Manhattan City Western Kansas Express, May 11, 1861

It is a note worthy fact, and one justly entitled to an earnest consideration as being well founded, that there exists in the public mind a prevailing conviction, that the present great struggle between the proslavery forces and freedom[']s hosts is designed in the overruling wisdom of the Supreme Governor of the Universe, to end the great sin and shame of American politics—slavery. Not only in the North, but in all parts of the Southern States, well grounded apprehensions are gaining prevalence, that the tenure by which millions of God's free born creatures are held as property, is, under the turbulent and unsettled state of affairs, very weak and uncertain. Nor can we be surprised that this impression should take hold of the public mind. A great hoary wrong, extending its vast proportions, and fattening its foul visage on the liberality and repeated concessions of the government, resisting the onward march of civilization and progress, hurling defiant insults at the Great Jehovah and tainting the breath of divine inspiration with its perverted pestilent doctrines, surely calls on a righteous God and outraged man for effective interposition.

Moreover, it cannot be concealed that slavery is not only the pretext, but also the foundation and inspiring cause of our most formidable National difficulties.—Aspiring political desperadoes, unscrupulous, wicked and daring as the devil, have taken advantage of the fact that the institutions of slavery and freedom are utterly incompatible and irreconcilable in their nature, to foment disaffection and dissension and advance themselves to a position of agg[r]andizement and power, to which they cannot expect to attain, so long as the Constitution and Government, as our fathers framed them, continue to exist. Hence treason has been plotting rebellion, in the high courts of the "cottonocracy" for the last thirty or forty years.

The people of the United States are obliged to regard this as the grand final struggle of this impious slave power for political supremacy in America; and a feeling of self-preservation as well as a stinging sense of the wrongs and outrages heaped upon them, imperatively call[s] for the adoption of measures, which will settle forever the destructive heresy of secession, and tend to loosen the fetters of the groaning bondsman.

We do not expect that the United States troops, in their march against treason and rebellion, will liberate the slaves, neither do we believe that they will esteem it their duty to crush the unerring instincts of humanity impelling the slaves to rise and resume the sacred rights of which fraud and violence has deprived them.

Who can but see that the hour of opportunity of the much wronged and oppressed negro is rapidly advancing! And however debased by ignorance and superstition, you cannot blot from his soul the important fact, which a just God has infixed, that his limbs belong to himself alone. However loyal and obsequious under ordinary circumstances to the behest of their masters, we cannot escape the great facts which the history of this race reveal[s—] that the black race perceive and deeply feel their wrongs, and when a fitting opportunity affords, will revenge them in the most implacable manner.

By wantonly provoking a war on the North, which if persisted in by the originators, must inevitably lead to the most disasterous results to those weak States of the South, they have voluntarily placed themselves in a position where the Federal aid cannot be invoked to quell servile insurrections. No succour and defense can be afforded rebels and outlaws.