ATROCITIES IN THE SOUTHERN STATES.

Lyttelton Times, Volume XXI, Issue 1194, 9 February 1864, Page 2

ATROCITIES IN THE SOUTHERN STATES.

The contest in America has furnished some of our public writers with an opportunity of discoursing eloquently on the horrors of war—a subject to which British readers will never be insensible. War in its most mitigated form is horrible, and genuine aversion to all unnecessary bloodshed has been a conspicuous feature in the character of our greatest commanders. When the American war broke out, it was confidently predicted that it would be conducted with less regard to the rules and usages of civilized nations than any conflict of modern history. And certainly there have been deeds done on both sides such as disgrace our common humanitv. These, however, will be found to be without exception the acts of individual, and generally of isolated commanders, and not part ol a system authorised bv either of the chief Governments. Accordinglv we find the most impartial of our public writers acknowledging one after another that the war has not put on that relentless, savage character which was at first feared, and that on the whole the reputation of our race has not suftered in this great conflict.

There are other horrors, however, reported from America to which justice has not vet been done—horrors which cannot properly be said to be those of war, although they happen to be coincident with it. Accounts have been received describing the massacre of the population of the town of Lawrence, in Kansas, by Missouri border ruffians, a feat which may well stand by the side of the massacre of Cawnpore. The whole transaction is so horrible, and brings out the dark side of human nature so strongly, that we mention it with reluctance. Laurence has been described as a ?few England town, with all its characteristic order and refinement, set down in the far West. iNext to Leavenworth it wjis the most thriving place between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains. On the 21st of August last, in the dead of night, when the citizens were sleeping in security, Lawrence was entered by a party of horsemen from the Missouri, under a leader named Quantrell. No attack had been apprehended; there was no dispute between the parties, and 110 demand was made by the invaders. The strangers went instantly to the houses of the leading citizens, and proceeded to shoot tbew m their beds. The mayor and his son, with forty of the principal inhabitants, physicians, clergymen, merchants, and traders, were murdered in their own homes in the midst ol their wives and children. In the morning it was found that a hundred and eighty persons had been killed in cold blood, lour brothers were shot in one house; in another building, twelve persons who had fled there for shelter were killed together; and in a third, twenty-five negroes were put to death. In comparison with these outrages the

robberies committed and the burniug of the town are not worth mentioning. The ruffians having satisfied their passions, returned as quickly as possible to their homes.

It might have been thought that if anything could rouse the fiery indignation of our eloquent writers it was just such a scene as this: the outrage was so fiendish both in its conception and in its execution, so like the heartrending scenes which, reported from India in 1857, made Americans forget their political separation from us in the sympathy of race, "let the comments of our press— we mean of those newspapers which speak in the name of that select portion of society which is proud to ignore the great body of the nation, and to style itself " England'"— have referred to its perpetrators in terms not stronger than those which have been applied to the witch-dockers of Hedingham. Or the morning after the massacre General Lane assembled the surviving citizens of Lawrence, and made a speech iu which he expressed all the burning feeling natural to a witness of the desolation around him, and vowed to take a bloody revenge for those foul murders. Lane's address, garnished with the flowers of a backwoodsman's rhetoric, appears to have struck our eloquent writers as the principal iucident in the transactions at Lawrence, and in their fastidious style of treatment the whole affair became a question of We have no intention of representing Mr. Davis's Government as morally accountable for this massacre. It is one of those unhappy occurrences which are prompted by the passions that aliment the war on the part of the South, but which lie out of the system of prescribed hostilities. But it is connected with the interests for which the Confederates are fightiug in the close relation of cause and effect. It is the offspring of slavery. It is just like what has happened again and again iu America, but never where slavery does not exist. Nothing like it has originated in a free State. Kansas has repeatedly beeu invaded by men like Quantrell and his followers, collected from Missouri, Alabama, and Georgia. The border ruffian is the child of a state of society in which industry is dishonorable, and which, maintaining itself from day to day by robbing the industrious class of liberty and labor, exists always in a state of semi-warfare. »I found," says a traveller who wrote two years before this war broke out, " that in this region (Kansas) when men went out to plough they always took their rifles with them, and always tilled in companies of from five to ten ; for whenever they attempted to perform their work separately, the bandits, who were constantly hovering about, were sure to make a sudden descent on them and carry off their horses and oxen. Every man went armed to the teeth. Guard was kept night and day. Whenever two men approached each other they came up pistol in hand, and the first salutation invariably was ' Tree State or Pro-Slave ?' or its equivalent in intent, ' AVhar ye from F' It not unfrequently happened that the next sound was the report of a pistol." Such is life in the neighborhood of a slave-owning society. The men who followed Quantrell were, like their predecessors in the invasions of Kansas six and seven years ago, settled after a fashion in the slave-owning parts of Missouri. Thev regard members of communities which hold no slaves with detestation —as their natural enemies. Wretched, degraded, and conscious of their inferiority, the prosperity, order, and cultivation which spring up, where industry is free only intensify their hatred, which continually finds expression in acts of violence. The daily history of slave society in America is made up of deeds of blood iuspired by the continual fear of the dominant caste for the safety of their institution and property. In this outrage at Lawrence we have one more illustration of the conflicts which sprang out of the eternal antagonism of free and slave Bocietv. These do not arise out ot the plans and intentions of statesmen, nor are they to be averted or controlled by constitutions or treaties. As the population of America increases and settlements are multiplied, the points of opposition becomes more numerous, and the interests and passions of the people in the two different states of -society bring them into collision. And if this general war were to end before either slavery had been overthrown or the principles of free society were trodden out, there is only too much reason in past experience for expecting that a delusive peace would be succeeded from year to year by local struggles such as these in Kansas. Barbarism anil Civilization are face to face in deadly conflict, each fighting to give the law to the future of the American Continent; and there can be no lasting peace until one of them has been either crippled for ever or totally destroyed. Daily New,.