Abraham Lincoln in Kansas

“President Lincoln has been wickedly assassinated” and “a calamity that seems almost unbearable has visited the nation,” lamented the Kansas governor Samuel J. Crawford in a proclamation announcing the April 15, 1865, death of Abraham Lincoln. Although the sixteenth president of the United States had only visited Kansas once, nearly a year before being elected to that high office, Kansans loved this seemingly quintessential “common man.” They identified with his humble origins: Lincoln was born in a log cabin in Kentucky on February 12, 1809. They admired his rise to greatness: he became a successful Illinois lawyer and U.S. congressman. They shared his abhorrence of the institution of slavery, which nearly destroyed the union and led to a “great” and bloody civil war. And, ultimately, Kansans mourned their president’s untimely death, just five days after General Robert E. Lee’s surrender all but sealed a Union victory and signaled the end of the Confederacy and slavery in the United States of America.

When Lincoln made his one and only Kansas sojourn in December 1859, however, he seemed like just another politician, aspiring to the nation’s highest office. His senatorial debates with Stephen A. Douglas the previous year had gained Lincoln a national reputation and a modest following, but most Kansas Republicans favored his better-known rival for the young party’s nomination, William H. Seward. Thus, Lincoln’s trip to Kansas Territory received only slight press coverage and was relatively brief. His message, nevertheless, was one of significance for the territory and nation at a pivotal moment in our country’s history.

Abraham Lincoln crossed the Missouri River at St. Joseph by ferry and arrived in Elwood, Kansas, on November 30. That evening, not long after his arrival, he delivered his first Kansas speech in the dinning room of the seventy-five-room Great Western Hotel. Lincoln condemned the institution of slavery, which the founders had considered an “evil” institution, and blamed the violence in Kansas Territory on the new policy of “popular sovereignty” as applied to the territories.

The next morning--a bitterly cold one by all accounts--Lincoln traveled in a single-horse-drawn buggy to Troy where he spoke for nearly two hours in the early afternoon and went on to Doniphan, some ten miles distant, where he delivered another speech and spent the night of December 1 at Ashel Lowe’s imposing hotel. Friday morning, December 2, Lincoln was driven in a two-horse carriage to Atchison, arriving at the Massasoit House in the afternoon. At 8 p.m. he addressed a large crowd in the auditorium of the Methodist Church for two hours and twenty minutes, but, curiously, the future president’s visit did not even capture one line in the local newspaper, Freedom's Champion. Editor John A. Martin, a prominent Republican who would end a distinguished political career as governor of Kansas (1885-1889), was in the audience that evening, but he was also a Seward man “and could not brook the thought of any encouragement or countenance given by the people of Atchison to a rival candidate.”

Ironically, Lincoln was in Atchison when news of John Brown’s execution reached the territory. Brown and some eighteen followers raided the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in an ill-fated attempted to foment a slave insurrection. Lincoln thought Brown had “shown great courage, rare unselfishness.” But, with most Americans of the day, Lincoln believed Brown had gone too far. “Old John Brown has just been executed for treason against the state. We cannot object,” Lincoln reasoned, “even though he agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong. That cannot excuse violence, bloodshed, and treason. It could avail him nothing that he might think himself right.”

Leaving Atchison on Saturday morning, December 3, Lincoln was taken to Leavenworth and there a brass band and local dignitaries escorted him to the Mansion House, where he would spend the night. Speaking that evening at Stockton Hall, Lincoln reiterated his position that the “new policy” for dealing with the territories as set forth in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, unlike the “old policy” adopted by “Washington and his compeers,” was “based on the idea that slavery is not wrong.” This was a failed policy, he insisted, for contrary to its promise, it had not brought a speedy end to slavery agitation or given the people of the territories more control over their own affairs. “All those who believe slavery is wrong,” proclaimed Lincoln, “should unite on a policy, dealing with it as a wrong.” Their policy should contain no ambiguity or “deceitful contrivances,” but, Lincoln insisted, “we are not trying to destroy it [slavery]. The peace of society, and the structure of our government both require that we should let it alone” in those states where it already existed. It was not, however, to be allowed to spread further; this, Lincoln insisted, was simply and “exactly the policy of the men who made the Union. Nothing more and nothing less.”

Lincoln stayed over on Sunday to spend some time with a distant relative, Mrs. Mark W. Delahay, and spoke again on Monday, December 5. He observed the election for state officers under the Wyandotte Constitution on Tuesday, and the next day Leavenworth, and Kansas, “bid honest Abe a kind and heart-felt farewell.” It was a short visit, and one that Lincoln would not have the opportunity to repeat. But his message and bearing had impressed a good many Kansans, and Kansas had made an impression on him. A few months later, when asked if he would advise someone to “go west,” Lincoln replied: “If I went West, I think I would go to Kansas--to Leavenworth or Atchison. Both of them are, and will continue to be, fine growing places.”

Despite a successful Kansas trip, Lincoln did not improve his standing that much in the territory and had to capture the Republican convention of 1860 without the support of the Kansas delegation. Today we sometimes forget that Lincoln was not universally loved by his own generation. Most Southerners despised him, many Northerners questioned his ability and judgment, and his position on racial issues certainly cannot be judged enlightened by early-twenty-first-century standards. Indeed, his thinking in this area was conservative even when compared to contemporaries such as Susan B. Anthony, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Charles Sumner. But he was well ahead of the vast majority of Americans, showed a great capacity for growth in this and other areas, and earned the laudatory epithet the “Great Emancipator” and reputation as one of America’s great presidents.

Sources used included The Daily Times, Leavenworth, December 3-6, 1859; The Kansas Chief, White Cloud, December 1, 1859; D. W. Wilder, Annals of Kansas (Topeka: Kansas Publishing House, 1886); Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955); “Lincoln in Kansas,” Kansas Historical Collections, 1901-1902 7 (1902): 536-552; Fred W. Brinkerhoff, “The Kansas Tour of Lincoln the Candidate,” as reprinted in Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 31 (Winter 2008-09): 274-293; Charles Arthur Hawley, “Lincoln in Kansas,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 42 (June 1949): 179-192; “The Centennial of Lincoln’s Visit to Kansas,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 25 (Winter 1959): 438-443.