1854 B. F. STRINGFELLOW. Negro-Slavery, No Evil. Rare Kansas Pro-Slavery Propoganda.

A rare piece of pro-slavery propaganda by one of the most virulent and assertive anti-abolitionists of the Missouri – Kansas region. Indeed, he was the inspiration for the term, "border ruffian." 

B F Stringfellow [1816-1891] moved to Boone's Lick, Missouri in 1839 and practiced law in Keytesville, Missouri. He was then elected to the Missouri House of Representatives as an anti-Benton Democrat serving from Chariton County, Missouri, and served as Missouri's Attorney General from 1845 to 1849.

From the beginning, he was an active pro-slavery agitator and strategist. While serving as a General in the Missouri Militia, and having been the former Attorney General of that state, Stringfellow used his influence to openly defythe law by declaring that Missourians were free to vote in Kansas territory, and attacked abolitionist patrols in what became known as Bleeding Kansas.

In 1853 he and his doctor brother John moved to Weston, Missouri, just across the Missouri River from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. There, he and his brother published the pro-slavery Squatter Sovereign. In 1854, after four slaves from Platte County ran away to Leavenworth, the Stringfellow brothers organized the Platte County Self-Defensive Association to attempt to prevent Free-Stater settlement of Kansas. They stumped across western Missouri, organizing "blue lodges" along the entire Kansas border. Working with David Rice Atchison, the recruited residents of Southern states to move to Kansas with their slaves to counter settlements by the anti-slavery Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company. He was a man on fire, hell-fire many thought, for the cause of slavery.

The New York Tribune quoted him in an 1855 speech in St. Joseph, Missouri:

I tell you to mark every scoundrel that is in the least tainted with free-soilism or abolitionism and exterminate him. Neither give nor take quarter from the damned rascals. I propose to mark them in this house, and on the present occasion, so you may crush them out. To those who have qualms of conscience as to violating laws, state or national, the crisis has arrived when such impositions must be disregarded, as your rights and property are in danger, and I advise one and all to enter every election district in Kansas, in defiance of Reeder and his vile myrmidons, and vote at the point of the bowie-knife and the revolver. Neither give or take quarter, as our cause demands it. It is enough that the slaveholding interest wills it, from which there is no appeal. What right has Governor Reeder to rule Missourians in Kansas? His proclamation and prescribed oath must be prohibited. It is to your interest to do so. Mind that slavery is established where it is not prohibited.

On July 2, 1855, he was accused of attacking Kansas Territory Governor Andrew Horatio Reeder at Reeder's office in the Shawnee Methodist Mission in Fairway, Kansas. The free state version of the encounter says:

Stringfellow sprang to his feet, seized his chair, and felled the Governor to the floor, kicking him when down. He also attempted to draw a revolver, but was prevented from using it by District Attorney Isaaks, and Mr. Halderman, the Governor's private secretary. And this the origin of the term, so common on the Kansas border for so many years, of "Border Ruffian"

Stringfellow, B. F. Negro-Slavery, No Evil; Or The North and the South. The Effects of Negro-Slavery, as Exhibited in the Census, by a Comparison of the Condition of the Slaveholding and Non-Slaveholding States. Considered in a Report Made to the Platte County Self-Defensive Association, by a Committee, Through B. F. Stringfellow, Chairman. Published by Order of the Association. St Louis. Printed by M. Nieder & Co. 1854. 40pp.

A good copy, bound in wraps, shaken, with moderate foxing.