Soon after the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854, in the neighborhood of Winchester and Harper's Ferry the project of sending a company of young men to Kansas to make it a slave state was much agitated. Subscriptions for that purpose were asked, and the duty of strengthening our sectional interest of slavery by adding two friendly Senators to your honorable body, was urged with great zeal upon my neighbors. This was long before I had heard of any movement of the New England Aid Co., or of anybody on the part of freedom. It was my understanding at the time that Senator Mason was the main adviser in the project. This may not have been the case. The history of this company will not be soon forgotten. Its taking the train on the Baltimore and Ohio R. R. at Harper's Ferry, its exploits in Kansas up to the fall of its leader (Sharrard) at the hands of Jones, the friend of the Democratic Gov. Geary, are all still well remembered. The return of the company with the dead body of their leader, and the blasted hopes of its sanguine originators, was a gloomy day in our beautiful valley, and created a sensation throughout the country. Another letter among the Trumbull papers deserves a place here, the author of which was Isaac T. Dement, who (writing from Hudson, Illinois, January 10, 1857) says that he was living in Kansas the previous year and had filed his intention on one hundred and sixty acres of land where he had a small store and a dwelling-house: On the 3d of September last [he continues] a band of armed men from Missouri came to my place, and after taking what they wanted from the store, burned it and the house, and said that if they could find me they would hang me. They said that they had broken open a post-office and found a letter that I wrote to Lane and Brown asking them to come and help us with a company of Sharpe's rifles (this is a lie); and also that I had furnished Lane and Brown's men with provisions (a lie), and that I was a Free State man (that is so). Mr. Dement hoped that Congress would do something to compensate him for his losses.