His collisions with the slave leaders and their northern allies grew thenceforth more frequent and ever fiercer. Every motion of his to gain the floor, he found anticipated and opposed by a tyrannous combination and majority, bent on depriving him of his rights as a senator. Wherever he turned he faced growing intolerance and malignity. It was only by exercising the utmost vigilance and firmness that he was able to snatch for himself and cause a hearing. Under these circumstances all the powers of the man became braced, eager, alert, determined. It was many against one, but that one was a host in himself, aroused as he then was, not only by the grandeur of his cause, but also by a keen sense of personal indignity and persecution. Whoever else did, he would not submit to senatorial insult and bondage. His rising temper began to thrust like a rapier. Scorn he matched with scorn, and pride he pitted against pride. As a regiment bristles with bayonets, so bristled his speech with facts, which thrust through and through with the merciless truth of history the arrogance and pretentions of the South. His sarcasm was terrific. His invective had the ferocity of a panther. He upon whom it sprang had his quivering flesh torn away. It was not in human nature to suffer such lacerations of the feelings and forgive and forget the author of them. The slave leaders did not forgive Sumner, nor forget their scars. Meanwhile the plot of the national tragedy fast thickened, for as the Government at Washington had adopted the "Squatter Sovereignty" scheme of Douglas in settling the territorial question, the two sections precipitated their forces at once upon the debatable land. It was then for the first time that the two antagonistic social systems of the union came into physical collision. Showers of bullets and blood dashed from the darkening sky. Civil War had actually begun. The history of Kansas during this period is a history of fraud, violence and anarchy. Popular sovereignty, private rights and public order were all outraged by the Border Ruffians of Missouri and the slave power.