Personal Recollections of Pardee ButlerButler, Pardee
Religion
Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler
Butler, Pardee
Kansas -- History -- 1854-1861
There were also in the audience two young gentlemen, recently come from
the New England States to seek their fortune. They were just of that age
to think that what they did not know, or at least what the people of New
England did not know, was not worth knowing. Such a meeting in the open
air; such an audience, in which the dress of every man and woman was got
up according to their own notions, and that, too, without consulting
Mrs. Grundy; _such a preacher! and such a sermon_! Certainly these all
were new to them, and did not command their highest admiration. These
young gentlemen kept up a sort of running commentary between themselves,
on what they saw going on, until, becoming tired of their misbehavior, I
turned and said to them in effect: "Young gentlemen, you profess to be
men of good breeding, and it is understood that well-bred people will
behave themselves in meeting." They were very angry, and one of them
wrote me a saucy letter about it. But finding little sympathy in the
settlement, they went to Atchison, and there they found abundant
sympathy and open ears to hear. A man who was a preacher, and a
pronounced free State man, had come from Illinois and had settled on the
Stranger Creek; and who could tell the mischief he might do to his
brethren who were squatters from Missouri? When these same New England
gentlemen were in their turn stripped of all they were worth by the
"Border Ruffians" it changed their feelings toward their free State
brethren "mightily."
And now that feeling of dissatisfaction that had been all along
festering in the hearts of the people, began to come to the surface. An
inside view would have revealed a perpetual murmur of discontent. The
Territorial Legislature was now in session, and doing its work, and
copies of the laws they had enacted were coming into circulation. No
legislature in America had ever been elected as they had been, and we
have already learned what a thrill of horror and pain this caused in
the hearts of the squatters. It would have been a dictate of the most
obvious common sense that a body of men whose claim to be a Territorial
Legislature rested on such a basis should proceed with the utmost
moderation. But they were intoxicated with success. It is an old and a
wise saw, that whom the gods wish to destroy they first deprive of their
reason, and these men were smitten with judicial blindness. No slave
State had ever enacted such savage and bloody laws--laws of such
barbarous and inhuman severity, for the protection of slave property.
And now the people were reading copies of these laws, and nothing could
long suppress the evidences of discontent. The following editorial is
also copied from the _Squatter Sovereign_:
WATCH THE ABOLITIONISTS.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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