Kansas Territorial
Sesquicentennial Commission

Week of October 3 - 9, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

Albert D. Searl, a 23-year-old civil engineer from Massachusetts, spent the fall surveying Lawrence and platting the streets. Searl's plan, probably suggested by the Aid Company, imposed a two-dimensional grid over the three-dimensional landscape. His main streets lay in straight lines crossed at right angles by secondary streets to make rectangular blocks, a plat that reflected city planning trends of the day. Although raised in Massachusetts where most streets and highways followed the lay of the land, winding around hills and curving with the river, Searl's new town echoed William Penn's gridiron plan for Philadelphia.

Philadelphia was strikingly different from coastal cities such as Boston and Annapolis where European tradition was laid atop Native American communities. Englishwoman Frances Trollope found Philadelphia boring. "The city is built with extreme and almost wearisome regularity." Another English traveler characterized the street system as a "mathematical infringement on the rights of individual eccentricity." Charles Dickens thought it "handsome but distractingly regular..I would have given the world for a crooked street." Penn's plan, however, appealed to practical Americans like Dr. John Cotton. "Though an entire stranger, I can find any street and even house without enquiring. The streets are very spacious and clean and the sidewalks in every street wide enough for five or six persons to walk abreast."

Penn's rational gridiron plan became the western standard, so much so that a Western man like former Kansas Governor James Denver, visiting Boston after the Civil War was aghast. "The plan of the city! How shall I describe it? It is unlike anything I ever saw before, or ever will see again.. It is a perfect reflex of the New England mind---cranky, crochetty and full of sharp turns. There is hardly a straight street to be found in it. They twist and turn, make a curve here, and a sharp angle there, half a dozen converging to the same point, and each finding a new name before it gets three blocks away."

The Aid Company may have instructed Searl to look to Philadelphia for the grid, but they rejected Penn's ideas about street naming. The common European model of naming streets for the King or a prominent personage offended Penn's Quaker sense of equality. He honored, instead, the native trees of the Schulkyll River valley, naming the streets Mulberry, Elm and Pine and numbering the cross streets. The Aid Company followed the ideas of L'Enfant who, in designing the nation's capital, named major streets after the states. Searl's map named the north-south streets for the thirteen original colonies, beginning with the proposed main street of Massachusetts and stretching east. Streets continued west as states in the order they were added to the Union. Cross streets in Lawrence honored Revolutionary War heroes---Pinckney, Henry, Lee and Winthrop.

While Searl was mapping Lawrence City, the family of Moses Baldwin was planning the overlapping town of Excelsior on the same land. The Aid Company had paid Clark Stearns $500 for his rights to 160 acres at the bend in the Kanzas River, but their planned town extended beyond the 320 acres permitted by federal land policy. The Lawrence Association designed a larger town by adding private claims, some under false names.

Leavenworth lawyer Carmi Babcock represented John Baldwin, the most vocal of the brothers who claimed the strip of river land east of the proposed Massachusetts Street, but lawyers were of little use in a territory with no courts. While the Baldwins threatened to bring over 50,000 Missourians to back their claim, their new neighbors managed to out bluster the "whiskey barrel chivalry," as the eastern papers termed the Baldwins. The town was called Lawrence and the New Englanders' tents remained in place on Massachusetts Street, where they formed a "Regulating Band," also called the "Shot-Gun Battalion," after the October 6th confrontation.

In Lawrenceburgh, Indiana, on Saturday night, former Congressman James H. Lane was shot by John Vail after a fight begun by Lane who, according to the local newspaper, struck Vail with his cane several times. "This difficulty is supposed to be the result of an old quarrel." The bullet lodged just under the skin and was removed at the hotel. Lane "got into his buggy and went home." (701 words)

The attached plat of the city of Lawrence, drawn in 1858, shows the neat grid of streets that typify the American city.

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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 Collection, Kansas State Historical Society.

George Barns, Denver, the Man (Wilmington, Ohio: 1949) Pg. 326.

John Cotton quoted in Beatrice B. Garvon, Federal Philadelphia: The Athens of the Western World (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1987) Pp. 14-15.

Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (Reprint, Vermont: Everyman, 1997) Pg. 107.

"Yankee Boys Vs. Missourians," Fitchburg Sentinel, October 27, 1854.

[Captain Hamilton,] Men and Manners in America (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1833) Pp. 337-338.

"A Fracas," Lawrenceburgh, Indiana, Independent Press, October 11, 1854.

Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (London: Whittaker, Treacher & Co., 1832) Pg. 201.

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Week of October 10 - 16, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

By October, Anna Maria Goodell, who'd trekked across eastern Kansas in May, arrived at her destination, Grand Mound, Thurston County, Washington Territory. Her mother-in-law "had supper all ready when we got there.. O, how glad I was to sit at a table and eat like folks and to sleep in a house on a bedstead." Sarah Sutton's children were establishing new homes in the Willamette Valley of the Oregon Territory without Sarah, who'd died a few weeks earlier in the Tygh Valley east of Mt. Hood. Weakened by malaria, the "Illinois Ague," Sarah, 48 years old, was buried on the Oregon Trail in a shroud she had brought along and a coffin made of boards her family had prudently packed for just such an event.

On the other side of the continent, New York businessmen faced a financial panic. Stock prices fell all summer, banks were now defaulting and newspapers reported that dishonest brokers had been issuing worthless stock. Shipbuilding, a lynchpin of the national economy, was dealt a serious blow by an October disaster when the trans-Atlantic steamer Arctic collided with a French ship and sank, drowning 200 passengers while the crew escaped in the lifeboats. The ship company's stock soon sank too.

In Boston, the Know-Nothings, once a secret political organization called the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, held their first state convention with 1500 acknowledged members dedicated to Native Americanism. The Know Nothings enjoyed their greatest growth in the 1854-1855 political seasons as Irish escaping famine and Germans fleeing political unrest took over the northeast's unskilled jobs. Half of Boston was now Irish. Many Americans feared the immigrant influx, worrying they would change the economy and the culture. The Irish drew the most contempt but the Germans were also ostracized and ridiculed. German-speaking refugees were generally referred to as the Dutch, an Americanization of Deutsch, and their name for themselves.

The Know-Nothings' anti-foreign platform, dedicated to curtailing immigration and preventing foreign-born office holders, was summarized in a song that Charles W. Marsh remembered years later:

"If I was president of the United States
I'd arrange my business accordin';
The n[egros] I would sell
The Irish send to hell,
And the Dutch to the other side of Jordan."

Amos Lawrence, owner of several factories employing the new immigrants, received a letter from Charles Robinson, his chief agent in Kansas. Apparently, Lawrence was distressed to hear that the men he'd sent to the territory intended to name their settlement after him. Robinson, writing on October 16th, explained that Lawrence's protest arrived "too late to influence the action of the citizens."

Lawrence must have asked that they maintain the name Wakarusa, by which the area had been known for years. Robinson explained the townspeople's objections. First, the town was not situated on that river. Second, and perhaps most important, the townspeople had discovered the word "Wakarusa" was immodest. "It is said to mean 'not up to the middle,'" as Robinson delicately phrased it. "Hip deep" was another contemporary translation of a concept we might describe as "crotch high." Amos Lawrence acquiesced and the free-state town kept his name.

Pierce appointees were arriving in the Territory to take over their new positions. Governor Andrew Reeder had set up an office at Fort Leavenworth, where he scheduled the first election to be held in the territory on November 29th. As a territory, Kansas was entitled to one congressman with no vote. This election would replace earlier illegally elected representatives Thomas Johnson and William Walker.

From Pennsylvania, Reeder had brought with him Democrat Robert P. Flenniken. W. J. Osborn, editor of the Leavenworth Kansas Herald, recalled meeting Flenniken on his trip from Uniontown, Pennsylvania, to Kansas and discussing career plans. If Flenniken won the November election he'd bring his family to the territory; if he lost he'd move to Pittsburgh. Flenniken solicited the Herald's support for his candidacy, which advocated the official Democrat position favoring the repeal of the Missouri Compromise.

The attachment is an old postcard picturing the Wakarusa River at Dutchman's Crossing, a placename now forgotten. The photo is from the Watkins Museum web site Wish You Were Here! Early Postcards of Lawrence. www.ci.lawrence.ks.us

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C. W. Marsh, Recollections 1837-1910 (Chicago: Farm Implement News Co., 1910) Pg 73.

Letter Charles Robinson to Amos Lawrence, October 16, 1854, transcript, Manuscript Collection, Kansas State Historical Society.

Anna Maria Goodell, "Vermillion Wagon Train Diaries, 1854." Kenneth L. Holmes, editor. Covered Wagon Women, Volume 7, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987) Pg.128.

W. J. Osborn, Congressional testimony, Report of the Special Committee, 1856 (Howard Report) Pg. 1131.

Sarah Sutton, "A Travel Diary in 1854." Kenneth L. Holmes, editor. Covered Wagon Women, Volume 7, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987) Pp. 15-16.

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Week of October 17 - 23, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

On October 21st, George W. Brown printed the first edition of The Herald of Freedom, the official organ of the New England Emigrant Aid Company in the Kansas Territory. The paper's masthead declared it to be from the town of Wakarusa, Kansas Territory, although Brown and his newspaper remained in Conneautville, Pennsylvania. "We had expected to have been on the ground in Kansas.but we were delayed in our departure, waiting for a rise in the Ohio River," he later explained. The Conneautville party finally left the next week.

In Peoria, Illinois, on October 18th, Abraham Lincoln continued his round of speeches against Stephen Douglas's policy of "Squatter Sovereignty" and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. The Kansas situation was bound to bring violence, he predicted. "Will not the first drop of blood so shed be the real [death] knell of the Union?"

In October, Lincoln and Douglas debated at the State Fair in Springfield. Lincoln, a Whig, and Douglas, a Democrat, had often appeared at the same political barbecue or rally. They had met twenty years earlier, remembered Lincoln, both ambitious young men. "With me," he wrote in 1856, "the race of ambition has been a failure---a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success."

They were joined in this debate by Douglas supporter John Calhoun, also admired for his speaking style. Lincoln and Calhoun had also been appearing on the same political stage since the candidacy of Martin Van Buren. Always on opposite sides of issues from tariffs to slavery, they remained friends despite Lincoln's victory over Calhoun in an 1836 race for the state legislature. Springfield lawyer William H. Herndon characterized Calhoun as a strong and clear-headed speaker in the 1840s, "Lincoln's equal and the superior of Douglas." "I have heard Stephen A. Douglas say that the only man he dreaded in a political debate was Calhoun," recalled Kansan Jack Henderson years after all three politicians had passed from the scene.

But in 1854, Calhoun, after serving as Springfield's mayor, appeared to have no political future. Alcoholism was a factor. He had, wrote a 19th-century historian, "few equals in point of ability, but he lacked energy and was the slave of the cup." Herndon agreed: "Whisky ruined him long before he went to Kansas."

Calhoun's long friendship with Douglas and support for the local Democrat party inspired Illinoisans to suggest him as Surveyor-General for the new territories. Springfield's postmaster wrote Douglas that Calhoun needed a job and his drinking was under control. "He is doing nothing, and is as poor as men generally get to be.. In justice to Calhoun, I will also state that his habits are, and have been for more than a year unexceptionable."

Douglas may have sympathized with Calhoun's notoriety as a drinker. He had a similar reputation. Lincoln recalled that when he kept a grocery store, he sold whiskey and "Mr. Douglas was one of my best customers." After his first wife's death in 1853, Douglas's reliance on alcohol increased. A trip to Europe revived his spirits and the 1854 Kansas Nebraska Bill revived his career. But alcohol continued to be a problem, despite his second marriage in 1856 when "he became more tidy and trim in his appearance, and more careful in his habits, although even then there were rumors of occasional excesses," recalled politician Carl Schurz. "There was something in his manners which very strongly smacked of the bar-room.Once at a night session of the Senate I saw him after a boisterous speech, throw himself upon the lap of a brother senator and loll there, talking and laughing."

Douglas's support assured Calhoun of the Surveyor-General position. In late October, Calhoun left for Kansas and the formidable job of sorting out the claims of the tribes and the sovereign squatters. (631 words)

The attachment is a detail of an 1857 map of the Kansas and Nebraska territories showing Surveyor General John Calhoun's signature. The map is from Wichita State University's digitized map library.

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Alexander Davison, A Complete History of Illinois from 1673 to 1873. (Springfield: Illinois Journal Co., 1874) Pg. 645.

"Jack Henderson, A Border Ruffian's Recollection of Kansas," Arkansas City (Kansas) Traveler, March 5, 1879.

Letter from William Herndon to Ward Lamon, March 6, 1870, in Emanuel Hertz, The Hidden Lincoln (New York: Viking Press, 1938) Pg. 79.

Letter from Springfield postmaster to Stephen Douglas, quoted in Robert W. Johannsen, John Calhoun: The Villain of Territorial Kansas," The Trail Guide, Volume 3, Number 3, September, 1958. Pg. 7.

Abraham Lincoln, Fragment about Douglas, December, 1856 (?), Roy P. Basler, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953) Volume III, pg. 383.

Quote about Douglas's drinking, Leon A, Harris, The Fine Art of Political Wit James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States (New York: MacMillan, 1909) Pg. 37.

Carl Schurz, The Autobiography of Carl Schurz, (New York, Scribners, 1961) Pp. 116-117.

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Week of October 24 - 30, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

In October, the territory was cooling off after a summer described by Father John Duerinck at the St. Mary's Catholic Mission as the hottest he'd experienced in his eight years in Kansas. The mission's thermometer had measured 105 degrees daily for six weeks.

Yet Kansas continued to heat up in the press as amateur correspondents writing letters to their home newspapers captured the country's attention and inspired many young men to "light out for the territory" as Mark Twain later phrased it. William Lloyd Garrison's son George was among them. He "talks of either going to Kansas or to sea," wrote his father, "but we cannot consent to his doing either." Twenty-two-year old Edward Fitch, who arrived in Kansas City in early October, wrote his mother that when he told the high school teacher in South Weymouth, Massachusetts, he planned to go to Kansas, "he said I ought to have a straight Jacket On."

By the end of October, over 500 enthusiastic Kansas pilgrims had traveled west, taking advantage of the cut-rate travel packages offered by the New England Emigrant Aid Company. But enthusiasm waned when some encountered the realities of camping in a wilderness. Charles Loomer of Lynn, Massachusetts, with his wife and three children, never made it beyond Kanzas City. They decided to stop at the western edge of civilization, renting a log cabin in Missouri near the California trail. Discouraged emigrants, returning from the territory on the road by his house, warned him of the Kansas climate and landscape. Even in October, Kansas was relatively hot. "There is but one hill to be seen.timber is scarce and water is very scarce indeed."

Others complained about the Aid Company's travel arrangements, which George O. Willard believed had been misrepresented. For the price of their passage, about $35, emigrants expected cheap meals (20 cents) and half-price hotel rooms while on the road and at base camps in Kansas City and Lawrence. West of New York, however, hotel rooms were scarce and meals expensive. Many spent their nights sleeping on the floor. Once in Kansas City, they found the Aid Company's hotel overbooked. "We paid for, and were told we should have first class passage, instead of which we barely got third-rate."

Worse, in Lawrence there was no hotel, just a large tent, an A-frame building constructed of poles covered with sod and hay thatch, called by various names "the meeting house," the Pioneer House, or the Astor House, an ironic reference to New York City's best hotel. Harriet Litchfield and her husband Lewis of Cambridge, Massachusetts, managed the boarding house, feeding campers for $2.50 a week. Emigrants crowded the tent hotel, trying to decide where to go. The best land around Lawrence, the land with timber and streams, had filled up with claimants. Groups were setting out to explore the riverbanks south and west for other promising sites. Facing winter in a hay tent, a good percentage of the emigrants decided to return to the east.

In Kansas City, John R. Everett met Orville C. Brown who was planning a settlement at the junction of the Pottawatomie and Osage Rivers (also called the Marais des Cygnes.) On October 28th, after a visit to the junction, Everett wrote his wife back in New York that Osawatomie, a name derived from the two rivers, "may grow up to be as beautiful a village as there is in the West." The spot had limestone, clay, timber and river water, "excellent for drinking." "And we are there contiguous to some Indian lands, most beautiful and fertile, that are soon to come into market. One on the grounds will be much better able to take advantage of choice spots, than a stranger." (620 words)

The attachment this week is a sketch of the "St. Nicholas Hotel," in Lawrence, made November 15, 1857. Three years after Lawrence's settlement the hotel situation was not much improved. This log hovel was on the river at the end of Kentucky Street. The drawing is in the Kansas Collection, downloaded from Territorial Kansas Online.

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Letters from George O. Willard to the Boston [?] Journal, published January 7, 1855, and Charles Loomer to the Boston Herald, published November 10, 1854, quoted in Louise Barry, "The Emigrant Aid Company Parties of 1854," Kansas Historical Quarterly, Volume XII, Number 2, May 1943. Pp. 138-139,146.

Louise Barry (editor), "Scenes In (And En Route To) Kansas Territory, Autumn 1854: Five Letters by William H. Hutter," Kansas Historical Quarterly, XXV, 3, Autumn, 1969, Pg. 327.

"Letters of John and Sarah Everett," 1854-1864. Kansas Historical Quarterly February 1939, Volume 8, Number 1.

Edward and Sarah Fitch, Yours For Freedom in Kansas: Letters of Edward and Sarah Fitch (Lawrence, Kansas: Douglas County Historical Society, 1997) Pg. 21.

William Lloyd Garrison, The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1979) Volume 4, page 320.

Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

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