Professor of English Literature, Williams College
Member of the Massachusetts Historical Society
Prefatory Note.
The limits prescribed for this volume have not permitted a minutely detailed account of the Kansas struggle. I have endeavored to exhibit the logic and spirit of "the first actual national conflict between slaveholding and free-labor immigrants," rather than to attempt an exhaustive collection of facts. Newspaper files, public documents, books, manuscripts that promised to throw light upon the subject have been carefully examined. A large amount of material has been derived from personal intercourse with men of all parties who helped to make the history of Kansas. If my version of it should not prove to be colored with the dyes in vogue twenty-five years ago, I beg the reader to bear in mind that there is too much truth in what Theodore Parker said in 1856, at the anniversary of the Anti-Slavery Society, concerning the Kansas business, "I know of no transaction in human history which has been covered up with such abundant lying, from the death of Ananias and Sapphira down to the first nomination of Governor Gardner."
The map which accompanies this volume is designed to illustrate the text, rather than to exhibit the Kansas of to-day. It shows the chief places of historic interest, some of which no longer exist.
L.W.S
State University, Lawrence, Kansas,
September, 1885.
In issuing a revised edition of Kansas, it seemed desirable that the narrative should be brought down to the present time. I therefore rewrote the last chapter and included in it some account of the two decades which have elapsed since the first appearance of the book. With the exception of a short paragraph of new material on the Pottawatomie massacre, the changes in other chapters have been relatively few and mostly verbal.
