"The roads are filled with armed robbers, and murders for mere plunder are of daily occurrence"
About this Quote
A stark ledger of civic collapse, the line evokes a landscape where the most basic promise of government, safe passage, has evaporated. John White Geary, a Mexican War veteran and former San Francisco mayor, wrote as territorial governor of Kansas in 1856-57, during the convulsions of Bleeding Kansas. The Kansas-Nebraska Act had tossed slavery to the winds of popular sovereignty, inviting proslavery Missourians and antislavery settlers to make a battlefield of a territory not yet a state. Geary arrived to find roads patrolled not by sheriffs but by guerrillas and opportunists, and towns toggling between sieges, reprisals, and raids.
The phrase shifts the frame from ideological conflict to outright predation. When murders are committed for mere plunder, the cause has been hollowed out and violence becomes self-justifying. Geary’s language insists that the problem is not only partisan militias, but the erosion of the rule of law into a market for loot. The road, symbol of commerce and connection, becomes a corridor of fear, a sign that the state’s monopoly on force has been ceded to the most aggressive bands.
There is strategy in the severity. By portraying a territory overwhelmed by banditry, Geary pressed Washington for troops and authority to neutralize both proslavery and free-state irregulars. As a Democrat appointed by Franklin Pierce, he tried to present himself as a neutral restorer of order, disbanding militias and denouncing atrocities on both sides. Yet the politics that produced the chaos also constrained any remedy; he resigned in early 1857, frustrated by interference from proslavery legislators and a federal administration reluctant to confront its own allies.
The sentence reads as a diagnosis of how polarized politics dissolves into criminal enterprise when institutions falter. Once the public way is no longer safe, the social contract is already broken, and factions that claimed moral purpose reveal their capacity to live by plunder.
The phrase shifts the frame from ideological conflict to outright predation. When murders are committed for mere plunder, the cause has been hollowed out and violence becomes self-justifying. Geary’s language insists that the problem is not only partisan militias, but the erosion of the rule of law into a market for loot. The road, symbol of commerce and connection, becomes a corridor of fear, a sign that the state’s monopoly on force has been ceded to the most aggressive bands.
There is strategy in the severity. By portraying a territory overwhelmed by banditry, Geary pressed Washington for troops and authority to neutralize both proslavery and free-state irregulars. As a Democrat appointed by Franklin Pierce, he tried to present himself as a neutral restorer of order, disbanding militias and denouncing atrocities on both sides. Yet the politics that produced the chaos also constrained any remedy; he resigned in early 1857, frustrated by interference from proslavery legislators and a federal administration reluctant to confront its own allies.
The sentence reads as a diagnosis of how polarized politics dissolves into criminal enterprise when institutions falter. Once the public way is no longer safe, the social contract is already broken, and factions that claimed moral purpose reveal their capacity to live by plunder.
Quote Details
| Topic | Peace |
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