nd
they were terribly angry. If the writer had been in town he certainly
would not have escaped alive, if this mob could have found him. As it
was, their curses would not be edifying reading in a Christian
newspaper. Lecompton could not give its friends food or lodging. It
had been located in an out-of-the-way and inaccessible place; its
proprietors were Sheriff Jones, Judge Lecompton, and men of that
_ilk,_ and business men avoided the place as if it had been smitten
with a pestilence. The people of the surrounding country were
generally Free State men, and the South Carolinians could not choose,
but were forced to return to Atchison. They had been angry and
impatient when their friends in Atchison had constrained them to do
things up in such "milk and water" style, and in Lawrence they had
been held back in the same manner, and they returned in a savage
temper. Should a cowardly Yankee be allowed to defy them, and scoff at
them, and call them "bull-dogs and blood-hounds," with impunity? and
now, with this man they had to have a settlement.

We have already seen how the contending factions spread murder and
violence south of the Kaw River; but from May till September
Leavenworth county became a "dark and bloody ground." Immediately
after the Fourth of July, Col. Sumner had been, because of his too
great leniency to Free State men, superseded in command at Fort
Leavenworth by Persifer F. Smith, a man whose heart was hard as
a rock of adamant toward the Free State people, and under his eyes
Leavenworth city and county were given up to blood and robbery.

In Atchison county, from the beginning of these border troubles to the
end of them, not one man's life was taken, and yet David R. Atchison,
Gen. B. F. Stringfellow, and his law partner, Peter T. Abell, were the
leading members of the Atchison town company. Robert S. Kelley and Dr.
John H. Stringfellow also maintained unchanged their bloody purposes.
We find in the _Squatter Sovereign_, under date of June 10th, the
following editorial, and this displays its uniform temper:

The Abolitionist: shoot down our men, without provocation,
wherever they meet them; let us retaliate in the same
manner. A free fight is all we desire. If murder and
assassination is the programme of the day, we are in favor
of filling the bill. Let not the knives of the Pro-slavery
men be sheathed while there is one Abolitionist in the
Territory. As they have shown no quarters to our men, they
d