of the ring-streaked, speckled
and spotted regiment of Kansas and Missouri Militia passed out of the
Territory.
Thirteen leaders of the "Law and Order" party had met with Lane and
Robinson, acting on behalf of the people of Lawrence, and had agreed to
the terms of the treaty. But Sheriff Jones is reported to have said:
"Had not Shannon been a fool I would have wiped out Lawrence." It is
reported that Stringfellow said that "Shannon had sold himself and
disgraced himself and the whole Pro-slavery party." Atchison accepted
the terms, saying to his followers: "Boys, we can not fight now. The
position that Lawrence has taken is such that it would not do to make an
attack on them. But boys, we will fight some time!"
The peace was to be broken at the earliest opportunity.
CHAPTER XII.
The winter of 1855-6 that I spent in Illinois was uneventful. My success
was not such as to discourage an evangelist that desires to be useful,
neither was it such as to fill him with vanity. The weather was
intensely cold, and the snow was deep.
It is said that before the coming of an earthquake, the sea gives forth
deep moanings, as if it felt the approaching convulsion; so at that time
there seemed premonitions in the hearts of the people that the whole
nation, North, South, East and West, would be swept by a political
cyclone that should leave behind it the desolation that is sometimes, in
the West India Islands, left in the track of a tropical hurricane. We
had heard of the murder of Dow, the rescue of Branson, and the invasion
of Lawrence, and these certainly did not give promise that Kansas would
be a favorable field for evangelical work, at least for a time. The
writer had not hitherto spent much of his time in Adams county; he now
spent a considerable part of the winter there, and visited the churches
of Quincy, Chambersburg, Camp Point, and many others. The brethren at
Quincy were making that experiment of monthly preaching that has been
found so hazardous, especially to city churches. They have since changed
the plan with wonderfully good results. It was at the church at
Chambersburg that Bro. Cottingham who has now won a national reputation,
achieved some of his earliest successes.
The majority of the leading members of these churches had been men and
women of full age when they left Kentucky. Some had tarried a little
time in Indiana. The memory of some went back to the time when the
Mississippi Valley was almost an
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