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 im-
migrants," rather than to attempt an exhaustive
collection of facts. Newspaper files, public doc-
uments, 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 busi-
ness, -- "I know of no transaction in human

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