Abraham Lincoln: a History -- Volume 2 | Page 8

Lecompton to take up
his thorny duties of administration. Though forewarned by
ex-Governor Shannon and by General Smith, Governor Geary did not
yet realize the temper and purpose of either the cabal conspirators or
the Border-Ruffian rank and file. He had just dispatched a military
force in another direction to intercept and disarm a raid about to be
made by a detachment of Lane's men, when news came to him that the
Missourians were still moving upon Lawrence, in increased force, that
his officers had not yet delivered his orders, and that skirmishing had

begun between the outposts.
[Sidenote] D.W. Wilder, "Annals of Kansas," p. 108. Gihon, p. 152.
Menaced thus with dishonor on one side and contempt on the other, he
gathered all his available Federal troops, and hurrying forward posted
them between Lawrence and the invaders. Then he went to the
Missouri camp, where the true condition of affairs began to dawn upon
him. All the Border-Ruffian chiefs were there, headed by Atchison in
person, who was evidently the controlling spirit, though a member of
the Legislature of the State of Missouri, named Reid, exercised nominal
command. He found his orders unheeded and on every hand mutterings
of impatience and threats of defiance. These invading aliens had not the
least disposition to receive commands as Kansas militia; they invoked
that name only as a cloak to shield them from the legal penalties due
their real character as organized banditti.
The Governor called the chiefs together and made them an earnest
harangue. He explained to them his conciliatory policy, read his
instructions from Washington, affirmed his determination to keep
peace, and appealed personally to Atchison to aid him in enforcing law
and preserving order. That wily chief, seeing that refusal would put him
in the attitude of a law-breaker, feigned a ready compliance, and he and
Reid, his factotum commander, made eloquent speeches "calculated to
produce submission to the legal demands made upon them."[14] Some
of the lesser captains, however, were mutinous, and treated the
Governor to choice bits of Border-Ruffian rhetoric. Law and violence
vibrated in uncertain balance, when Colonel Cooke, commanding the
Federal troops, took the floor and cut the knot of discussion in a
summary way. "I felt called upon to say some words myself," he writes
naïvely, "appealing to these militia officers as an old resident of Kansas
and friend to the Missourians to submit to the patriotic demand that
they should retire, assuring them of my perfect confidence in the
inflexible justice of the Governor, and that it would become my painful
duty to sustain him at the cannon's mouth."[15] This argument was
decisive. The border chiefs felt willing enough to lead their awkward
squads against the slight barricades of Lawrence, but quailed at the

unlooked-for prospect of encountering the carbines and sabers of half a
regiment of regular dragoons and the grape-shot of a well-drilled light
battery. They accepted the inevitable; and swallowing their rage but
still nursing their revenge, they consented perforce to retire and be
"honorably" mustered out. But for this narrow contingency Lawrence
would have been sacked a second time by the direct agency of the
territorial cabal.
[Illustration: GENERAL JOHN W. GEARY.]
[Sidenote] Examination, Senate Ex. Doc., 3d Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. II.,
pp. 156-69.
Nothing could more forcibly demonstrate the unequal character of the
contest between the slave-State and the free-State men in Kansas, even
in these manoeuvres and conflicts of civil war, than the companion
exploit to this third Lawrence raid. The day before Governor Geary,
seconded by the "cannon" argument of Colonel Cooke, was convincing
the reluctant Missourians that it was better to accept, as a reward for
their unfinished expedition, the pay, rations, and honorable discharge of
a "muster out," rather than the fine, imprisonment, or halter to which
the full execution of their design would render them liable, another
detachment of Federal dragoons was enforcing the bogus laws upon a
company of free-State men who had just had a skirmish with a
detachment of this same invading army of Border Ruffians, at a place
called Hickory Point. The encounter itself had all the usual
characteristics of the dozens of similar affairs which occurred during
this prolonged period of border warfare--a neighborhood feud;
neighborhood violence; the appearance of organized bands for
retaliation; the taking of forage, animals, and property; the fortifying of
two or three log-houses by a pro-slavery company then on its way to
join in the Lawrence attack, and finally the appearance of a more
numerous free-State party to dislodge them. The besieging column,
some 350 in number, had brought up a brass four-pounder, lately
captured from the pro-slavery men, and with this and their rifles kept
up a long-range fire for about six hours, when the garrison of Border
Ruffians capitulated on condition of