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[142] the price of obedience to the laws of the false legislature. He is making a clear path, therefore, for a contest between the inhabitants and the United States troops, first or last.


Governor Geary aimed to take a neutral stand between conflicting elements, his orders being to “stop the fighting in Kansas.” His course did not commend itself to the radical abolitionists, but his later career as an officer in the Union forces of the Civil War led Mr. Higginson, at least, to change his estimate of Geary's character.

This letter was written to one of the Dabney family with whom he had been in close relations in Fayal:

Steamboat Cataract, aground on a bank in the Missouri River, October 9, 1856
I know you would enjoy going to Kansas, for it is as genuine a sensation as we expect it to be; things and people are very real there. It is precisely like waking up some morning and stepping out on the Battle of Bunker Hill; one learns in a single day more about Greeks and Romans and English Puritans and Scotch Jacobites, and Hungarians and all heroic peoples, than any course of history can teach. The same process is producing the same results before your eyes, and what is most striking the same persons whom you saw a year ago in Boston, indolent and timid, are here transformed to heroes. Perhaps this brings down the dignity of our courage a little, showing it to be the child


Boston and New York. Houhgton Mifflin Company. 1921.

Mary Thacher Higginson provided support for entering this text.

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