On the morning of the 21st, the Marshal's armed force appeared upon one of the heights overlooking the town, displaying first a white flag, then a red one, and, lastly, the flag of the United States. The Deputy-marshal then entered the town with a small posse, and called the managers of the hotel and several of the citizens to join his posse and assist him in the service of his writs. They obeyed, and two persons were arrested. The Deputy, with his force and his prisoners, returned to the camp. Colonel C. W. Topliff, a prominent citizen, went with them, bearing a communication from the committee of safety of Lawrence to the Marshal, in which the promise of obedience to his processes was again made, and his protection claimed.
It was hoped that the crisis was now passed. The Marshal dismissed his posse. But the Sheriff immediately reorganized the bands as his posse. This was most ominous of evil. The Sheriff was burning with passion for personal revenge. In the middle of the afternoon (May 21st), he rode into the town at the head of his army, and, in spite of every plea and remonstrance, caused the contents of the printing offices to be scattered through the streets and the hotel to be burned, and allowed the pillage, and even the burning, of private houses.
| Repudiation of the deed by Atchison and others. |
The atrocious and disgraceful deed of sacking Lawrence was denounced by many of the persons who had joined the Marshal's posse. General Atchison tried to prevent the Sheriff from thus wreaking his vengeance, and denounced his deed afterward. Jackson, the leader of the Georgians, and Buford, the captain of the Alabama squad, also denounced the vile procedure, and declared that they had not come to Kansas to destroy property.
Atchison knew well enough that a great blow had been given to the prospects of the Democratic party in the now approaching presidential election. What, then, must have been his despair upon learning that an attack, even more outrageous than the sacking of Lawrence, had been made, at the same time, upon the defender of "Free-state" Kansas in the Senate chamber at Washington?
| The attack on Senator Sumner. |
The debate on the bills for the admission of "Free-state" Kansas had progressed from day to day, in both Houses of Congress, with increasing earnestness and excitement. At length, on May 19th and 20th, Mr. Sumner delivered his fierce philippic on the "Crime against Kansas." It was not only an unvarnished statement of the case from the Abolitionist point of view, but it was a personal arraignment of several of the Senators. The attack contained in it upon Senator Butler, of South Carolina, a gentleman of great refinement and politeness, and much honored and esteemed by his associates, was especially coarse and brutal. Almost all the Senators felt the attack to be more than a discourtesy. Senator Butler was in ill health and was absent from his seat, both of which circumstances made the affair all the more exasperating. For two days the Capital rang with denunciations of the insulting speech, when Preston S. Brooks, a nephew of Senator Butler, and a member of the House of Representatives, demanded and took satisfaction of Mr. Sumner for the attack upon his kinsman. Had he carried out his purpose in a brave and manly way, he would have been generally applauded for it, but being no match physically for Sumner, Brooks had recourse to a method which stamped him as a coward, and his attack upon Sumner as a brutal outrage. He entered the Senate chamber on May 22nd, after the adjournment of the body, and approaching Mr. Sumner, who was seated and bending over his desk, charged him with libel on South Carolina and her sons, and struck him with a cane upon the head until the Senator became helpless and unconscious. With this, Sumner's outrage upon Butler was entirely lost sight of in Brooks's far more brutal outrage upon Sumner.
The cowardly deed was looked upon everywhere in the North as the fit companion-piece to the sacking of Lawrence. The indignation of the North was roused to the highest pitch, and it seemed as if the elections of 1856 must bring the anti-slavery party into the seats of power.