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  Sumner had been, because of his too great leniency to Free State men, superseded in command at Fort Leavenworth by Persifer F. Smith, a man whose heart was hard as a rock of adamant toward the Free State people, and under his eyes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 deserve none from us.  Let our motto be written in blood on our flags, “Death to all Yankees and traitors in Kansas.”

Why, then, were not these bloody counsels made good by deeds?  Our circumstances were peculiar.  It will be seen above that it was only the Yankees and Abolitionists in whose bodies the knives of the “Law and Order” party were to be sheathed; and the Yankees in the country were only a handful of men, and were therefore powerless; but between them and these bloody-minded chieftains was interposed a barrier that proved insurmountable.  The great mass of the squatters were just from the other side of the river.  Sometimes a son had left a father, and crossed the river to get a claim; or a brother