Mr. Deitzler presented himself at this office on Wednesday last [May 2], with a letter from Mr. Thayer relative to a certain business intrusted to him; no one in this village having received any advices.

We were busily occupied in getting ready for special meeting No. 2, . . . to see if we could raise funds for more Mills; still considering the exigencies of the case we ventured to lend a helping hand, . . . although by so doing we pushed out . . . our legitimate business. I eventually arranged, with the aid of Dr. Cabot, so as to take the risk of ordering, in all one hundred machines, at a cost of about three thousand dollars, taking our chances hereafter to raise the money.

...

I am free to say, had your letter . . . arrived forty-eight hours earlier, myself and others would have been little, if at all disposed to exert ourselves, . . . to procure machines for the improvement of Lawrence. Rather we should have seconded the suggestion of one of our most influential coadjutors, which was to advise you and other friends to quit L., abandon it to its impending fate, and seek a location at another spot, where more harmony and good will will be likely to prevail.

It would be curious to know who the influential coadjutor was that suggested abandoning Lawrence. Evidently not Mr. Lawrence; for he appears, by a memorandum in his own handwriting, dated August 24, 1855, to have subscribed $955 "to make up the sum expended by me for rifles for the defence of the Kansas settlers." The list of these subscribers is in the handwriting of Dr. Samuel Cabot, and shows the follow

ing names, beside Mr. Lawrence's: John M. Forbes, $300, Gerrit Smith, $250, Dr. Cabot, $240, Wendell Phillips, Dr. W. R. Lawrence, Captain John Bertram of Salem, Samuel A. Eliot, Theodore Lyman, G. Howland Shaw, and Cunningham Brothers, each $100; Samuel Hoar of Concord, Henry Lee, and Calvin Hall, each $50; Judge E. R. Hoar, Dr. Le Baron Russell, and P. S. Crowell, each $25. The total of these subscriptions for the first hundred rifles, exclusive of Mr. Lawrence's, is $1,715; and it thus appears that, of the whole $2,670, for which Mr. Lawrence made himself responsible, $1,055 were paid by the two brothers Lawrence, with one of whom, Dr. Lawrence, I served for years as a member of the State Kansas Committee. Most of the subscribers were either officers or members of the Emigrant Aid Company, and the whole business was transacted at the office of that company in Winter Street.

One of the last shipments of rifles, in the spring of 1856, was seized, on board the Missouri river steamboat Arabia, by a thousand armed Missourians at Lexington, and for some years kept out of the hands of the Kansas free-state men. D. S. Hoyt, of Deerfield, Massachusetts, who had charge of them, returned to St. Louis, libelled the steamer for the value of the rifles, and collected the money; but the rifles remained useless in the custody of the Missourians. Mr. Lawrence wrote: "If we were not officers of the Emigrant Aid Company, we could get them by suit; but whether we can do so by proxy remains to be seen."

A few months later Hoyt was murdered on the plains of Kansas; and Brown, in his address to the Massachusetts legislature in February, 1857, said, "In August last I saw the mangled and shockingly disfigured body of the murdered Hoyt of Deerfield brought into our camp." The hundred rifles were finally recovered by the Emigrant Aid Company in the early part of 1859, and at the request of Martin Conway, an agent of the company, some time in the spring of 1859 were turned over to Captain James Montgomery, and employed by him in 1860, during the border troubles at Fort Scott. Montgomery, a year earlier, using probably some of the rifles sent out from Boston in 1855, had, when pursued by United States dragoons in southern Kansas, turned upon them and put them to flight, killing two dragoons. This was the first and last time that

the national soldiers were fired on or forcibly resisted by the free-state men of Kansas. Colonel Montgomery afterward commanded a Kansas regiment in the Civil War, and a colored regiment recruited among the freedmen of Carolina. After all his perils and exposures he outlived the wars, small and great, and died quietly in his bed at Mound City in Kansas. His portrait (the only one known) will be hereafter submitted. He visited me at Concord in 1857, and was introduced by me to Emerson, and to the scene of the Concord fight of 1775. His grandfather had fought among the New Hampshire troops at Bunker Hill; his great-grandfather was out in the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, and had to emigrate from Scotland, first to Ireland and then to New England. My friend himself was a slender, dark-complexioned person, of a certain elegance both of person and speech, reminding me of a French chevalier.

-

Other rifles than the lot already mentioned were sent out from Boston by the officers of the Emigrant Aid Company, in August, 1855, and later. The whole sum recorded by Dr. Cabot, as raised for this purpose, was $12,444. Whether the list given above of the subscribers to a hundred rifles relates to those sent in May, or those of August, is left in doubt by Mr. Isely, but I think I am not wrong in applying it to the May shipment. The August shipment was also solicited by Robinson, through Major Abbott, and the request was granted by Mr. Lawrence, who wrote (August 11 and 20, 1855) as follows to Major J. B. Abbott:

Request Mr. Palmer to have one hundred Sharps rifles packed in casks, like hardware, and to retain them subject to my order. Also to send the bill to me by mail. I will pay it either with my note, according to the terms agreed on between him and Dr. Webb, or in cash less interest at seven per cent. per annum.

[August 20.] This installment of carbines is far from being enough; and I hope the measures you are taking will be followed up until every organized company of trusty men in the Territory shall be supplied....

You must dispose of these where they will do the most good, and for this purpose you should advise with Dr. Robinson and Mr. Pomeroy.

I cannot find that John Brown, who certainly had an "organized company of trusty men," made use of any of the rifles of 1855. He had supplied himself with arms in the early summer of 1855, on his way to Kansas with his son-in-law,

Henry Thompson, who is yet living at Pasadena, California. Writing from Syracuse, New York, June 28, 1855, Brown said to his family at North Elba:

I have met with a most warm reception from all, so far as I know, and (except by a few sincere, honest peace friends) a most hearty approval of my intention of arming my sons and other friends in Kansas. I received to-day donations amounting to a little over $60, -$20 from Gerrit Smith, $5 from an old British officer:1 others giving smaller sums, with such earnest and affectionate expression of their good wishes as did me more good than money, even.

In Akron he received gifts for arms, and also the artillery sabres which were afterwards used by his men in the Pottawatomie executions, the following May; together with some infantry bayonets, too large to fit any of the Kansas muskets, but which he fastened to wooden handles, intending to use them as pikes to repel attack. With these, set up in a row on each side of his great wagon, he crossed the line of the invading Missourians in December, 1855, when he led his six sons to the Wakarusa war, and received at Lawrence his commission from Major-General Robinson.

In a later communication I shall speak of the Emigrant Aid Society and its useful work in Kansas for a few years. It had less to do with the pioneer settlement and the final triumph of freedom in Kansas than we used to claim; but its task was well performed, on the whole, and its agents at times rendered good service.

SAMUEL A. GREEN presented a photographic copy of a silhouette of Joseph Willard, President of Harvard University from 1781 to 1804, the gift of his grandchildren, Mr. Joseph Willard and Miss Susanna Willard; and he also communicated the following extract of a letter from a great-granddaughter, Miss Theodora Willard, dated at Cambridge on July 31, 1907 :

As far as we know there are three originals, one belonging to us, one to Harvard, and one to another branch of the family. The picture I brought to you last week is a photographic reproduction from our original, enlarged to just twice the size. My aunt and uncle had eight of these made, one for you, one which has been framed in the

1 Captain Charles Stewart, who had served under Wellington.