Top Highlights

• It enraged Emerson, pulling him from his pedestal of philosophic aloofness. “I do not often speak to public questions,” he admitted, but this “immoral law” impelled him to voice “the secret of the new times, that Slavery was no longer mendicant, but was become aggressive and dangerous.”
• not admirable, but they were explainable, given John Brown’s makeup as it intersected with special conditions of time and place, and given the long-term social tensions that led to these conditions.
• These Missourians did their assigned work. In the election for a Kansas delegate to Congress on November 29, 1854, they elected a proslavery candidate by casting 1,729 fraudulent votes. The election on March 30, 1855, saw even worse fraud, as the invaders cast more than 80 percent of the 6,307 recorded votes, ensuring that thirty-nine of Kansas’s f...
• The proslavery leaders “elected” by the ruffians organized a bogus legislature that passed stringent laws protecting slavery in Kansas. These so-called black laws mandated absurdly severe punishments for antislavery activity: two to five years of hard labor for anyone possessing an Abolitionist publication; five years of hard labor for writers or p...
• As iniquitous as was the proslavery element in Kansas, the Free State side was not much better. The antislavery settlers sent from the East by emigrant aid societies were often low- or lower-middle-class people ripe for ridicule as “scum” hired to control the vote in Kansas. Missourians variously dubbed them “the lowest class of rowdies,” “the most...