From Edward Fitch to Dear Mother
Your welcomed letter of June second came to hand on Wednesday the eleventh inst., very soon for a letter. Welcome I say first, because I had looked for it every mail for four weeks, and welcome because it enclosed a ten dollar bill, and welcome because you did not say as I expected you would that I must be shiftless if I could not earn enough to live on. I should have said so myself, would I been there; and the fact is no one here is doing any business and there is not money in circulation, and therefore I can’t get any. You said nothing about the scrip, but I will send it, not in this letter however. The letter got to me about ten o’clock in the evening. I had been handling rails and driving teams all day since four o’clock in the morning, but the letter refreshed me very much. I have not been in town myself until last night for a week and last evening, as I was walking with a lady (who by the way is to move into my house this week), she had a letter in her hand which I happily attempted to take away and finally got it. When lo! it was directed to me in your well known hand, but mailed at Dover, New Hampshire. I found it was dated the twentieth of May and I got it two days after the one dated the second of June. In that letter I find this sentence. “If it is Edward I shall never consent to his going to Kansas again.” Now though at times I wish I were well out of the difficulty here, yet if I were there you would have hard work to keep me there I think. I have not been engaged in any battles yet, because I have been planting and fencing ever since Lawrence was burned or rather the hotel, but I want some pistols badly and must have them. Stowell must bring them, and if you see him tell him from me that I think he ought to be here by the fourth of July. At any rate, there are now about six hundred or more Missourians about Palmyra, about twelve miles from here, and Colonel Sumner is concentrating his forces there. We may get into a fight this week. If not, we shall in July.
From Buchanan and Breckenridge we have nothing to hope, and now we must be immediately admitted as a state or the Republican candidate must succeed for president, or we will be a Slave State, unless the Union is dissolved, which I go in for, now. I hope the Northern American conventions have not nominated a candidate, but will wait and join with the Republicans and elect Fremont.
The death knell of slavery has been tolled and now comes the decisive times. I hope if Brooks is not expelled from the House of Representatives at Washington, that the Massachusetts legislature will call home her Senators and request her Reps. to leave Washington, or Congress rather, and send an army to march into Missouri and free the slaves. Let the Union slide.
I am so much excited that I cannot write. Men are being found dead more or less every little while. A man was in here yesterday with whom I am acquainted, who was robbed of his horses a few miles from here and these three men went out and went to kill him; they fired at him and he fell. Two of the men then ran away and the other came at him to beat his brains out with the butt of his musket. The man made out to get his gun away from him [the attacker] and he left. The wounded man then wandered three days without anything to eat and finally got here. He has the ball in his side yet. Such are some of the outrages perpetrated upon Free State men here every day. Rob a man and then kill him.
