Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 3

[417] an act of disunion, that demanded extraordinary measures of retaliation, even to the exclusion of the State's representatives in Congress. Governor Gardner viewed it in the same light when he vetoed it, but the Legislature stood¹ firm, and passed the act again over his veto. It was the high-water mark of Northern manhood.

In Kansas, on the other hand, the Slave Power was in the ascendant. Hordes of degraded beings, such as only slavery and whiskey could produce, crossed in arms at the² spring elections from Missouri into the Territory, took possession of the polling-places, terrorized and maltreated judges of election and free-State voters, stuffed the boxes with ballots in wild excess of the census-voting population, and elected a legislature which purged itself of³ every free-State delegate, removed the capital nearer the⁴ Missouri border, adopted the slave code of that State, and⁵ in other ways completed what Governor Reeder himself rightly called the subjugation of Kansas. Powerless to⁶ rectify the doings of this bogus body, for what he did do⁷ honestly the Governor was removed by President Pierce⁸ and succeeded by Wilson Shannon, who acknowledged the⁹ legality of the Legislature, and put himself openly at the¹⁰ head of the invaders, assuring them of the firm support of the Administration at Washington. Every difference growing out of the unsettled state of society in a new country—and disputes over titles to the land were inevitable— was liable to array free-State men against slave-State, and to end in bloodshed. The first homicide of this¹¹ character occurred before Governor Reeder's dismissal, and nearly led to a pitched battle. Arms were sent to the¹² Territory by the friends of the Emigrant Aid Association to prevent the extermination of the Northern settlers. Gerrit Smith and his little knot of Simon Pure Liberty Party men, now styling themselves Radical Political Abolitionists and met in convention at Syracuse June 27, 28, took up a collection in response to an appeal from ‘a Mr. John Brown, who had five sons in Kansas, and who¹³ was desirous to join them. They had written for arms ’