Kansas Territorial
Sesquicentennial Commission

Week of November 28 - December 4, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

In the November 29th election for territorial representative, voters in the infant town of 110 in present-day Osage County cast 609 ballots for proslavery candidate General John A.Whitfield. At most, 20 men, women and children lived there. The great majority of the voters were Missouri residents, among them Samuel Ralston of Independence. Although Ralston's group was armed, "prepared for any emergency, fortunately we had no difficulty, everything passed off quietly and pleasantly."

In addition to guns, Missourians brought ballots pre-printed with Whitfield's name, ensuring they had enough of the conventional color-coded ballots of the day. Before the era of the secret vote, observers could easily project the outcome by checking the paper in each man's hand. Party loyalists could shape results by threatening voters with the wrong colored slip. Another irregularity in an election preceded by neither registration nor census was voting by soldiers and Native Americans, two groups forbidden by law to cast ballots.

In Leavenworth, a "large party from Weston and Platte County," crossed the river to vote at the hotel there, among them Missourian H. Miles Moore who remembered "a great crowd around the polls all day. There was a good deal of excitement, and some quarrelling and fighting." In Lawrence, quarrelling escalated to murder. As Henry Davis walked home to his claim after arguing with the election judge, he was shot by Lewis Kibby. Sam Ralston thought he might know the murdered Davis. A James Davis was "a worthy Gentlemen from [Jackson] County. Shot by a D----yankee.."

Ralston summarized the election in a letter to a friend: "Strangers at a distance may be led to believe that Kansas is all right on the Slavery question.Of the 2248 [votes] to Whitfield at least 2000 were Missourians, and Missouri has 10,000 more whenever necessity requires their services."

On the 1st of December, Ralston attended a convention at Independence where Missouri radicals revealed a new phase of their pro-slavery plan. Counties would join to sponsor agents traveling throughout the South, establishing branches of "our order all over the Slave holding states. Money is required to defray their expences, we bleed freely." Platte and Buchanan Counties, for example, would pay for Benjamin Stringfellow's trip to Virginia and Maryland. "The men whom we send are, as we say here, right on the 'Goose question,'" explained Ralston, as he asked his friend for a $100 donation, which "would guarantee friends in days to come..We have no name, nor no books farther than a simple record of names. Jackson Co. numbers over 600."

Ralston noted that David Atchison was elected President at the unnamed order's Independence convention, but whether the Missouri Senator was actually there is unknown. His duties as President Pro Tem of the Senate now required his presence in Washington while Congress prepared for a new session. On the 4th, Atchison, probably realizing he could not effectively preside over the Senate and the Missouri Self Defense organization at the same time, chose to resign his Senate seat. His slave state Kansas campaign appears to have been designed to further his Senatorial election campaign, but his resignation to focus on the territory causes historians to wonder which were his ends and which were his means.

In early December, Abraham Lincoln also announced a change in political plans in a letter to a potential supporter. "I have really got it into my head to try to be United State Senator." (572 words)

The attachment is a drawing of the square in Independence, Missouri.

___________

Letter from Samuel Ralston to an unnamed friend, December 9, 1854, in W. Darrell Overdyke, editor. "A Southern Family on the Missouri Frontier: Letters From Independence, 1843-1855", The Journal of Southern History, Volume XVII, Number 2, May, 1951. 216-237.

H. Miles Moore, testimony before the United States Congress. Report of the Special Committee, (Howard Report) 1856.

Letter from Abraham Lincoln to Joseph Gillespie, December, 1854, in Roy P. Basler, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953) Volume II, Pg. 290.

See PDF format

Week of December 5 - 11, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

Land along the south bank of the Kansas River, west of the mouth of Shunganunga Creek, was filling with settlers as winter began in 1854. (Americans then used the first day of the quarterly months to mark seasonal change, rather than using today's point of reference, the winter solstice.) Ten days into the new season, Pennsylvanian Cyrus Holliday wrote a letter to his wife from "Up the River," seated on a trunk, using a keg for a desk. He was "assisting in starting a new town. We are just about in the central portion of the settled territory.with perhaps the best landing and the most eligible site for a city in the entire country..Our food is mush, molasses and bacon mixed plentifully with dirt three times each day."

Charles Robinson, agent of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, had traveled with Holliday to the site at the foot of Papan's Ferry across the Kansas, where they met several members of the year's last group of emigrants sponsored by the Aid Company. On the 5th, the men gathered at a grass thatched cabin near the river to form a company for a town to be named Topeka. That week, the cabin roof caught fire, forcing the founders to seek shelter elsewhere. Within the month, the town association had decided to name the place after the Native American name for the river---"Topeka," a word referring to the wild potatoes growing on its banks.

The area had long been a western outpost of the French settlement known as the Illinois Country. What we now call North Topeka was a remnant of French colonies populated by migrants who traveled along the Mississippi north from New Orleans or south from Quebec to establish a New France with cultural centers in Kaskaskia and Sainte Genevieve on the Mississippi River. Unlike the English model, the French and Spanish concepts of colonization did not include extensive female migration to provide a wife of European descent for every pioneer. Frenchmen often found their wives among the native tribes, creating a half European, half Indian culture where people spoke both European and native languages with ease, supported themselves by trading between the two cultures and sent their daughters to schools in St. Louis to learn the niceties of European manners.

Napoleon's sale of the Louisiana Territory in 1803 had little effect on French-speaking frontier towns so far from the governments that ruled them. By 1854, however, communities like the small settlement on the north side of the Kaw sixty miles west of the state of Missouri were facing change.

Four brothers, Joseph, Ahcan, Louis and Euberie Papan, had left the city of St. Louis in the early 1840s to earn a living on the western trails in the Indian Territory. Sons of a French Canadian, the Papan brothers each married a Gonville sister, also children of a French-American, Louis Gonville, who had traded goods to the Konza tribe for decades. The Gonville sisters, Julie, Pelagie, Josette and Victoire, were children of two Konza sisters, daughters of White Plume named Wy He See and Hunt Jimmy. Each daughter's dowry included a 640-acre tract of land along the Kaw River. The Papan-Gonville family made their money with a ferry across the Kaw, first serving traders on the trail to Santa Fe, then immigrants on the California and Oregon trails. They also maintained a toll bridge across Shunganunga Creek.

Among the settlers living on the south side of the Kaw River when the New England Emigrant Aid Company decided to form a town company there were Clement and Ann Shattio. Clement Shattio, another Frenchman from St. Louis, came west to trade with the tribes at Uniontown, a community that grew up around a ferry site west of the Papan's enterprise. There he met Ann Davis who had been born a free black in the state of Illinois. As a child she was kidnapped into slavery in Missouri and eventually brought to Uniontown where she purchased her freedom in 1849. In 1854, four years after their marriage, the Shattios bought a Native American's claim along the Shunganunga. (684 words)

Attachment: A photo of Charles Curtis (1860-1936), on the right, with President Calvin Coolidge. Curtis, grandson of Julie Gonville and Louis Papan, was Vice President of the United States under Hoover.

___________

Cyrus K. Holliday, letter to his wife, December 10, 1854. Manuscripts Collection, Kansas State Historical Society.

George A. Root, "Chronology of Shawnee County," Bulletin of the Shawnee County Historical Society, Volume 1, Number 1, December, 1946. Pg. 15.

Samuel F. Tappan letter, December 22, 1854, published in the Boston Journal, January 22, 1855.

Papan genealogies from Familysearch.com.

Week of December 12 - 18, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

In December, two companions arrived in the Territory. James McClure of Indiana and Samuel J. Jones of Virginia had met on the steamer F.X. Aubry on the Missouri River, en route to Kansas, where they were going "to seek their fortunes." The men and their wives became friends, and the families had spent the fall at various boarding houses in Missouri, looking for business opportunities in Westport and Parkville. During a stay in Clay County, McClure "found a very bitter feeling existing in the neighborhood against all Northern men, whom they regarded as abolitionists and dangerous characters. Mr. Jones, who was a pro-slavery man, was treated with great consideration, while I, being a free-state man, although a Democrat, was looked upon with suspicion and as an intruder."

On a trip into the Kansas Territory in mid December, the two men and a third companion, found attitudes reversed when they spent the night in the tent hotel in Lawrence, getting little sleep as they listened to a noisy discussion denouncing Southerners led by Samuel Wood of Bloomington, "the loudest talker." Apparently, Samuel Jones kept his origins and politics to himself. The next day, the three traveled west to Bloomington where they met John Wakefield whose cabin was the best they'd encountered, "quite large and comfortable." McClure recalled Wakefield as "a very prominent man" with "high political aspirations." He also remembered him as quite a talker. "The judge had written a history of the Black Hawk war, and during our stay I am quite sure he related to us the whole contents of his book. I have felt so convinced of this fact that I have never had any desire to read his work."*

Discouraged by the lack of available land close to the Missouri border, the men returned to Westport, where Samuel Jones was hired by Albert Gallatin Boone, Westport's Postmaster, to run the post office. James McClure continued to look for opportunities in the Territory, spending time at the Shawnee Methodist Mission where he met Governor Reeder. Because he'd heard "from Governor Reeder's friends that in all probability the territorial capital would be located at Pawnee, near Fort Riley," McClure and a few other men, including Charles Albright, decided to make the five-day trip to the Fort near the junction of the Kansas and Smoky Hill Rivers. There they found "a number of Reeder's friends from Pennsylvania..The site had been surveyed and platted, and lots were being sold at fancy prices." McClure claimed land near the town along Clark's Creek and the party returned to Westport. (420 words)

*Those who have a desire to read Wakefield's work can find it at the University of Kansas Libraries. History of the War Between the United States and the Sac and Fox Nations Of Indians, published in Jacksonville, Illinois in 1834, has been reprinted in the Garland Library of Narratives of North American Indian Captivities, volume 49.

The attachment this week is a photograph of Samuel Jones who later gained notoriety as Lawrence's sherrif who helped sack the town in 1856.

___________

James R. McClure, "Taking the Census and Other Incidents in 1855," Kansas State Historical Society Collections, Volume 8. Pp. 227-250.

Week of December 19 - 25, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

A reviewer for the National Intelligencer, a Washington based newspaper, was pleased to read Edward Everett Hale's book Kanzas and Nebraska, although he mentioned that many readers might have had "their nervous exictablities worn down and their sense of hearing deadened by the daily repetition of these names for almost a year---soft and sweet and euphonious though they be."

On Christmas Day, Charles Albright, an agent of the American Settlement Company, camped in the relative comfort of Westport after a two-week trip to Pawnee, K.T., also seemed weary of Kansas. He wrote a resignation letter to President Thaddeus Hyatt, complaining about conditions in the Settlement Company's proposed town of Council City, eventually named Burlingame. Instead of buildings and corded off lots, immigrants from New York and Pennsylvania found "nothing but an expanse of prairie, with no boundaries or nothing else." Albright encountered "a torrent of indignation" from would-be Kansans. "Five out of every six turned back!"

He found the landscape beautiful, but Albright was pessimistic. "This country is very deficient in timber and water. The best lands in the territory are owned and occupied by the Indians." He predicted that desirable land would continue to belong to the Natives, "as long as they are nations or tribes---such is the opinion of the Indian agents here and also Manypenny, Commissioner of Indian Affairs. These reserved lands.will forever be thorns in the sides of settlers." Albright's traveling companion, James McClure, returned to Westport to find his wife Hester had given birth to her second child on Christmas Eve.

The Fitchburg, Massachusetts, Sentinel announced that Kansas Governor Reeder would refuse to give a certificate of election to John W. Whitfield, because of voting illegalities. Reeder's opinion meant little, however, as Kansas's new Representative took the oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States that week in Washington City in a short and quiet ceremony. On the 23rd, several Lawrence citizens met to protest the election dominated by Missouri voters. A committee agreed to prepare resolutions of outrage.

The Fitchburg Sentinel also carried an advertisement for Christmas Eve services. "The approaching anniversary of the advent of our Saviour will be noticed by appropriate religious services and decorations in the Universalist Church." Celebrating Christmas was one more way the Universalists broke with Calvinistic religious principles. New Englanders had long dismissed Christmas as "Popish," a remnant of European Catholic tradition. The Universalists' decorations of evergreen swags over doors and windows were a sign of progressive reform, a break with the Puritan past.

New England's reformers also celebrated Christmas with craft fairs to support their causes, a tradition that endures in our annual Christmas craft bazaars that benefit churches. The National Anti-Slavery Bazaar opened on December 20th, an event so large it filled two halls on Winter Street in Boston. For weeks, the women who planned the fair had been advertising for donations. "We would call upon ladies at home for large contributions of useful articles, all kinds of fine needlework for ladies and children's wear, gentlemen's dressing gowns, shirts, collars and hosiery are greatly in demand. There is no danger that the supply will be too large or that articles will be sold at a sacrifice."

Southerners with their Anglican history tended to celebrated Christmas with more ceremony than the Puritan New Englanders. Southern festivities included gifts, feasts and family reunions. Among the most enthusiastic Christmas revelers were the slaves, who traditionally received a week's vacation. In Missouri, Henry Bruce finished his term clearing a forest and returned to his master's farm to learn his next assignment. (600 words)

The attachment this week is an illustration of a Christmas tree about 1880. Christmas trees were just beginning to be seen in the United States in 1854, influenced by Queen Victoria's German husband Prince Albert, who brought the tradition to England. The early trees were hung with gifts.

___________

Charles Albright, Letter to Thaddeus Hyatt, December 25, 1854, Manuscripts Collection, Kansas State Historical Society.

Henry Clay Bruce, The New Man: Twenty-Nine Years a Slave, Twenty-Nine Years A Free Man (York, PA: P. Anstadt & Sons, 1895).

Fitchburg, Sentinel December 22, 1854.

The Liberator, November 10, 1854.

Lawrence Herald of Freedom, January 6, 1855.

James R. McClure, "Taking the Census and Other Incidents in 1855," Kansas State Historical Society Collections, Volume 8. Pp. 227-250.

National Intelligencer, December 21, 1854. Pg. 2

Week of December 26 - 31, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

In Lawrence, George W. Brown was trying to publish the second edition of the Herald of Freedom, the newspaper sponsored by the New England Emigrant Aid Company. He had ink, type, a press and four tons of newsprint, but building an office to house them was a problem. He couldn't find enough trees to fell for a log cabin, and the Aid Company's sawmill couldn't produce boards enough to meet demand. By Christmas night, Brown had managed to hire workmen to build the foundation and walls of an office, 80 feet long by 30 feet wide, a story and a half. The walls were framed of cottonwood boards, lumber too soft and too green for that purpose. Brown, like everyone else in Kansas, was realizing that boards and shake shingles cut from the timber along the rivers would quickly warp and twist. He predicted his new building, "will be well-ventilated by spring." As the carpenters began framing the roof during the last week of 1854, Brown began setting type.

During the week, Jonathan Bigelow, an immigrant from Maine, chopping wood west of Lawrence, was attacked by a wild animal, generally thought to be a wildcat. Bigelow, came out of the encounter with torn clothing and a story for Brown's newspaper.

On the 26th, a Lawrence committee reconvened with townspeople to discuss means of protesting November's election of Congressional Representative John W. Whitfield. Newspaperman John Speer and Congregationalist Missionary Samuel Lum reported that protest resolutions seemed "inexpedient," as they might stir up more trouble. Rather, the town should prepare itself for "such action as circumstances call for." Speer however, offered modest resolutions declaring slavery to be a "blighting curse," and a request that Missourians "desist from all unlawful interference" in Kansas. Samuel Wood offered his own stronger resolutions, stating "that we do not regard General Whitfield as properly the delegate from Kansas, but as a Delegate from Tennessee, elected by citizens of Missouri." Secretary Charles Robinson reported that "Mr. Wood did not care how much our resolutions stirred up the enemies of freedom in Missouri and elsewhere---the more the better."

One small aspect of the Kansas question seems to have been settled by year's end. During the last week of 1854, George Brown wrote to Edward Everett Hale, author of Kanzas and Nebraska, "The spelling of Kansas seems to have become almost established by usage, and I think it would be impossible in the West to change it now."(409 words)

The attachment this week is a drawing of Lawrence in 1855 by J.E. Rice showing the "hay tents" that served as the buildings. The center building is Sands's Harness and Saddle Shop. Behind it to the right is the Astor House, the Litchfield's hotel and on the left is the Congregational Church. Behind the ridge is the Kaw fringed with the cottonwood trees people were cutting for building timber and in the distance the Delaware Reservation. The drawing belongs to the Kansas State Historical Society.

___________

George W. Brown letter, December 27, 1854, quoted in Clara Dolbee, "The First Book on Kansas," Kansas Historical Quarterly #2, 1934.

Lawrence Herald of Freedom, January 6, 1855

Back to Kansas Territorial Sesquicentennial Commission