There is this peculiarity about the case of Kansas, that all the right is
on one side. We hear the screams of hunted wives and children answered
by the howl of the butchers. The testimony of the telegraphs from St.
Louis and the border confirm the worst details. The printed letters of
border ruffians avow the facts. When pressed to look at the cause of
the mischief in the Kansas laws, the President falters and declines the
discussion; but his supporters in the Senate, Mr. Cass, Mr. Geyer, Mr.
Hunter, speak out, and declare the intolerable atrocity of the code.
It is a maxim that all party spirit produces the incapacity to receive
natural impressions from facts; and our recent political history has
abundantly borne out the maxim. But these details that have come from
Kansas are so horrible, that the hostile press have but one word in
reply, namely, that it is all exaggeration, ’tis an Abolition lie. Do the
Committee of Investigation say that the outrages have been overstated?
Does their dismal catalogue of private tragedies show it? Do the private
letters? Is it an exaggeration, that Mr. Hopps of Somerville, Mr. Hoyt of
Deerfield, Mr. Jennison of Groton, Mr. Phillips of Berkshire, have been
murdered? That Mr. Robinson of Fitchburg has been imprisoned? Rev. Mr.
Nute of Springfield seized, and up to this time we have no tidings of his
fate?
In these calamities under which they suffer, and the worst which threaten
them, the people of Kansas ask for bread, clothes, arms and men, to save
them alive, and enable them to stand against these enemies of the human
race. They have a right to be helped, for they have helped themselves.
This aid must be sent, and this is not to be doled out as an ordinary
charity; but bestowed up to the magnitude of the want, and, as has been
elsewhere said, “on the scale of a national action.” I think we are to
give largely, lavishly, to these men. And we must prepare to do it.
We must learn to do with less, live in a smaller tenement, sell our
apple-trees, our acres, our pleasant houses. I know people who are making
haste to reduce their expenses and pay their debts, not with a view to
new accumulations, but in preparation to save and earn for the benefit of
the Kansas emigrants.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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