The state authorities of Missouri converted the mobs which had plundered the Saints, burned their homes and laid waste their lands, into the state militia, which gave the former mob a legal status, under which guise they plundered the Saints, compelled them to sign away their property and agree to leave the state. To resist this mob-militia was to be guilty of treason; but the people of western Missouri lived to see a like policy pursued towards them. They suffered much in Jackson and other western counties in the border war, previous to the opening of the Civil War, from the inroads of abolition "jayhawkers" in the interest of anti-slavery. For a time this was in part suppressed by the state militia under General Frost and by the permanent force stationed on the border under Lieutenant-Colonel Bowen. But later, and when the Civil War broke out, these old "jayhawking" leaders "now came with United States commissions in their pockets, and at the head of regularly enlisted troops, in which guise they carried on a {LXXI} system of robbery and murder that left a good portion of the frontier south of the Missouri river as perfect a waste as Germany was at the end of the Thirty Years' War." [69] Such wretches as Generals Lane and Jennison, though Union officers, and denounced alike by Governor Robinson of Kansas--of course a strong Union man--and General Halleck, [70] commander-in-chief of the western armies of the Union, were permitted to disgrace alike the Union cause and our human nature by their unspeakable atrocities. But they were retained in office, nevertheless. It was the outrages committed by these men and their commands, and the Kansas "Red Legs" that led to the equally savage reprisals on the people of Kansas. In revenge for what western Missouri had suffered, outlawed Missourians sacked Lawrence, Kansas, a Union city, massacred one hundred and eighty-three of its inhabitants, and left it in flames. In justification of their act of savagery, they declared: "Jennison has laid waste our homes, and the 'Red Legs' have perpetrated unheard of crimes. Houses have been plundered and burned, defenseless men shot down, and women outraged. We are here for revenge--and we have got it." [71] How nearly this language of the Missourians--and there can be no question that it describes what had been done in Missouri by Lane, Jennison, and their commands, and the Kansas "Red Legs" [72]--follows the complaint justly made by the Latter-day Saints years before against the Missourians! But thank God, there is recorded against the Saints no such horrible deeds of reprisal.