Unfortunately, the only route to Kansas, by rail-road or steamboat, passed through Missouri. Baggage-wagons were continually plundered, and letters broken open and destroyed, by the Border Ruffians. Supplies of provisions, purchased by the settlers, or sent to them by their friends, went to enrich their enemies. Money enclosed in letters met with the same fate. Still the settlers of Kansas pursued a pacific course toward their persecutors. They came from communities where laws were reliable for protection, and, following their old habits, they appealed to the laws; desirous, at all hazards, not to involve the country in civil war. This conscientious patriotism was not appreciated. The banditti on the borders laughed it to scorn; while the slaveholding gentlemen and statesmen, who used them as puppets, to do the disgraceful work they were ashamed to do openly themselves, smiled at the Yankees’ reverence for the Union, and successfully played their old game of practicing on conscientious love of country, in order to tighten the serpent coil of slavery more securely about the neck of freedom. Missourians had voted their own creatures into most of the offices of Kansas. Some of them pitched a tent in that Territory for a while, while others did not even assume the appearance of residing there. From such officers of justice the citizens of Kansas could find no redress for the robberies and wrongs continually inflicted on them, by the band of ruffians commissioned to drive them out of the Territory, by any means that would do it most effectually. Our wrongs from the British government were slight, compared with theirs. Still these Western Colonies refrained from revolution. They sent agents to Washington, with well-attested evidence of their outrageous wrongs. They received fair words, and no relief. Every day it became more evident that the President of the United States was in league with the power that was crushing free Kansas. The Missourians, emboldened by their knowledge of this fact, played their bad game more and more openly. They paid men a dollar a day, with plenty of whiskey, and free passage across the ferries, to go into Kansas and vote down the rights of the citizens. More and more, the conviction grew upon the people of Kansas that they could not trust the government of the United States, and consequently had only their own energies to rely upon. They published a paper called the Herald of Freedom, in which they maintained the right of all American citizens to choose their own magistrates, and make their own laws. They rejected the legislators imposed upon them by the rabble of Missouri, at the point of the bayonet. They declared that a large majority of the settlers were desirous to have Kansas a Free State, and that they would maintain their right to be heard. To this paper, John Bradford and William Bruce were constant contributors, and Kate’s brother, Thomas, was diligent in setting the types. Of course, the family became odious to those who were bent on driving freedom out of Kansas.
A Convention of the free-soil citizens of the Territory was called at Topeka. There were representatives from nearly all sections of the Union. Emigrants from Carolina, Virginia, and Missouri, agreed with emigrants from Ohio and Massachusetts, that the introduction of slavery would prove disastrous to the prosperity of the state. They framed a Constitution for Kansas, and chose legislators. Some required that free coloured people should be excluded from the Territory, as well as slaves. Others deemed that such a regulation would be an infringement upon freedom, and urged that no man could calculate the future bad consequences of introducing one wrong principle into the basis of their government. No one urged this point more strenuously, than did William Bruce, in his mild firm way. But Southern emigrants were opposed to that view of the case, and the Convention, desirous to concede as far as possible, yet unwilling to introduce such a clause into their Constitution, concluded to leave that question to the votes of the people.
It was a trying time for the women in Lawrence. The wisest and bravest men were absent in Topeka, which was twenty-five miles further up the river. The Convention excited great wrath in Missouri. They called themselves lovers of “law and order,” and denounced those as “traitors” who dared to make other laws than those imposed upon them with bowie-knives and revolvers. The wildest stories were circulated. The most moderate of them was a rumour that Mr. Bruce insisted upon having “niggers” become members of the legislature. This they regarded as the greatest monstrosity a republican could be guilty of; for they were blind to the fact that hundreds of coloured slaves could be found, who were more fit for the office, than the white ones they had appointed to rule over Kansas. Insults multiplied, and curses and threats grew louder. Every family in Lawrence went to bed each night with the feeling that they might be murdered before morning.
When the delegates returned, John Bradford thought his wife seemed at least ten years older, than when she came to Kansas, the preceding spring. The baby, who could now toddle alone, had caught the trick of fear, and hid himself, when his father knocked at the fastened door.
William was alarmed to find Alice so thin and pale, and to see her gentle eyes look so large and frightened. He folded her closely in his arms, and as she wept upon his bosom, he said, “O my wife! My loving and generous wife! How I reproach myself for accepting the sacrifice you offered! Yet had I foreseen this state of things, I never would have consented that you should follow me into Kansas.”
“Don’t say that!” she exclaimed nervously. “It will be easier to die with you, than it would have been to live without you. But oh, William, why need they persecute us so? There are thousands of acres of land uncultivated in Missouri. What makes them covet our land?”
“Ah, dearest, it is a complicated question, and you don’t understand it. They care little for the land, except as a means of increasing their political power. They want more Slave States, to be represented by slaveholders in the councils of the Union; and they do not want that any more Free States should come into the Union, to balance their influence. Therefore they are not content with stretching their dominions to the Gulf of Mexico, and seizing Texas. They wish to grasp the Northern Territories also, that they may be secure of keeping the Free States in political subjection. It is a long story, my love. For many years, they have been artfully availing themselves of every means to increase their power. The antagonistic principles of slavery and freedom have come to a death-grapple here in Kansas; and you, my delicate little flower, are here to be trampled, in the struggle.”
Alice sighed, and wished she was more like Kate; for then she would not be such a weight upon his spirits. But he declared that he would not for the world have her in any way different from her own dear self. Then they fell to talking about their future home, which was now in readiness. Two of William’s brothers had arrived with their families. An addition to the cabin had been built for one of them, and the other would live within call. Katie was loth to part from her cousin; but she said they would be far more comfortable in their new quarters, and as for safety, there was safety nowhere; least of all, in Lawrence.
Gradually they fell into a more cheerful strain of conversation. The husbands spoke hopefully, and really felt so; for they had strong faith that their beautiful Kansas would become a free and prosperous state.
Various boxes from Massachusetts, directed to William Bruce, had arrived in Kansas City. Some of them contained comfortables and blankets for the winter, which Mrs. May had prepared for her darling daughter; her “stray lamb in the wilderness,” as she was wont to call her. Could all that mother’s thoughts and feelings have been daguerreotyped on the cloth, while those stitches were taken, it would have been an epic poem of wondrous pathos. What visions of Alice sleeping in her cradle; of her wakening smile; of her soft curls waving in the summer breeze, as she came running with a flower; of her girlish bloom, delicate as the sweet-pea blossom; of her clear melodious voice in the choir at church; of the bashful blushing ways, that betrayed her dawning love for William; of the struggle in her soul, when she must choose between him and her parents; of her parting look, when she turned from the home of her childhood, to follow her husband into the wilderness. In Alice’s soul those stitches, by the old, fond, faithful hand, would also waken a poem of reminiscences. How she longed for those boxes, to see what mother had sent her! Above all, for the letters from dear New England; especially the long letter from mother!