Personal Recollections of Pardee ButlerButler, Pardee
Religion
Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler
Butler, Pardee
Kansas -- History -- 1854-1861
The leaders of the Pro-slavery party made a pathetic appeal to the
people of the South to send a corresponding class of emigrants; but
the appeal was feebly responded to. Slave-holders would not come,
because their slaves would be insecure; and now slave-holders felt
that they had small cause to come to fight a battle that was not
theirs.
Gov. Shannon held the scepter of power with a more and more feeble
hand. He was going to resign, and he was not going to resign. But
whether he did or did not resign, the substance of power had already
passed into the hands of his secretary, Mr. Woodson, who was hand and
glove with his fellows in this conspiracy to make Kansas a slave
State.
Meantime Col. Sumner had been superseded in command at Fort
Leavenworth by Persifer F. Smith. Col. Sumner had obeyed orders like
the brave soldier that he was, but he had shown too much sympathy for
these victims of oppression in the discharge of his shameful duties. [5]
He did his appointed work, but he did not do it with an appetite, and
he had been succeeded by a man that felt no more pity toward the Free
State people than the wolf feels for the lamb out of which he makes
his breakfast. The consequences of this state of affairs began soon to
appear. The Missouri River had been blockaded. Trains sent to
Leavenworth from Lawrence and Topeka were robbed on the public highway
of the merchandise and provisions with which they were loaded, and
these interior Free State settlements began to feel the sharp pressure
of hard necessities, while they a third time saw companies of
so-called "Law and Order" militia occupying various points in the
Territory which these men proceeded to fortify, and from which they
could overawe the inhabitants and make raids on the citizens; and
thus the old business of robbery, murder, spoliation and oppression
was again begun.
And now this new immigration of a squatter soldiery, who came bearing
their muskets in one hand and their implements of husbandry in the
other, and were perfectly indifferent whether it should be work or
fight, came pouring over the Nebraska line and into Kansas Territory.
A feeble attempt was made to stop them, but it amounted to nothing.
They were not now on a Missouri River steamboat. Jim Lane came with
them. He remained _incognito_ a few days, and then threw off his
disguise, and Capt. Joe Cook was Jim Lane. And now the old, hard rule
of the law of Moses, "An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,"
was again the law of Kansas. It was, "You have robbed us, and we will
rob you; you have subsisted yourselves upon us, and we will subsist
ourselves on you; you have blockaded the Missouri River, and waylaid
our freighting trains, and pillaged them of their freight, with intent
to starve out the Free State people, and all that belongs to you and
yours shall be free plunder to us."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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