Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/557

 The Sharps Rifle Episode in Kansas History 547 It is the purpose of this article to deal with only one phase of this dramatic chapter — the output, source, and distribution of Sharps ^ rifles, " Beecher Bibles ", and other arms furnished to Kansas emi- grants during the free-state struggle. The New England Emi- grant Aid Company was accused by politicians and pro-slavery partizans of having initiated the policy of arming. A large por- tion of the press and the non-resistance, Garrisonian abolitionists joined in the cry of condemnation. " Sharps Rifles " became a by- word for dispute and controversy. It absorbed the attention of the United States Senate. Congress appointed committees to discover how, w-hen, and by whom arms were sent to Kansas. It vexed the national executive, and when Thaddeus Hyatt, W. F. M. Arney, and Edward Daniels called on President Pierce, demanding pro- tection for Kansas settlers, the committee was given a cold rebuff and informed that " Bibles rather than . . . Sharps rifles "' should have been sent to Kansas.^ State political conventions likewise denounced the policy ; such a convention at Lexington, Missouri, in 1855, charged the New England Company " with recruiting armies and hiring fanatics to go to Kansas ".^ But Sumner warmly defended the Emigrant Aid Company on the floor of the Senate.'' The officers of the company also entered a general denial. Its secretary, Thomas H. Webb, in reply to an inquiry from Sumner, wrote that " the company had never sent, or paid for sending guns, cannon, pistols or other weapons to Kansas . . . The company had sent saw mills, grist mills, various kinds of machinery, also Bibles and a great variety of religious, literary and scientific books." ^ Amos A. Lawrence, treasurer, and Anson J. Stone, assistant treasurer, both testified before a Congressional investigating com- mittee that the company had never employed any of its capital for firearms." A few men openly favored arming the colonists, among whom Henry Ward Beecher stands as the most celebrated. He is reported in the A" etc York Tribune as saying that "he believed that the Sharps rifle was a truly moral agency, and that there was more moral power in one of those instruments, so far as the slave- holders of Kansas were concerned, than in a hundred Bibles. You > Erroneously spelled " Sharpes " and " Sharp's ". One Christian Sharps was the inventor of the gun ; and " Sharps " is the correct form. '^New York Tribune, September 3, 1856. ' Congressional Globe, 34 Cong., i Sess., Appendix, p. 288. ' Manuscript Letter-book of New England Emigrant Wi Company, March 14, 1856. ^Report of the S fecial Committee on the Troubles in Kansas, Serial 869, 34 Cong., I Sess., House Report 200, pp. 878, 880, 886. AM. HIST. REV., VOL. XU. — 36.
 * Ibid., p. 537.