The following article, copied from the St. Louis Republican on 25 Sep 1856, was published in the Lancaster [S.C.] Ledger, 15 Oct 1856, p. 2, c. 2:

"RETURNING FORM KANSAS

The St. Louis Republican, of the 25th ult., says:

'The misguided emigrants, who crowded to Kansas early in the spring, continue to leave that Territory in all directions. They are to be met in scattering companies, looking half starved, sickly and miserable. Many of them having spent all their money, have gathered up their little effects, and crossed the river into Iowa, on their way home, or to locate in some secluded corner of the wilderness, or patch of prairie, where they will be at peace.

Every boat which comes from the Missouri has among her passengers some of these people. We saw them once before, in the early spring, when they went up the river, with money in their pockets, hope in their hearts, health in their blood, and the world before them.

They were then in companies of hundreds; they ahd family circles, and looked happy; they took quarters in the cabins of steamboats, and partook of the luxury of repose and a plenteous table. They were thrifty looking emigrants, who would do honor to any new country.

We now see them in squads of tens and twenties; crippled, sickly, and apparently poverty-stricken -- crowded upon the decks of steamboats, almost begging their way back to the homes they left but a few months before. And civil war in Kansas has wrought all this mischief -- doomed many a hopeful heart to despair and death, and embittered the lives of hundreds more whose piteous stories the world will never know.

The time will come when the public mind will be in a temper to ask, how and by whose instrumentality was this distress and misery brought about? What agency had the Congressional Aid Society, and the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society, and the Beechers, the Sillimans, the Greeleys, the Quincys, the Sumners, and the Gerrit Smiths, in reducing these people, and thousands of others, to beggary and squalid wretchedness -- in introducing murder, and rapine, and desolation throughout the Terrirory of Kansas? It will be a fearful reckoning, but one which will as surely overtake them as that there is a God in Heaven, who sees the wickedness of men on earth, and punishes them for their iniquities.'

N.B.: While this pro-slavery article focused on the returning Free-Soilers, probably the same conditions could be described for returning pro-slavery men.