For the critical years following August, 1854, when it was necessary to show that the settlers from the North and Northwest were acting under United States law, Robinson showed the most extraordinary courage and wisdom. Step by step, under his lead, the real colonists won victory after victory over poor Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan; and they showed to all men that they were on the side of law and order. It is absurd, not to say wicked, to try to leave such a man out of history. The first agents of the Emigrant Aid Company were Charles Robinson, Samuel C. Pomeroy, and Charles Branscomb. I do not know, and nobody else knows, where Kansas would be to-day without them, and without Eli Thayer, who sent them. Robinson was a settler in Kansas more than a year before John Brown. T CHAPTER V THE WAR ONE TO MAKE READY HERE has been a great temptation to pre pare for this part of these memoirs a severely condensed history of the Civil War. For eighteen months I had such a plan in mind, and it was with regret that I abandoned it. But I have abandoned it. I should like to write such a history. I think if I had ten years of life before me, with nothing else to do, I would do it. But I will not do it here. No! The reader ought to understand, by this time, that he is looking at the century through my key-hole. We are taking snap-shots together, and of our snap-shot pictures I throw away nineteen before I let the reader see one. I think there will be a certain interest in bringing together five or six separate glimpses of the war, which will show how a working minister in a Northern parish could be mixed up in it. I have had in mind, for nearly forty years, the |