During the early summer of 1854, exaggerated and false reports in regard to the character, purposes, and means of the proposed Emigrant Aid Company were circulated through Missouri and the entire South. It was said that an organization, chartered by the legislature of Massachusetts, possessing an immense capital, was preparing to abolitionize Kansas by means of military colonies, recruited from the slums of the Eastern cities, and planted in Kansas with all the munitions of war, to be used not only when necessary for their own defence, but for keeping out immigrants from the South. The notorious B. F. Stringfellow, co-editor with one Kelly of the _Squatter Sovereign_, a paper published at Atchison, which professed to be the organ of the Washington Government in western Missouri, rang the changes upon these misrepresentations in his newspaper, and advised that the emigrants sent out by the Aid Society be met with the weapons of their choice, which he charged were those of violence. [Sidenote: The Missouri "border ruffian" of 1854.] [Sidenote: Nebraska for the North and Kansas for the South.] The population of western Missouri was then such as to receive ready impression from such representations, and respond heartily to such counsel. This region was then the frontier between civilization and savagery, and into it had gathered a horde of desperate characters, {412} vulgar, fearless, brutal, without respect for civilization or reverence for God, usually inflamed with whiskey and stained with tobacco, gambling by day and jayhawking by night, always ready for any adventure which promised fun, blood, or booty. It is true that they had no special interest in slavery. They were simply the ready material out of which the slaveholders of Missouri might recruit their mercenaries for any villainous work which might be found necessary. Such was the Missouri "border ruffian" of 1854. It must not be understood that western Missouri contained no other sort of people. There were many generous-hearted, fair-minded, upright men there, among both the slaveholders and the non-slaveholders, who would no sooner have done wrong than suffered wrong. Most of them felt, however, that Kansas for the South and slavery, and Nebraska for the North, was the fair thing, the only fair thing, the thing understood and intended in the organization of the two Territories by one Act, and that any attempt on the part of the North to make Kansas a non-slaveholding Territory was a breach of faith, which ought to be resisted by the South, and especially by Missouri. [Sidenote: General Atchison.]