Kansas Territorial
Sesquicentennial Commission

Week of August 1 - 7, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

In Massachusetts, the Garrisonians, the most radical of the abolitionists, celebrated their annual version of Independence Day on August 1st, the anniversary of emancipation in the British West Indies. Led by William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the weekly newspaper the Liberator, Garrisonians refused to deal with a federal government that sanctioned Southern slavery. Garrison’s principle was simple. The newspaper’s motto was “No Union with Slaveholders,” or, as he phrased it in a letter to his wife: “The dissolution of the Union must first precede the abolition of slavery.” The legal niceties of a free-state/slave-state vote in Kansas were a waste of time.

Most anti-slavery activists believed Garrisonian extremism blocked practical reform and viewed them as divisive if not absurd, as in Missouri Representative Thomas Hart Benton’s description of one anti-slavery couple: He was “abolitionist enough for anybody outside of a mad house---and his wife abolitionist enough for all those who ought to be in one.”

Eli Thayer, advocating a practical and idealistic emigration society, became a bitter enemy of William Lloyd Garrison, fuming in later life that any credit the Garrisonians took for freedom in Kansas was revisionist history. On August 1st, the 29 men he sent to Kansas left the settlement of Wakarusa to climb Back Bone Ridge. As they pitched their tents, they painted a sign naming the hill “Mount Oread,” an echo of Thayer’s Oread Hill back in Worcester. Each man set out to mark a claim but found that most of the most desirable land down on the banks of the Kansas River was already inhabited by squatters, among them William Lykins, the missionary’s son raised in Kansas, Achilles B. Wade, a Missourian, Clark Stearns, an Iowan, and the large family of Moses Baldwin.

Wade’s claim at a bend in the river looked like a good spot for a town, which they intended to call Wakarusa. Wade and Stearns offered Thayer’s agents the rights to their claims for $500 and $1,000, respectively, but James Blood refused the opportunity, “I regarded the buying of claims at that time as impolitic.” Blood may have been hesitant to pay an exorbitant price for land to which Wade and Stearns had no actual legal rights. Without a land survey, a federal land office and officially registered claims, the concept of a squatter’s legal ownership was an oxymoron.

The federal government did, that week, make some progress in making sense out of the land rush by appointing John Calhoun of Springfield, Illinois, to the position of Surveyor General for the new territories. Calhoun, with experience in surveying and Illinois’s Democrat politics, seemed quite qualified for the job. A friend and supporter of Senator Stephen A. Douglas, he was also a friend of the minor Whig politician Abraham Lincoln to whom he’d taught the surveying trade years ago.

Out on the California Road, west of the newly christened Mount Oread, a New Englander who’d set up his tent on what he thought was unoccupied land returned to find “his camp utensils, tent and all his fixings removed into the California road,” in the words of New Englander B. R. Knapp. “Nancy [Miller] and another Hoosier woman made quick work with the intruders moveables. I had rather have a Prairee wolf after me than one of these Hoosier women.”

“Hoosier” was then, as now, a nickname for citizens of Indiana. The term was indelicate if not offensive. Other common nicknames, now almost forgotten, were worse. People called Illinois residents “Suckers” and Missourians “Pukes.”

You can read the Liberator on line. PDFs of its pages are now available in a sesquicentennial project from Kansas City Kansas Community College at kckcc.edu/territorial_news/boston_liberator. They’ve also scanned Kansas territorial newspapers from the files of the Kansas State Historical Society. (622 words)

The attachment this week is a drawing from Albert Richardson's West of the Mississippi picturing "A Young Sucker." Richardson speculates that the Illinoisian nickname derives from sucker fish or the new shoots on plants.

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Letter from B. R. Knapp published in Boston Sun News, August 27, 1854, quoted in Louise Barry, “The Emigrant Aid Company Parties of 1854,” Kansas Historical Quarterly, Volume XII, Number 2, May, 1943. Pg.122.

Walter M. Merrill, The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1979) Volume 4. March 1856, Pg 390.

Charles Robinson, The Kansas Conflict (New York: Harper & Bros., 1892) Blood’s memoir. Pg. 72.

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Week of August 8 - 14, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

Across the Missouri River from St. Joseph, speculators platted the town of Wathena. "It is eligibly situated for a town .the California and Oregon road from St. Joseph passes through the place. .This will be one of THE towns in Kansas Territory," said an article in the St. Joseph Gazette. The editor also enthused about Leavenworth: "On a beautiful eminence, has a rock shore, the ascent from the river being very gradual back for about half a mile.Leavenworth it is thought by many will be the great city of Kansas."

On the 12th, west of the proposed town of Wakarusa on the Kaw, settlers met at the Hoosier Millers' claim to form a vigilante court. In a territory without federal land oversight, self-regulatory judicial systems filled the vacuum. The National Intelligencer reported on this convention of "actual settlers" that took place "on Back Bone Ridge in the valley of the river Kansas," noting that although the discourse was "very stormy and full of excitement and violent talk," the resulting association was satisfactory to all concerned. The term "actual settlers" was apparently a "newly adopted Territorial cognomen for the abolition party."

They elected John A. Wakefield as chief justice. Wakefield, born in South Carolina, had lived in various parts of the upper Midwest. On his way to California with his family that summer, he'd halted at a spot on the California Road. Wakefield's qualifications for chief justice were a law degree, maturity (at 60, he was older than most of the settlers) and a black stovepipe hat. Other officials elected were William Lyon as treasurer and William Lykins as marshal, deputized to carry out Wakefield's decisions.

The September 12th meeting drew people from the pro-slavery, anti-slavery and neutral camps. New Englanders who'd arrived during the past few weeks met old settlers like Wakefield and Lyon, who'd been improving their claims for three or four months. Missourians and other Southerners, western farmers from Indiana, and anti-slavery pilgrims from Massachusetts met to negotiate their perceived rights to the land, an emotional issue made more emotional by a contrast in cultural styles. The New Englanders were surprised to see the amount of liquor consumed at a political event and astonished by the speechmaking, described by one of them as "bombast, rant, and an almighty patriotic devotion to the great principles of the star-spangled banner and revolutionary blood. It beat everything I ever listened to in my life." None of the New Englanders was elected to an office.

In Washington, the administration appointed George W. Clarke of Van Buren, Arkansas, to replace Richard C. S. Brown, who'd died of cholera in June on his way to take over as agent to the Potawatomi. Clarke, like most other territorial appointees, was a loyal Democrat whose efforts had boosted Pierce into office in 1852. A newspaper editor and former state representative, he probably owned slaves in Arkansas, and probably brought at least two enslaved women (Ann Clarke and Judy Clarke) when he moved his family to Kansas.

Under the spoils system upon which the government was based, his position was quite a political plum. An Indian Agency offered power and profit to those who placed their own welfare above that of their charges. Agents had insider knowledge useful for speculation in former tribal lands; they commissioned traders who might offer bribes and kickbacks for the rights to sell goods to the tribe, and the agent dispersed the regular federal annuity payments. Clarke quickly took advantage of at least the last opportunity, skimming fifty cents off the top of each payment to members of the Potawatomi tribe. (600 words)

The attachment this week is a cased picture of a man in what is probably meant by a plug hat in 1850. When Lincoln was President he survived an assassination attempt that put a hole in his best "plug hat," he told Ward Lamon. Descriptions of plug hats vary from boater to bowler to stovepipe. Whatever a plug hat was, it was supposed to command respect, but frequently invited ridicule.

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James A. Clifton, Prairie People (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, pg. 373.
Letter from John Mailey, August 12, 1854, quoted in Louise Barry, "The Emigrant Aid Company Parties of 1854," Kansas Historical Quarterly, Volume XII, Number 2, May, 1943. Pg. 123.
Martha J. Parker and Betty A. Laird, Soil of Our Souls: Histories of the Clinton Lake Area Communities (Lawrence, Kansas: Coronado Press, 1976) Pg. 75.
National Intelligencer, September,1854
St Joseph Gazette, August 9, 1854.

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Week of August 15 - 21, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

On August 21st, Edward Everett Hale, fighting a losing orthographic battle, wrote the preface to his soon-to-be published book, explaining why he would call it Kanzas and Nebraska despite the now common spelling of "Kansas." "I have held to the spelling Kanzas [over] Kansas, the more fashionable spelling of a few weeks past. There is no doubt that the z best expresses the sound [and] that it has been almost universally used till lately." Hale, on the board of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, had never been to Kanzas, but his guidebook became a best seller.

Francis Xavier Aubry, famous for his record horseback ride from Santa Fe to Independence, was back in the New Mexico Territory this week. He'd returned from California blazing a new trail, which he believed would be an excellent transcontinental railroad route from California to St. Louis, his hometown. His advocacy of what was called a "central route" raised the ire of Richard H. Weightman, a Santa Fe newspaper editor who favored a "southern route," a railroad across the deep South.

Weightman had somehow insulted Aubry in his Santa Fe Herald. On August 18th or 20th, they met for a glass of wine and within minutes Aubry was dead of a stab wound. Weightman's family maintains today that Aubry had been insulted by the newspaper's unintended ridicule of his daring ride, but the St. Louis Democrat at the time stated the dispute was about different railroad routes, a quarrel not considered petty.

The proposed transcontinental railroad was a leading issue of the 1850s, and indeed was major motivation for creation of the Kansas and Nebraska Territories. Land that had been considered a desert fit only for Native Americans took on new value as Northerners and Southerners argued about the most profitable route to the Pacific. Once entrepreneurs set their sights on a route west of St. Louis, Indian reserves stood in the path of progress.

Throughout the summer of 1854, Thomas Hart Benton and David Atchison sniped at each other in the press over who was a stronger advocate for a Missouri terminus. Senator Stephen Douglas had invested heavily and secretly in a proposed extreme northern path beginning near Lake Superior. Every newspaper editor had an opinion about the route and usually a share of a proposed railroad company. Potawatomi agent George W. Clarke, for example, campaigned for a southern route in his Arkansas newspaper. His position as vice-president in The Little Rock and Fort Smith Railway was not considered a conflict of interest. Newspapers and their editors were expected to be partisan in both politics and commerce. "Boosting" a railroad or a town was part of the job.

Weightman was acquitted of murder in Aubry's death. It had not been a crime, but an affair of honor. The St. Louis Democrat explained the circumstances to its readers, who understood well what was called the code duello. "Mr Aubry, though of a pieaceiable disposition was a man who could not rest quietly under unjust imputations..Being naturally impetuous under a sense of wounded honor, his language or conduct may have given rise to the quarrel in which he was stabbed to death by his cooler adversary." Weightman had insulted Aubry in print; Aubry insulted Weightman in person; Aubry pulled a gun and Weightman stabbed him. It was the kind of thing that happened every day. (561 words)

Attachment. The duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr in July, 1804, depicted here, horrified enough Americans that dueling, fifty years later, had faded as a common cause of death in the North. Many Southerners, however, continued to believe that a man's sense of honor must be defended to the death.

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St. Louis Democrat, reprinted in the St. Joseph Gazette, September 20, 1854

Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1947) Volume II. Pg. 86.

Diane Weightman, webpage about Richard Hanson Weightman at geocities.com

Edward Everett Hale, Kanzas and Nebraska: the History, Geographic and Physical Characteristics. (Boston: Philips, Sampson & Co.,1854), Pg. v.

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Week of August 22 - 28, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

In Winchester, Illinois, on August 26th, local Whigs caucusing to choose state delegates demanded that Abraham Lincoln give his thoughts on party direction. "He responded to the call ably and eloquently, doing complete justice to his reputation as a clear, forcible and convincing public speaker. His subject was the one which is uppermost in the minds of the people---the Nebraska-Kansas bill.His was a masterly effort.replete with unanswerable arguments," reported the Illinois Journal. A former surveyor, now a successful lawyer representing the railroads, Lincoln was a sometime politician who had served an undistinguished term in Congress and turned down the position as secretary of the Oregon Territory five years earlier.

The major parties, the Whigs and the Democrats, had for several decades been differentiated more by economics than by geography. The Whigs, the party of Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams, could be summarized as representing bankers, merchants and mill owners. The Democrats still followed the principles of Andrew Jackson, a party of farmers and planters. North-South lines etched by the Fugitive Slave Law and the Kansas Nebraska Act sectionalized the parties in the summer of 1854. Southern Democrats captured their party, leaving anti-slavery and Northern members adrift. Whigs like Lincoln grew increasingly alienated from party leaders who seemed to lose direction after their spring alliance with pro-slavery Democrats David Atchison and Jefferson Davis during the fight over the repeal of the Missouri Compromise.

Lincoln could not be termed a political abolitionist; he did not advocate an immediate end to slavery in the South. He explained the conflict between his personal and political feelings in a letter to friend and slaveholder Joshua Speed. "It is hardly fair for you to assume that I have no interest in [slavery] which has, and continually exercises, the power of making me miserable. You ought rather to appreciate how much the great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings in order to maintain their loyalty to the constitution and the Union."

By 1854, Lincoln had given up on politics, but the Kansas-Nebraska issue inspired him to get back up on the stump, speaking not for himself but for fellow Whigs opposed to "squatter sovereignty." For the time being, he remained a Whig although he had other choices. Alternative organizations included the Free Soil Party, the People's Party and the American Party, all parties dedicated to a single issue. The Free Soilers and the People's Party hoped to quarantine slavery in the South and prevent its spread to any more territories. The American Party's agenda was based primarily on vehement hatred of foreign emigrants and Catholics. Part political party, part secret society, the American Party demanded that members deny belonging, obligated to say when asked that they "knew nothing" about it. The "Know-Nothings" benefited from the 1854 realignments in the major parties; gaining so many adherents that they began to admit their existence.

During the summer of 1854, the spring's "Anti-Nebraska" rallies coalesced into meetings advocating a new fusion party that allied anti-slavery Democrats (called Barnburners), anti-slavery Whigs (called Conscience Whigs) and more conservative Know Nothings, "all the odds and ends of society, politics and religion," as one editor summarized it. Around the country, and especially in the upper Midwest, the consensus arose that the new party be named for an old one that supported Thomas Jefferson, the Republicans. (556 words)

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