Kansas Territorial
Sesquicentennial Commission

Week of May 2 - 8, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

During the first week in May, Anna Marie Goodell traveled up the Missouri on the boat Sam Cloon, which had debarked from St. Louis a week earlier and arrived on the 1st at the river port of Kansas, Missouri. Anna and friend Elizabeth Austin had left families in Vermillion, Ohio, to join their husbands who'd made claims near Puget Sound. Anna, 22 years old with a two-month-old baby, kept track in her diary of the six-day trip from Kansas up to Council Bluffs, Iowa, where they left the river to begin their overland journey. The river trip, about 200 miles by road today, lasted nearly a week due to the many ports the boat visited as it meandered from the Missouri to the Kansas side of the river. River men considered the Missouri particularly difficult to navigate. People also considered it particularly muddy, but they drank the river water anyway, often remarking on how many days it took for the dirt to silt out before the water was palatable.

The Sam Cloon spent the night of May 2nd stuck on a sandbar north of the city of Kansas. The next morning, "a beautiful morning," Anna noted, found them free. Before noon, they arrived at Ft. Leavenworth. The afternoon stop was Weston, Missouri, where she "saw a great many wagons and oxen and horses ready to start to California and Oregon."

Weston was the center of commerce for western Missouri, far more important than the twin towns of Kansas and Westport. In 1854, Weston boasted 5,000 residents and a Missouri river port second only to St. Louis. Today, Weston is frozen at it's point of glory by a combination of geology and politics. The river abandoned the town after an 1858 flood and the railroad builders of the 1860s bypassed it for Kansas City.

The Sam Cloon stopped at St. Joseph for an hour on the 3rd. "Don't get along very fast," noted Anna as snags of tangled trees clogged the river. On the 4th, the boat left Iowa Point at Kansas's northeastern edge. The next day found them stalled by shallow water. "Dare not go any farther for fear of running aground, so the Captain has taken a small boat and gone to find a channel." They finally reached Council Bluffs on the 6th.

Sarah Sutton's party was, in the first week of May, already 100 miles into their overland journey. On the 2nd they crossed the boundary into the new Nebraska territory. "Very cool morning. Froze ice over the pans of water.. passed over [the most] beautiful land that ever was seen but no timber." As they crossed the Nemaha River, the toll keeper told them he'd counted 10,000 head of cattle and 118 wagons ahead of them. Our imaginary image of the trails with their grassy wagon ruts leaves no room for more accurate pictures of a cow path trod by tens of thousands of cattle.

This week's image is a photo of a wagon train from the National Archives.

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Anna Maria Goodell, "Vermillion Wagon Train Diaries, 1854." Sarah Sutton, "A Travel Diary in 1854." Kenneth L. Holmes, editor. Covered Wagon Women, Volume 7, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987) Pp. 35-37, 90-92.

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Week of May 9 - 15, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

On May 10, 1854, the world was scheduled to come to an end. Millerites, followers of an apocalyptic New York prophet named William Miller, believed that his precise calculations based on literal Biblical interpretation predicted the second coming of Christ. Miller first foretold that the last day would be October 22, 1844, inspiring the faithful to quit their jobs, sell their land and wait. Sunrise on the morning of October 23rd astonished over 100,000 Millerites, an event that came to be known as "The Great Disappointment." Undaunted, Miller rescheduled the apocalypse several times, losing more adherents with each disappointing sunrise. After daylight on May 11, 1854, die-hard Millerites recalculated an end date of May 19, 1855.

But for the Shawnee tribe a part of their world did come to an end on May 10th. Tribal leaders brought to Washington by the Reverend Thomas Johnson signed over a million and a half acres to the U.S. government. The treaty excepted 200,000 acres for those Shawnee who wished to remain in northeastern Kansas. People who consented to become farmers would accept deeds to 200 acre parcels, a plan that never was carried out.

Throughout the spring of 1854, talk of apocalypse was in the air. Rhetoricians prophesied the end of liberty at each step in the Kansas Nebraska Bill's journey through the legislative process. By May 15th, the Bill was lodged in Congressional committee in one more attempt to kill it. Stephen Douglas, a skillful dealmaker as all successful Senators must be, worked to extricate his bill by persuading three representatives viewed as "anti-Nebraska" into changing position. One Northerner, Nathaniel P. Banks of Massachusetts, and two Westerners, John Wentworth of Chicago and James Henry Lane of Indiana, added to the two-thirds majority Douglas needed to remove the latest roadblock. Lane's vote would surprise his hometown. On the morning of the 15th, the Lawrenceburgh Independent Press had noted, "J. H. Lane is opposed to the Douglas Nebraska Bill. We are glad to hear this. It is indeed what we had reason to expect from the position he took when canvassing the district."

Historians do not know what Douglas promised, but Banks was soon elected Speaker of the House. Gossips long alleged that James Lane had been promised the Senate seat he desired.

Voting with Douglas, however, did few Northern politicians any good in the short run. Weeks earlier Washington insider Benjamin French had written in his diary: "I prophecy---and I hope I am a false prophet---but I do prophecy that if [Kansas Nebraska] is pressed through, that not a single northern man, from President Pierce down to the most insignificant politician who goes for it, will be sustained by the people of the free states!" (500 words)

This week's image is a painting of Tenskwatawa, a Shawnee, by George Catlin. Artist and model met in 1832 in what is now Wyandotte County. Tenskwatawa was, like William Miller, a charismatic seer. Catlin's painting captures the Shawnee leader wearing traditional dress that included a typical fabric bandana around his head, sometimes referred to as a turban. By the 1850s, most Shawnee wore cotton clothing rather than the skins shown here, but many of the men continued to wear red cotton headwear. The painting is in the collection of the Smithsonian's American Museum of Art.

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Benjamin Brown French, Witness to the Young Republic (Hanover, N.H. University Press of New England, 1989) Dairy entry, January 29, 1854. Pp. 244-45.
Lawrenceburgh (Indiana) Independent Press, May 15, 1854.

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Week of May 16 - 22, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

On the 22nd of May, the House of Representatives passed the Kansas Nebraska Bill by a vote of 113 to 100. The bill required two more steps in the legislative process before becoming law. It would be returned to the Senate for approval of the final form and passed to President Franklin Pierce for signature, steps that seemed assured.

The North's increasing indignation was reflected in speeches, meetings, petitions and outcries in the press. Most outraged were the anti-slavery newspapers, among them . William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator and Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, both of which were so inflammatory that Southern post masters felt at liberty to destroy them before they reached their subscribers. The Tribune was the largest anti-slavery paper, reaching over 150,000 national subscribers in mid 1850s, but the far smaller Liberator was the most infamous. Garrison and his newspaper represented the radical edge of anti-slavery politics. Garrisonians demanded immediate abolition in contrast to gradualists who advocated freedom for the next generation of slaves or advocates of colonization who believed a return to Africa in the best interests of the ex-slaves and the white citizens of the United States. Garrison and his followers came to the opinion that any political action was tantamount to sanctioning slavery, a position he dramatized in 1854 by publicly burning a copy of the Constitution.

The imminent passage of the Kansas Nebraska act seemed to radicalize even the gradualists. "Pierce and Douglas have made more abolitionists in three months than Garrison . could have made in a half-century," wrote Greeley on May 17th.

Settlers continued to trickle into Kansas despite feeble warnings by the federal government that they were trespassing on Indian land. The Army was obligated to expel illegal squatters, but the Pierce government with Jefferson Davis as Secretary of War refused to order soldiers at Fort Leavenworth to act. Many of the soldiers were among the squatters marking their plots with names carved into tree bark and other signs.

Immigrants on the way to California and Oregon in mid-May passed many small camps of would-be settlers sure their squatting would entitle them to the most productive lands once the former Indian reserves were surveyed and land offices established. Among them was Isaac Cody, a former representative to the Iowa Legislature. In 1853, determined to be the first to make a claim in the new Territory, he moved his wife and family of six children to Weston. With son Willie (later known as Buffalo Bill Cody), Isaac rode west past Ft. Leavenworth until he came upon a hill overlooking the Salt Creek Valley, a spot impressive for its beauty. Looking for a legal loophole that would allow him to occupy the hill, he obtained a contract to cut the prairie grasses there to supply hay for the horses at the Fort. With permission to build a temporary home and pasture his horses, Isaac Cody waited to hear of Congressional action on the Kansas Nebraska Bill. (500 words)

The attachment this week is a daguerreotype photograph of New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, dressed to meet New York's winter winds, which is in the collection of the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. Greeley, in his forties when photographed in the 1850s, had a reputation as a rather eccentric dresser, but the top hat and shawl were typical winter outerwear at the time.

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Greeley quoted in Frank W. Blackmar, The Life of Charles Robinson (Topeka: Crane & Co., 1902) Pg. 97

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Kansas Troubles: This Week in Territorial History #21

Week of May 23 - 29, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

The sun disappeared from the skies on May 26th, adding to the apocalyptic anxiety. An almost total eclipse was visible throughout the U.S. from the Missouri River to the Atlantic. Anti-slavery advocates seized upon the event as an appropriate metaphor in the week the Senate again approved the Kansas Nebraska Bill. "The sun has set for the last time upon.liberties..Tomorrow's sun will rise in dim eclipse over them," mourned William Seward of New York to his fellow Senators.

In Boston, the sun set on liberty for an escaped slave named Anthony Burns, when his ex-master persuaded local police to enforce the law of the land and arrest him. Burns had found his way to Boston in March. He wrote to his brother, still in slavery in Richmond, Virginia, informing him of his whereabouts. After intercepting the letter, the slaveholder traveled to Massachusetts to reclaim his property.

Until 1850, Burns's owner would have received no assistance from Northerners. An escapee stepping over the boundary between free state and slave was legally free, but Congress had legislated Northern assistance in Southern slave extradition with the Fugitive Slave Act. Burns's arrest was a dramatic example of public enforcement of an unpopular law, shocking Bostonians who saw southern slavery reaching into the city that considered itself the heart of liberty. On the night of May 24th, a mob of 2,000 blacks and whites gathered before the courthouse imprisoning Burns. Led by abolitionist minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson, they battered a hole in the door in a failed attempt to free him. The major casualty was a deputy defending the jail, who died of a stab wound. The mob dispersed and President Pierce called out the Marines to restore order and accompany Burns on his trip south to Richmond.

The attachment this week is a broadside printed in 1855 featuring a portrait of escapee Anthony Burns with imagined scenes from his early life. The broadside (a single sheet often printed on newsprint paper) is in the collection of the Library of Congress.

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Frederick W. Seward, Seward at Washington as Senator and Secretary of State (New York: Derby & Miller, 1891) Pg. 464.

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Kansas Troubles: This Week in Territorial History #22

Week of May 30 - June 5, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

Cannon fire echoed through Washington City on May 30th as supporters of the Kansas Nebraska Act fired 100 volleys to celebrate President Franklin Pierce's signature. The territories were now open for white settlement. Kansas was defined by three of today's boundaries, Missouri on the east, Nebraska on the north and the Cherokee Territory (now Oklahoma) on the south. In 1854, the western borders of both territories extended to the peaks of the Rocky Mountains, the continental divide. Daniel W. Wilder, in his Annals of Kansas, noted that Kansas spanned a distance as great as the journey between Boston and Sandusky, Ohio.

Settlers would elect legislative representatives to draft constitutions dictating a free economy or slave. Conventional wisdom in Missouri was that Nebraska, next to the free state of Iowa, would choose a free economy based on small farms. Kansas, bordering the slave state of Missouri, would likely be settled by slaveholders bringing a type of plantation economy built on hemp production, the labor intensive product that had brought prosperity to western Missouri.

Anti-slavery partisans considered Pierce the worst of the "doughfaces," Northern politicians with Southern sympathies. Consistently rated as one of America's poorest Presidents, he governed by delegating decisions to southern cabinet members and Congressional leaders like Secretary of War Jefferson Davis and President of the Senate David Atchison.

But Pierce's problems went beyond administrative style; he lacked emotional strength and just plain luck. By the time he was elected, Franklin and Jane Means Appleton Pierce had lost two of their three sons to disease. Pierce, an alcoholic, continued to binge drink while in the White House. Jane Pierce, a reclusive, pious woman, strongly opposed her husband's political career. Just before his inauguration, the first family was shattered when remaining son Bennie was crushed and killed in a train wreck before their eyes. The First Lady believed the trauma to be divine retribution for Pierce's political aspirations. Her years in the White House were marked by deep mourning.

Pierce's vice president William Rufus King was elected to office in the fall of 1852 while gravely ill. He took the oath of office in Havana, where he hoped the tropical climate would restore his health, but died there six weeks later. The Constitution had no provision for vice-presidential succession at the time. The President of the Senate, David Atchison of Missouri, took over King's legislative duties, but Atchison was never legally Vice-president (or President for a day, as folklore about him recalls.) He was an exceptionally powerful leader during the first years of Pierce's administration, considered one of the strongest advocates for the Southern point of view. Atchison's constituents in western Missouri considered him a hero for his stand on slavery in the territories and the Kansas Nebraska Act.

"Old Davy's" boys held a meeting in Westport on June 3rd, resolving that slave owners planning to emigrate to Kansas would transport their human property and claiming the right to protect it. Bostonians, on June 2nd, held a much larger meeting as fifty thousand people watched a shackled Anthony Burns march through the streets on his way to board a ship returning him to slavery in Richmond, Virginia. (525 words)

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Daniel W. Wilder, Annals of Kansas (Topeka: Kansas Publishing House, 1875) Pg. 46.

The attachment this week is a daguerreotype photograph of President Franklin Pierce that is in the collection of the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. They believe it to have been taken by the Boston photographers Southworth and Hawes during the 1852 presidential campaign.

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