Our friend Douai is in a corner again, the muster of the Sierra Nevada filibusters at San Antonio having been taken advantage of to overawe his party. [362] His subscribers neglect to pay up, believing that his paper will be interrupted by Lynch law process. His advertizing patrons have been forced to discontinue their important assistance to his financial position.

Vexatious law suits and other contrivances for embarrassing him have been instituted. He would undoubtedly have been lynched if he was not too brave & too well prepared for them. For fourteen days a strong armed guard was maintained at his printing office, & he sleeps in it well armed every night.

He is unable in consequence to meet his note for type & ink, due here this week for $150. I have given my honor that it shall be paid & shall prevent legal proceedings against him, if entirely out of my own pocket.

He writes as if overpowered & despairing—expects to quit & come North. I want to encourage him to stay & maintain the position he has gained & if he will, he must be sustained.

I suppose you will be helping them to arm in Kansas, which is a better thing & I don’t want to divert anything from it. So I won’t ask you to assist me now with this, but I want, if you have it, that letter from Douai which I gave you. I am going to try to tax the peace people, whose consciences won’t let them contribute for arms—& want that letter to send to Gerrit Smith.

I want mightily to go to Kansas myself this fall or next winter: if I find it possible to leave my business so long as will be necessary, perhaps I may—particularly if it comes to fight. I should like to know what you anticipate there.

I can’t well write a word to you without much emotion even now, but I am anything but a miserable or even a dissatisfied man & most sincerely.

The “Kansas” is excellent—puts the main issue plainly, strongly and straightforwardly. We are all well satisfied & ready to stand by it.

I have suggested a couple of verbal exchanges. If I was to criticize it, I should say that the distinction between the “greater part of the slaveholders” (observe the #) and the propagandists and fire-eaters was hardly sufficiently presented or sustained. Could not some expression of respect for the character of the better & more conservative class of Southerners be introduced with good effect—& some expression of regret that they do not exercise more influence—or cannot—in politics. Men like your Savannah friend.

Two Southerners that I have seen within a few days tell me that they believe most educated men at the South desire that there should be no further [364] extension of slave territory—that Kansas should be a free state—are afraid of the propagandists & would be glad to rebuke them.

Such men are, I suppose, most of our subscribers at the South & we should encourage them to speak out—though we know they dare not.

A distinct denial of any desire or purpose to interfere with Slavery in the states should be appended to or in some way introduced in the last paragraph.

Yours Truly