CHAPTER XVII. 
THE “ REIGN OF TERROR” IN KANSAS. 
The end is not yet. While these outrages were being com- 
niitted, and fiend-like, with hideous yells, these officials rushed 
from spot to spot, to make the ruin complete, the people of Law¬ 
rence looked on in silence. They could hardly believe that men 
could be so transformed into demons of darkness, or that these 
acts were committed at the instigation of United States appointees. 
But cheerful, for the most part, was the silence. It is ever better 
that the foe one contends with should be clothed in his own pan¬ 
oply. If that panoply be sin, darkness, degradation, let them form 
the external covering. So, now, the slave power, blood-thirsty, 
and still crying more victims, had sent its own tools, — ragged, 
ignorant, debauched, semi-savages, the very offshoot and growth 
of its peculiar institution, — to destroy a quiet town, to steal, de¬ 
stroy, and outrage its inhabitants. The work has been accom¬ 
plished. The first time in the history of the American people 
has an American town been besieged and its inhabitants robbed, 
by forces acting under the instructions of U. S. officers. Every 
outrage committed was in direct violation of that act in the consti¬ 
tution, which provides for the rights of the people in their persons, 
houses, papers and effects ; but it was done by the administration, 
acting as the servile tool of the slave power. Can any freeman 
decide what other provision of the constitution cannot as easily 
be set aside, when it stands in the way of the slave power’s subdu¬ 
ing intentions ? Was it ever heard in this country, or in England, 
before the times of Judge Lecompte, that a judge had legal author¬ 
ity to order the destruction of a press, which the grand jury, under 
his Instructions, might find a nuisance ? Are one and all the 
