[6] Lawrence, named for Amos A. Lawrence of Massachusetts.
THE BATTLE FOUGHT AND WON.
It was the doom of slavery that it should require the destruction of every thing that stood in its way. This being conceded, a resort to lawlessness—more especially on the part of a rude population like that of the Missouri border—was sure to follow the attempt to set up a free commonwealth in Kansas.
From the moment the organic Act became law, the future of Kansas was ever and foremost a national question. The Southern leaders had told the Missourians, if they would not see political power wrested from the South, they must secure Kansas to slavery at any cost. The North had met the challenge in the words of Senator Seward, who said, "Come on, then, gentlemen of the slave States! Since there is no escaping your challenge, I accept it in behalf of freedom. We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to the side that is stronger in numbers, as it is in the right."
THE FERRY, LAWRENCE, KANSAS.
The people of Western Missouri, of whom glimpses have been given in former chapters, were typical American borderers, rude of manner and speech, scarcely touched by the refining influences of the older East, open-handed and hospitable to a fault, but capable of committing brutal excesses when their passions were aroused, as they now were by the overwrought appeals of their most trusted leaders to make an end of abolitionism, if they would not see it become a menace to their domestic peace,—an incitement to insurrection or ceaseless turbulence along their border. Their character may be guessed from the name which in a spirit of bravado they took from their opponents' mouths,—that of border ruffians. They were expert with the rifle, daring riders, accustomed to out-of-door life from infancy, and hardened by experiences drawn from the vicissitudes of frontier life, into the bone of a self-asserting Americanism of the Davy Crockett school. Then, inasmuch as public opinion justified the settlement of private quarrels with the pistol or bowie-knife, the taking of life was held cheaply as compared with communities where the enforcement of law is the safeguard of the citizen. Add to this the frontiersman's habitual scorn for those reared in cities, or who shunned a resort to violence in support of their principles, and we have the measure of those adversaries whom the free-State men of the North were to face on their own ground, and with their own weapons in their hands.
