THE SHARPS RIFLE EPISODE IN KANSAS HISTORY
The Kansas struggle was indeed the prelude to the Civil War. The first armed conflict between the North and the South began, not at Fort Sumter in 1861, but on the Wakarusa and at Lawrence in 1855. The desperate strife for the possession of this virgin soil was the necessary introduction to the awful carnage of the sixties. Many leaders on both sides foresaw with remarkable clearness that an impending crisis was at hand and that Kansas would be a decisive factor in the approaching conflict. Senator Atchison of Missouri, writing in September, 1855, to his Southern friends who were gathered to celebrate the anniversary of the battle at King's Mountain, fervently solicited their aid, saying that "the [Kansas] contest ... is one of life and death, and it will be so with you and your institution if we fail ... the stake the ' border ruffians ' are playing for is a mighty one ... in a word, the prosperity or the ruin of the whole South depends on the Kansas struggle."[1] Horace Greeley, but a few months earlier, with equal prophetic vision, wrote his celebrated "Rising Cloud" editorial,[2] predicting that the great battle between Freedom and Slavery was at hand; that the little cloud hovering over a handful of people in the far West foreshadowed the coming storm; that the distant rumble of the tempest could already be heard, and that the mischief there brewing was not alone for Kansas. No wonder that both sides in this great controversy threw themselves into the contest with such impetuous intensity, such determination and abandonment, often forgetting or ignoring the most vital principles of right action, and yet rising to such lofty exhibitions of heroism, courage, patience, self-sacrifice, and suffering as to move every section of the nation to proffer aid and sympathy. "Bleeding Kansas" became a familiar cry in every hamlet; its echoes reverberating across the Atlantic aroused the compassion of Europe. Lady Byron, sending sixty-five pounds to Mrs. Stowe, requested that the money be spent, not in the purchase of arms, but for the relief of those who had "resisted oppression at the hazard of life and property".[3]
(546)
