Dated April 30, 1858, and executed in Leavenworth, Kansas Territory, this handwritten document is an "agreement made and entered into" by John Adams Halderman and Hugh Ewing, representing the "Leavenworth Journal," with C. H. McLaughlin and William B. Hutchison, to lease all the newspaper equipment for $25 per month. Among other more technically-oriented conditions of the lease pertaining to the upkeep of the business, McLaughlin and Hutchison agreed "to make it a free-state Democratic paper, sustaining the ___ ___ course of Senator Douglas . . ."