Kansas Territorial
Sesquicentennial Commission

Week of July 4 - 10, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

July 4th, the 78th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, was celebrated throughout the states, the territories and the unorganized lands. Traffic on the overland trails was far west of the Missouri Valley by the first week of July. Travelers following the recommended schedule celebrated the holiday at Independence Rock in what is now Wyoming. The huge slab of red granite was both a landmark and an autograph album. Travelers for decades had scratched or painted their names on its surface.

Anna Maria Goodell and her party, bound for the Washington Territory, were right on schedule, spending the night of the 3rd at Independence Rock. She walked around the monument reading the autographs. "I do not see any names on it that I know." Weary after almost three months on the journey, she wrote on the 4th, "I would like to be where I was last fourth at Vermillion [Ohio]." The Sutton family, who'd started their journey early, spent the holiday three weeks beyond Independence Rock near Soda Springs (Idaho), after crossing the "longest and roughest mountain we have passed yet." Sarah took the time to write a poem in her diary beginning with the lines, "Hail the day that bought our freedom, bought with our forefathers' blood."

Back in the states, festivities exploded in New England, despite suggestions by leading abolitionists that the day be observed with a tolling of church bells mourning the Kansas Nebraska Act. Broadsides and fliers urged free-soilers to ignore the usual barbecues, fireworks and parades. Deep-dyed abolitionists had long disdained Independence Day festivities as hypocritical in a country where a third of the people were enslaved. Anti-slavery advocates saved their celebration for August 1st, the anniversary of abolition in the West Indies.

In Massachusetts, Clara Torrey and her fellow students at the Mount Holyoke Seminary draped their dormitory in black. "To express our indignation against the Nebraska Bill.we hung our black dresses and aprons and capes on all our doors [and] had a large flag with 1776 on it all in black. . .We had some mottos around. 'Liberty died May 20 1854'. . .We all wore black ribbons on our arms. But after supper we did have a splendid time down in the orchard."

At Salt Creek in the Kansas Territory, Isaac Cody and his new neighbors invited members of the Kickapoo and Delaware tribes to a barbecue. Four days later, across the Missouri line, four slaves in Platte County celebrated their own independence after escaping from their owners.

The attachment this week is a contemporary photo of Independence Rock, an important landmark on the western trails.

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Viola F. Barnes, "College Girl and School Ma'am in the Eighteen Fifties," New England Quarterly, Volume 3, # 3, July, 1930. Letter from Clara Torrey, July 4, 1854. Pp. 542-3.

Reverend William H. Goode, Letter to the Western Christian Advocate from Wakarusa, K.T., July 8, 1854, reprinted in the Lawrenceburgh (Indiana) Democratic Register, Oct 6, 1854.

Anna Maria Goodell, "Vermillion Wagon Train Diaries, 1854." Kenneth L. Holmes, editor. Covered Wagon Women, Volume 7, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987) Pp.108-109.

Sarah Sutton, "A Travel Diary in 1854." Kenneth L. Holmes, editor. Covered Wagon Women, Volume 7, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987) Pp. 56-57.

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Week of July 11 - 17, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

In Worcester, Massachusetts, the first group of emigrants gathered by the anti-slavery aid organization left the railroad station on July 17th. Hundreds of supporters wished the 27 men well as they departed on "the cars." News of cholera throughout the west may have frightened potential Kansans, as did threats of retaliation by pro-slavery Missourians. Rumors circulating of murders by Indians and settlers were "all not true" asserted the Boston Journal.

The territory, however, was not lacking for settlers. "Kansas is swarming with emigrants," noted the Western Christian Advocate. An early settler described the landscape. "Every tent was set up at least a half mile from the next one. This all because when the survey should be made and the lines run, every settler would be likely to find himself on a separate quarter section." Under the Pre-emption Act, which preceded the Homestead Act of 1862, farmers meeting certain minimal requirements claimed the future right to buy "their" 160 acres for $1.25 per acre.

Some travelers heading for the west coast changed plans when they realized the productive Indian lands along the trails were available for the taking. A dozen Missouri cattle drovers had staked claims about fifty miles up the Kaw in early May, abandoning the idea of driving the herd to California. Their claims joined the farm of Thomas A. Stinson and Julia Bushman Stinson at a bend on the south side of the river. Stinson had long lived in the Indian Territory as an agent and blacksmith to the Potawatomi, and his 1850 marriage to Julia, a descendent of the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, earned him the right to own land. Stinson, with his legal rights through Julia, and the Missourians, with their illegal claims, would soon plat a city on their land south of the Kaw. The future town of Tecumseh was pre-empted weeks before Pierce signed the Kansas Nebraska Act.

The Lyon family from Ohio was also en route to California. William and Elizabeth Sinkey Lyon and their children were forced to lay over in Independence due to illness, wasting weeks in May and June when they should have been on the road. Son-in-law Samuel Wood persuaded the clan to settle in Kansas. William, it would seem, did not require much persuasion to add his vote to the free state cause. His daughter Sarah recalled him as a radical abolitionist, "an old pioneer of the W. L. Garrison stamp."

Both families had long been active in Ohio's underground railroad. Sam Wood met his future wife Margaret on a night he'd brought ten escapees to the Lyon house for shelter. When the Nebraska Bill was introduced, Wood recalled, "We had an indignation meeting in the town where I lived..I said: 'If that bill passes, I ,for one, will go to Kansas'.I had no idea, then, of going to Kansas, but in the course of the next thirty days the question was asked me frequently when was I going to start..One night I went home and told my wife, as quick as the bill passed, I was going to Kansas."

In mid-July, the Lyon/Wood families laid claims near the intersection of the Wakarusa River and the California trail, finding many free-state Ohioans among their new neighbors. People left Ohio for political reasons, but economics was a motivation. Before soil conservation, farming practices dictated new land be tilled regularly. Kansas was a solution to the problems of marginal farmers whose eastern farms were played out. They sold acreage and equipment, stored the profits, and looked west for cheap, unplowed land. One Ohio farmer who brought considerable assets was Thomas Barber, rumored to have $40,000 in gold. (617)

The attachment this week is a portrait of Tecumseh wearing a U.S. government peace medal and a typical Shawnee headdress, which his white contemporaries often referred to as a turban.

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Anonymous member of the first party of Lawrence settlers, a paper read at a meeting of the "54ers" in Lawrence, 1909. Manuscript, Kansas State Historical Society.

Henry Baldwin, Manuscript, Kansas State Historical Society, Pg. 15.

Samuel Wood, speech recorded in Charles S. Gleed, The Kansas Memorial, a Report of the Old Settlers' Meeting.(Kansas City, 1880) Pg. 67.

Sarah Lyon Mack Pinkston, speech recorded in Charles S. Gleed, The Kansas Memorial, a Report of the Old Settlers' Meeting.(Kansas City, 1880) Pg. 186.

Boston Journal, quoted in the Western Christian Advocate, reprinted in the Lawrenceburgh (Indiana) Democratic Register, Oct 6, 1854.

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Week of July 18 - 24, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

In Buffalo on July 19th, Eli Thayer bade farewell to his party of New Englanders headed for Kansas as they boarded a steamboat to cross Lake Erie to Detroit. Two New Yorkers, newspaperman Daniel Anthony and physician John Doy, joined them in Buffalo, bringing the total to 29. In Detroit, they caught a train bound for Chicago, then transferred to a St. Louis line. They arrived in St. Louis an hour late for their scheduled Missouri River steamboat and laid over for the weekend. "Saw nothing of cholera," Anthony wrote his editor at the Rochester paper.

In St. Louis, the men met with Charles Robinson, returning from the Territory, where he and another employee of the aid organization, Charles Branscomb, had scouted possible town sites and revisited a spot Robinson recalled from his 1849 California trip, the southeast edge of Back Bone Ridge overlooking the twin valleys of the Wakarusa and the Kaw. They also spent time over the border, assessing the mood in western Missouri.

Robinson must have told them about meetings in Weston, Independence and Westport, where Missourians vowed to bar anti-slavery settlers from the Territory. Among the organizers of those meetings was Dr. John Stringfellow, who "continually [reiterated], with horrid oaths, that ..'If he had the power he would hang every abolitionist in the country, and every man north of Mason and Dixon's line was an abolitionist,'" recalled Robinson's wife Sara. Stringfellow and his older brother Benjamin, a lawyer in Weston, had come to western Missouri from Virginia a decade earlier. Because there were two Stringfellows, people confused them. Many believed they were the same person, a man with a memorable name who seemed to be in two places at once, a paragon of proslavery politics combining Benjamin's legal know-how and John's speaking style.

On the 20th, the Stringfellows, Senator David Atchison and others announced the formation of the Platte County Self Defensive Organization with John as secretary. This public organization reflected the goals of several rumored secret organizations with names like the Sons of the South and the Blue Lodge. The secret arm of Platte County's public Self Defensive Organization was the Kansas League, described in the history of the county as "a subsidiary institution to carry into effect the decrees of the.. Association. It was comprised, chiefly, of the same persons, bound to secrecy by an oath and holding meetings in the dark, wherever and whenever called out. Through the agency of this institution newspapers were surpassed and Northern Methodists silenced."

Like the Stringfellows, the emigrant aid organization seemed to be in two or three places at once. Begun in March by Eli Thayer, incorporated in April as the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company, reorganized in May, re-incorporated in June as the New England Emigrant Aid Company with local offshoots known as Kansas Leagues, and chartered in July by the Connecticut and the New York Legislatures, the organization had managed by the 20th to assist a mere 29 men to travel west. The publicity, however, inspired a disproportionate ratio of anxiety in the hearts of slave-holding Missourians, who felt threatened by an onrushing horde of easterners. (516)

The attachment this week is a photograph of John Stringfellow, the younger of the brothers who were influential in the pro-slavery activities in western Missouri in the mid-1850s. The photo is from Territorial Kansas Online, a website from the Kansas Historical Society.

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Daniel R. Anthony, letter, July 24, 1854, quoted in Louise Barry, "The Emigrant Aid Company Parties of 1854," Kansas Historical Quarterly, Volume XII, Number 2, May, 1943. Pp. 119-120.

William Paxton, "Annals of Platte County," History of Platte County, Missouri (1885) Pg. 184.

Sara T.D. Robinson, Kansas; Its Interior and Exterior Life (Boston: 1856) Pg. 10.

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Week of July 25 - 31, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

In Washington City, Congress, trying to catch up with territorial events by approving funds to survey the land, created the position of Surveyor General for Kansas, Nebraska and New Mexico. The Surveyor, with an annual salary of $3,000, 20% more than Governor Reeder's, would be the Pierce administration's highest paid agent in the area.

On 25th, the party of anti-slavery colonists left St. Louis aboard the steamer Polar Star, paying $12 per passenger, higher than the fare negotiated by the emigration society. Economics dictated low fares when the river was high, and high fares when it was low. During that last week of July, in the midst of the annual summer drought, the Missouri was low.

After a three-day trip, the Polar Star arrived in the city of Kansas, where the settlers were met by Charles Branscomb and James Blood. Branscomb argued that they should settle where the Kaw River met the Missouri on the Wyandot reserve, but the consensus was that the Wyandot retained the rights to that prime spot. Blood advocated a townsite about 30 miles west on the Back Bone, where the Shawnee had already ceded their rights.

Because the days were hot, up to 120 degrees by their measurements, the men traveled at night, passing through "pugnacious and fire-eating Westport," on the 29th. There they met no resistance, despite an announcement in the Platte Argus of a $200 reward for the capture of Eli Thayer, who'd remained in New England. On the last day of the month, they pitched a small city of 25 tents at the place near Blue Jacket's Crossing generally called Wakarusa.

That week, the town of Atchison, Kansas Territory, was officially organized in Weston, Missouri, by a group of "fire-eaters," the nickname for the most rabid of the pro-slavery Southerners. Dr. John Stringfellow was secretary; his brother's law partner Peter T. Abell, President, and James N. Burnes, another Weston lawyer, Treasurer. They located the town-to-be on the "Great Western Bend of the Missouri River," near Million's Ferry over the Missouri, a good site for a "jumping off place" into the west. The organizers might have christened the new town Oldham, but John Stringfellow insisted it be named for Missouri Senator David Atchison.

Atchison was facing a challenge to his Missouri Senate seat from Thomas Hart Benton. Atchison and Benton symbolized both sides of Missouri politics, Geographically, Atchison represented the west, Benton the east. Ideologically, Atchison represented a radical Southern position, Benton a more compromising stand. Senators, at the time, were not chosen by popular election, but by the states' legislators. Campaigns were directed at the voters (men who were free, white and 21) but also at the legislators, whose votes could be secured by promises of favors, power, pork and cold, hard cash.

Atchison was glad to take credit for Benton's 1850 Senatorial defeat, after which Benton won the popularly elected office, a seat in the House. Representative Benton intended to obtain revenge by trouncing Atchison during the Senatorial election in spring, 1855. Atchison recognized a good campaign issue when he saw it. He began painting Benton with an abolitionist brush, accusing him in July 1854, of stirring "up a 'pestiferous agitation' by which his ambitious designs might be promoted, [appealing] to the freesoil and abolition fanatics.." (541)

Attached is a Matthew Brady photograph of David Rice Atchison, Missouri Senator. The rather damaged photo is from the collection of the Library of Congress.

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Letter from "Charlestown," August 6, 1854, quoted in Louise Barry, "The Emigrant Aid Company Parties of 1854," Kansas Historical Quarterly, Volume XII, Number 2, May 1943. Pg. 121.

Speech by Daniel Atchison, printed in the St Joseph Gazette, July 5, 1854, Pp 1-2.

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