The leaders of the Pro-slavery party made a pathetic appeal to the people of the South to send a corresponding class of emigrants; but the appeal was feebly responded to.  Slave-holders would not come, because their slaves would be insecure; and now slave-holders felt that they had small cause to come to fight a battle that was not theirs.

Gov.  Shannon held the scepter of power with a more and more feeble hand.  He was going to resign, and he was not going to resign.  But whether he did or did not resign, the substance of power had already passed into the hands of his secretary, Mr. Woodson, who was hand and glove with his fellows in this conspiracy to make Kansas a slave State.

Meantime Col.  Sumner had been superseded in command at Fort Leavenworth by Persifer F. Smith.  Col.  Sumner had obeyed orders like the brave soldier that he was, but he had shown too much sympathy for these victims of oppression in the discharge of his shameful duties. [5] He did his appointed work, but he did not do it with an appetite, and he had been succeeded by a man that felt no more pity toward the Free State people than the wolf feels for the lamb out of which he makes his breakfast.  The consequences of this state of affairs began soon to appear.  The Missouri River had been blockaded.  Trains sent to Leavenworth from Lawrence and Topeka were robbed on the public highway of the merchandise and provisions with which they were loaded, and these interior Free State settlements began to feel the sharp pressure of hard necessities, while they a third time saw companies of so-called “Law and Order” militia occupying various points in the Territory which these men proceeded to fortify, and from which they could overawe the inhabitants and make raids on the citizens; and thus the old business of robbery, murder, spoliation and oppression was again begun.

And now this new immigration of a squatter soldiery, who came bearing their muskets in one hand and their implements of husbandry in the other, and were perfectly indifferent whether it should be work or fight, came pouring over the Nebraska line and into Kansas Territory.  A feeble attempt was made to stop them, but it amounted to nothing.  They were not now on a Missouri River steamboat.  Jim Lane came with them.  He remained incognito a few days, and then threw off his disguise, and Capt.  Joe Cook was Jim Lane.  And now the old, hard rule of the law of Moses, “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” was again the law of Kansas.  It was, “You have robbed us, and we will rob you; you have subsisted yourselves upon us, and we will subsist ourselves on you; you have blockaded the Missouri River, and waylaid our freighting trains, and pillaged them of their freight, with intent to starve out the Free State people, and all that belongs to you and yours shall be free plunder to us.”