This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [3]
As such, it became a focal point for hatred. The tension had been building up for months. There had been arrests and shootings and all manner of bloodthirsty threats and shouts of defiance, for nothing could be more hateful just then, to a certain attitude of mind, than the simple belief that one man ought not to own another man. A territorial grand jury with pro-slavery leanings had asked that the town’s leading citizens be jailed for treason, and it had added a rider to the effect that both of the town’s newspapers ought to be suppressed as public nuisances and that its fortress hotel should be torn down.
Now, on May 21 — one day after Senator Sumner had finished his excellent speech — there was a posse on hand to see that the grand jury’s thoughts were properly embodied in action. This posse numbered perhaps a thousand men. A great many of them came from Missouri, for Lawrence was not far from the state line, and they rejoiced in the collective title of Border Ruffians. They owed dim allegiance to a United States marshal who had certain arrests to make in Lawrence and they were heavily armed. Unlike most posses, they dragged along with them five cannon.
For once the people of Lawrence were on their good behavior. They offered no resistance when the marshal came in, and the arrests he wanted to make were made. The marshal thereupon dismissed his posse, which was immediately called back into service by a Kansas sheriff, a cover-to-cover believer in slavery, who announced himself as a law-and-order man and who said that he had a job of his own to do in Lawrence. The transformed posse was addressed briefly by former Senator David R. Atchison of Missouri, the great spokesman for slavery in the West, who cried: “Be brave, be orderly, and if any man or woman stand in your way, blow them to hell with a chunk of cold lead.” The sheriff then led the posse into town and the fun began.5
Various rounds from the cannon were fired at the hotel. It had been well built — and the cannon, perhaps, were aimed and served inexpertly — and nothing in particular seemed to happen. The sheriff’s helpers then swarmed all over the town, setting fire to the hotel, raiding the two offending newspaper offices and dumping press and type into the river, ransacking homes and getting drunk and in general having a high old time. The home of a man who presumed to call himself the free-state governor of Kansas was burned, two men who apparently stood in the way were killed by flying pellets of lead, a certain amount of lesser damage was inflicted, various female free-staters were scared half out of their wits (though not, it would appear, actually harmed), and there was a great round of shouting and speechifying and wobbly-legged parading and rejoicing. If rowdyism could settle the matter, it had been demonstrated beyond recall that Kansas was slave territory and would someday be a slave state and that the writ that made it treason to doubt the legality of the pro-slavery government of the territory would run henceforth without interference.6
Lawrence was sacked by men with a genius for putting the worst foot forward. There were in Lawrence — and would arrive in droves in the next few days — certain newspaper correspondents who wrote from deep abolitionist conviction and who had access to the front pages of some of the country’s most influential newspapers. These men had something to write about now, and they would make the most of it. And there stood on the record now one more indication that the disagreement between sections might not finally be settled by the ordinary processes of reason, debate, and compromise.
Next day was May 22, and Senator Sumner sat at his desk in the Senate chamber, the Senate having adjourned for the day.