August 29
We have excellent news from Kansas. . . . Our men are nicely
settled in the northern part of Kansas, which is more peaceful. Colonel
Topliff, who has just come from Lawrence, speaks quite encouragingly and thinks
they can resist invasion.
Meanwhile it will be probably necessary for me to go out
West again for several weeks1 to the Nebraska border, and perhaps
some way inside. But my mission will not be a very warlike one, and I have only
the same general sense of possible danger that one has in setting foot in a
ship or in the cars, or in running fast downstairs, or (if feminine) in meeting
a drove of cows. . . . Frank Sanborn is to stop here to-morrow, safe back from
the same ground I am going over.
_______________
1 He had previously been sent to Chicago and St.
Louis to aid emigrants.
SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters
and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 139
