s greatly complicating an already delicate
situation and immeasurably heaping up difficulties, embarrassments,
and disasters for the frontier.

The same indifference towards the West that characterized the
governing authorities in the South was exhibited by eastern men in the
North and, correspondingly, the West, Federal and Confederate,
was unduly sensitive to the indifference, perhaps, also, a trifle
unnecessarily alarmed by symptoms of its own danger. Nevertheless, its
danger was real. Each state gave in its adherence to the Confederacy
separately and, therefore, every single state in the slavery belt had
a problem to solve. The fight for Missouri was fought

[Footnote 87: Morton, war governor of Indiana, who had taken
tremendous interest in the struggle for Kansas and in the events
leading up to the organization of the Republican party, was one of the
most energetic of men in raising troops for the defence of the Union,
especially in the earliest stages of the war. See Foulke's _Life of
Oliver P. Morton_, vol. i.]

[Footnote 88: Some doubt on this point exists. John Speer, Lane's
intimate friend and, in a sense, his biographer, says Lane claimed
Lawrenceburg, Indiana, as his birthplace. By some people he is thought
to have been born in Kentucky.]

on the border and nowhere else. The great evil of squatter sovereignty
days was now epidemic in its most malignant form. Those days had bred
intense hatred between Missourian and Kansan and had developed a
disregard of the value of human life and a ruthlessness and brutality
in fighting, concomitant with it, that the East, in its most primitive
times, had never been called upon to experience. Granted that the
spirit of the crusader had inspired many a free-soiler to venture into
the trans-Missouri region after the Kansas-Nebraska bill had become
law and that real exaltation of soul had transformed some very
mercenary and altogether mundane characters unexpectedly into martyrs;
granted, also, that the pro-slavery man honestly felt that his
cause was just and that his sacred rights of property, under the
constitution, were being violated, his preserves encroached upon, it
yet remains true that great crimes were committed in the name of great
causes and that villains stalked where only saints should have trod.
The irregular warfare of the border, from fifty-four on, while it may,
to military history as a whole, be as unimportant as the quarrels of
kites and crows, was ye