Mary Thacher Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson: the story of his life

[174] treachery of Gorgey. Each had his story to tell of arrests and tyrannies; how a Pro-Slavery witness had only to point at a man as identified with any measure of public defence, and he was seized at once. Several whom we met had been arrested in person, herded with a hundred others, like cattle, on the bare prairie, been scantily fed once a day, and escaped by rolling half a mile through the grass while the sentinels' backs were turned. The bravest young men of Lawrence were put under arrest, charged with treason, murder, arson, robbery, and what not; while not a Pro-Slavery man was seized. This was the penalty they had to pay for defending themselves vigorously at last, and clearing their own soil from the invading Missourians. “The worst enemy Kansas had ever had,” they pronounced Governor Geary to be; and they were going into Iowa to wait for better times. “Will you give up Kansas?” I asked. “Never!” was the reply from bronzed and bearded lips, stern and terrible as the weapons that hung to the saddle-bow. “We are scattered, starved, hunted, half-naked, but we are not conquered yet.”

Some of these were young men, whom I had seen go from prosperous homes, well clothed and cared for. I had since heard of them performing acts of heroic courage in this summer's battles. Lane had praised them to me, and declared that there never was such courage in the world as that of the Free-State men of Kansas. “I saw one of them,” said he, “ride up alone within thirty yards of a body of a hundred and fifty men, during an engagement, take ”