Kansas Territorial
Sesquicentennial Commission

Week of March 1- 6, 1854 (2004) (No Leap Year Day in 1854)

By Barbara Brackman

In Washington City, after weeks of debate, the Senate passed the Kansas Nebraska Bill at five in the morning on the 4th of March. Of the 51 Senators who voted, only 14 opposed the bill, among them William Seward of New York, who'd written in his diary the evening before: "Heaven be thanked that since this cup of humiliation cannot be passed, the struggle of draining it is nearly over! ..Southern men were imperious and Northern men abetted them.There is no longer dignity or honor in serving our country in the Senate of the United States."

The 4th was spend in argument over a last ditch effort by another of the radical anti-slavery Senators, Salmon Chase of Ohio, who had moved to attach an amendment to the bill. Chase knew that if he could tack on a provision allowing popular election of the new territory's executive and judicial branches, the Senate would defeat the bill. Popular sovereignty in the territories was unpopular idea in Washington. Unlike states, territories were not democracies. Territories were more literally bureaucracies, in which the executive branch and the judiciary ---the governor, his staff and the court system---were appointed by the federal government. Territorial settlers had the right to choose only the members of the third branch---the legislature.

Southern Senators, aided by compatriots nicknamed "doughfaces"---Northerners allied with Southern principles---defeated Chase's amendment. In the early hours on the 4th of March, Washingtonians woke up to the sound of celebratory cannons fired by supporters of Senator Stephen Douglas and his Kansas Nebraska Bill. Anti-Nebraska partisans now clung to the hope that the House of Representatives would defeat the bill in the next step in the legislative process. (290 words)

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Frederick W. Seward, Seward in Washington (New York: Derby & Miller, 1891) Pg. 224.

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Week of March 7- 13, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

In Worcester, Massachusetts, on March 11th, a meeting was held at the City Hall to protest the Senate's passage of the Kansas Nebraska Bill. Eli Thayer, a school master who represented the town in the Massachusetts Legislature, rose to speak about a plan he had been considering. "I pondered upon it by day, and dreamed of it by night," he remembered. "Suddenly it came upon me like a revelation, It was organized and assisted emigration." Thayer decided that New Englanders opposed to slavery should sponsor like-minded immigrants to the new Kansas Territory, settlers who would choose a territorial legislature dedicated to creating a free state there. Money for transportation, farming and building would be raised by selling shares in a company, which would turn a profit, rewarding shareholders for their politics. The logistics of profiting while supporting a moral cause were vague, but Thayer's "Plan of Freedom" captured the national attention with its sunny concept of doing good while doing well financially.

In 1848, Thayer had founded a girl's school on Goat Hill outside of Worcester (pronounced somewhat like "Wuhster.") The Oread Collegiate Institute was dedicated to the rather novel proposition that women deserved an education equal to men's. Thayer's school, often called the Oread Castle, was named for a place in classical Greek mythology, "the abode of mountain nymphs." Goat Hill became Mount Oread.

Politician George Hoar recalled that he moved to Worcester as a young man, "chiefly for the reason that that city and county were the stronghold of the new Anti-Slavery Party, to which cause I was devoted with all my heart and soul." Worcester was also home to the "Anti-Slavery Sewing Circle," which raised money for the cause with women's traditional economic tool, the needle. Profits from quilts and other needlework went into the societies' coffers along with the monthly dues of 25 cents. Among the items in the Sewing Circle's annual budget were three subscriptions to the radical abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator. Not everyone in Worcester was an anti-slavery advocate, and it may be that some women who stitched for the abolitionist cause preferred to read their weekly Liberator at the sewing society rather than at home under the disapproving eyes of fathers and husbands. (370 words)

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George F. Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years (London, Bickers & Sons, 1904) Pg. 158.
Address by Eli Thayer, Proceedings of the Worcester Society of Antiquity For the Year 1886 (Worcester, Massachusetts, 1887) Pg. 25.
Worcester Anti-Slavery Sewing Circle Record Book, manuscript collection, Worcester Historical Society.

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Week of March 14- 20, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

On March 16th, an important sign of spring appeared in St. Joseph. As the ice broke up on the Missouri River, the first steamship of the season arrived. The F.X. Aubry began its regular route from St. Louis to St. Joseph and back, arriving every other Tuesday. The boat, only a year old, was named for Francis Xavier Aubry (also spelled Aubrey), a western legend. Six years earlier Aubry had bet $1,000 that he could ride from Santa Fe to Independence in six days, a startling proposition in the days when the wagon trains that traveled that 800-mile trade route took two months.

Aubry, a small, brash man, won his bet, averaging 13 miles an hour while wearing out six horses. In that spring of 1854, he had moved on to California, herding sheep as he explored the passes of the Golden State, pioneering wagon and railroad routes. His reputation for speed inspired the boat's builders to christen their new steam packet after him.

America's river system was the super highway of the day. Dozens of boats steamed along the major waterways, the Mississippi, the Ohio and the Missouri, and a western traveler could efficiently and economically travel from Cincinnati or Pittsburgh to the City of Kansas where the Missouri met the Kaw.

River travel's major flaw was its seasonal shutdown. When winter's ice choked the water, businessmen of the river towns impatiently awaited the spring thaw. John Xantus, a Hungarian surveyor, wrote a letter aboard the S.S. Admiral on the Missouri north of Fort Leavenworth in March in the late 1850s. "The river is jammed with ice floes and the racket is loud enough to make your hair stand on end, but all this does not bother the American captain and his passengers, for the desire for gain makes them steam over ice jams that would terrify a captain on the Danube. Yet, these steamers do not even have the iron hulls of those that ply the Danube, instead, they are huge wooden castles.they steam at no more than a depth of five feet."

The wooden steamboats were well adapted to their routes. Those that plied the Missouri River were built with extremely shallow hulls to skim over the snags and sawyers, driftwood that would rip the bottom out of a deeper boat. In the spring of 1854, boat builders, traders and merchants looked west along the Kansas River, planning small, shallow boats that would carry trade hundreds of miles into the proposed Kansas Territory. The first to try it was the Excel, a stern-wheeler that drew only two feet of water. She hauled food and hardware to the soldiers building Fort Riley and back to Westport in a two-day return trip. Passenger H. D. McMeekin wrote that they "found no more difficulty in navigating the Kansas than we did the Missouri." (475 words)

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David Dary, "The Crazy Bet Of F. X. Aubry," Kanhistique, in KSHS biography scrapbook.
Darryl W. Levings, "Paddle Wheels Once Wrestled Waters of Kaw," Kansas City Star, June 16, 1977.
John Xantus, Letters from North America, March 9, 1857, (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975) Pg. 147.

Week of March 21 - 27, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

Readers of the St. Joseph Gazette on March 22 found numerous advertisements for paint and toothbrushes, patented eye salve, grape vine starts and Missouri tobacco. Among the items for sale was "A Negro Girl." Edmond Robidoux, a founder of the town, offered "a likely young Negro Girl about 15 years of age. She is well grown and sprightly, is a good cook and washer and ironer." No price was mentioned.

Another slaveholder advertised two people: "A number one servant, aged 23, an excellent cook, washer and domestic, strong, healthy and likely, with her boy aged one year, is now offered for sale. Both slaves warranted sound in body, mind and title indisputable. She is not offered for fault of disposition but because the owner WANTS MONEY! For further particulars, inquire at this office."

In the same paper Penick, a seller of general merchandize such as tea, advertised Uncle Tom's Cabin. The merchant might have been a bit rash to call attention to his stock of Harriet Beecher Stowe's abolitionist book in a slave town. Few people were neutral about her tale of "Life Among the Lowly," a view of America's "peculiar institution" from the slaves' perspective. The book was confiscated, banned and burned in many areas of the South. The book burners fear of the written word was well-justified. Many recalled the tale changing their lives. It's first appearance was as a serial three years earlier in the abolitionist newspaper The National Era.

"It was the reading of Uncle Tom's Cabin that really made my father hate slavery so bitterly that when the call came for colonists to go to Kansas and settle there and make it a free state, he was ready to go," recalled Annie Soule Prentiss many years later. "What a sensation that story made! No one today [1929] can even imagine it.At first mother started to read it to us on Sunday afternoon, so father could be there to hear, but the paper came on Wednesday, and soon we became too eager for it to wait until Sundays, and besides, our neighbors wanted to borrow the paper. They were as eager as we, so mother would read it to us Wednesday nights.I can see father yet, striding up and down the room, his hands clenched in fury." (380 words)

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A. B. Macdonald, "She Looks Back Seventy-Five Years." Kansas City Star, January 13, 1929. St. Joseph Gazette, March 22, 1854.

Week of March 28 - April 3, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

With the river now open to steamboat traffic, travelers began appearing in Westport and the city named Kansas. On March 28th, the Reverend Thomas Johnson returned home from Washington City where he had been working to affect Congressional opinion on the necessity for a new Kansas Territory.

Johnson was one of the few whites who resided in the territory, having spent over twenty years managing the Shawnee Methodist Mission, a mile or two from the Missouri border. The only non-Natives permitted by the government to live west of the Missouri line were Indian agents, traders, spouses of the Natives, and missionaries like Johnson and his family.

In 1853, a few men who favored a territorial government open to white settlement held an irregular election, choosing Thomas Johnson as "delegate at large" to Congress. In early 1854, he'd left for the nation's capital. When he took a seat on the House floor, he was promptly asked to leave by the doorkeeper. Johnson watched the spring session from the galleries, denied an official seat because he had no legal basis to be there.

According to Andreas's History of Kansas, Johnson was "a Southern man, born and reared in the South. His ancestors were Southern, and most of his associates and associations were Southern." In other words, Thomas Johnson was a strong advocate of slavery and a slaveholder. Seven years earlier, Quaker missionary Richard Mendenhall had written a letter complaining of slavery in the Indian lands west of Missouri, noting that few of the native tribes kept slaves. "It is white men in the service of the Government of the United States and missionaries, that have introduced slavery here." About the same time, Ann Archbold, a teacher at the Shawnee Mission, overheard the enslaved cook (probably Jackson Young of Fayette, Missouri) dictate a letter to friends back home. "He told her to tell them that at the Mission, 'was first white people, then Indians, then dogs and then n[egroes].'" Archbold wrote that the native tribes' opposition to Johnson's slaveholding caused her enough "alarm" that she soon returned to Ohio. Among the slaves at the Mission in 1854 (estimates range from six to twenty people in Johnson's custody during his years at the Mission) were two girls, Jane about 8 and Mary about 3, whom Johnson had bought during the past year for $550.

Thomas Johnson was home at the Mission for only a few weeks; long enough to gather together local tribal leaders to return with him to Washington City where they would negotiate treaties to cede their lands should the Kansas Nebraska Bill pass the House. (435 words)

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Martha B. Caldwell, Annals of the Shawnee Methodist Mission, (Topeka, KSHS, 1976) Pp. 78-79.
Biography of Johnson by Nathan Scarritt, A. T. Andreas, History of the State of Kansas (Topeka, KSHS, 1976 reprint) Pg. 300.
Mendenhall letter, quoted in Louise Barry, "Kansas Before 1854: A Revised Annals," Kansas Historical Quarterly VXXX, 1964, pg. 552.
Ann Archbold, A Book for the Married and Single, the Grave and the Gay, (East Plainfield, Ohio: Practical Preacher, 1850) Pg. 70.

The photograph is the West Building at the Shawnee Indian Mission State Historic Site in 2004.

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