Kansas Territorial
Sesquicentennial Commission

Week of August 29 - September 4, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

On August 29th, what was known as the Second Party left Boston accompanied by three agents of the Emigrant Aid Company. Positive reports from the Territory encouraged several men to bring their families. Sixty-seven men, women and children left the Boston railroad station to the cheers of supporters and the words of a poem. John Greenleaf Whittier, a Massachusetts Quaker who shaped current events into poetry for anti-slavery newspapers, penned the Song of the Kansas Emigrants just for the occasion. Several Vermonters who'd packed their brass horns immediately put the words to the familiar tune of Auld Lang Syne. As they crossed the country, the emigrants sang:

"We'll tread the prairies as of old
Our fathers sailed the sea,
To make the West as they the East
The homestead of the free!"

Their numbers doubled as sympathizers joined them. By the end of the week they'd broken into two parties in St. Louis, one aboard the New Lucy on the Missouri; the other in St. Louis waiting to board the Clara.

The drama was playing out just as David Atchison and the Stringfellow brothers had predicted. Four slaves had escaped into Kansas in July. In September, troops of poetry-spouting abolitionists armed with guns and cornets were picking up supporters in Albany and Chicago. By late fall, the Platte County Self-Defensive League claimed 500 members ready to defend Missouri against the slave-stealing army. Members of the League recognized each other by a password, "Kansas" or "Kan," and by a secret sign, a subtle addition to the wardrobe---"a skein of bleached silky hemp tied in a buttonhole of the coat." The hemp yarn represented the Missouri crop cultivated to fashion rope needed to bundle the cotton grown in the deep South. Hemp also signified the hangman's noose, a threat awaiting the abolitionist hordes.

The Self-Defensive League, the Blue Lodges and the Know-Nothings were just a few of the secret societies that thrived in mid-century male political life. America was a self-regulating democracy, where civilian armies, both secret and public, marched parallel to the federal government's professional corps. "Our republicanism was fresh and wide-awake. The edge of George Washington's little hatchet had not yet been worn down," New Englander Lucy Larcom wrote of the era when the major holidays were "training days," celebrating the civilian militia.

Towns throughout the country were required by state authority to raise troops to keep public order, train for national wars and keep a check on the federal government's standing army. Thomas Low Nichols of New Hampshire recalled the annual muster of the civilian militia in his home town. "Spectators gathered in crowds, drank sweet cider and New England rum, and ate molasses gingerbread.Our citizen soldiers were dressed in every kind of homespun fashion.variously armed, with [antique arms] captured with the Army of Burgoyne [and] fowling pieces, ducking guns, or rifles." Lew Wallace in Indiana remembered that most of his town militia were armed with "umbrellas, corn-stalks and hickory staves." The event "usually wound up with a drinking folic at the tavern," recalled New Yorker Horace Greeley. (509 words)

The attachment this week is a photo of a group of re-enactors dressed as militia men from the Northwest Territories (the Ohio area in the early 19th century). The rag-tag uniforms fit the nineteenth-century descriptions.

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Horace Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life (New York: Treat, 1872) Pg. 100.

Thomas Low Nichols, memoir in Forty Years of American Life 1821-1861 (New York: Stackpole Books, 1937) Pp. 440-441.

Lew Wallace, An Autobiography (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1906) Volume 1, Pg. 17.

Lucy Larcom, Memories of a New England Girlhood, (Beverly, Massachusetts, 1854, Reprint: Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith, 1973) Pg. 98.

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Week of September 5 - 11, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

David Atchison was traveling through his western Missouri district, campaigning for the spring Senatorial election as he gained support for a pro-slavery Kansas. On the 7th, he was in Liberty, looking well, noted the Liberty Tribune, "as well as it is customary for an old bachelor who has sworn eternal hostility to band-boxes and apron strings."

In the City of Kansas, the second group of anti-slavery colonists stopped over. Among them was a financial agent hired by the Emigrant Aid Company. Thirty-eight-year old Samuel Clark Pomeroy had served a term in the Massachusetts legislature and been a member of the Liberty Party, a single-issue party aligned with the most radical abolitionists. A graduate of Amherst College, he'd taught school in New York. The Fitchburg, Massachusetts, Sentinel praised Pomeroy's appointment: "He is cool, judicious, enterprising, and bold as a lion. He is also a capital speaker, and can inculcate New England principles in his public as well as private capacity."

As financial agent, he answered to Amos Lawrence, treasurer of the Company. If Eli Thayer with his impassioned speeches was the organization's heart, Lawrence was it's head. The Lawrence family made their fortune in cotton, establishing New England mills named Cocheco and Salmon Falls that transformed the South's raw cotton into the North's calico prints. As a "Cotton Whig," Lawrence balanced his reformist instincts with a tolerant attitude towards Southern slaveholders, but the Kansas Nebraska Act with its repeal of the Missouri Compromise had radicalized him. "We went to bed one night, old-fashioned, conservative, compromise, union Whigs and waked up stark mad abolitionists."

General Pomeroy (he was generally called General Pomeroy) was one of several agents authorized to pay for land, tools, construction and travel with the money Lawrence donated and raised in New England. How Pomeroy, a former schoolteacher, earned the title of General is a mystery. Albert Richardson in his 1869 book tells one story. On the September 1854, trip to Kansas, a fellow pilgrim said, "'Pomeroy, a man of the frontier without a handle to his name is a nobody. Now what shall we call you? You were once a member of the Massachusetts general court (legislature).' The newcomer was accordingly introduced as General Pomeroy and never lost the prefix afterward."

Richardson's story may well be true, but it was also a common joke at a time when Americans were inordinately fond of titles. As English immigrant Jean Rio Baker noted, "Colonels, Majors, Captains, Judges and squires, [were] as plentiful as blackberries." Twenty years earlier, Frances Trollope overheard a similar story in Cincinnati, when General M's war record was called into question. "'I was not aware of his being in the army.' 'No, sir.but he was surveyor-general of the district.'"

Moritz Busch explained the American fixation to his German readers. Aboard an Ohio River boat, he was amused to find "a cargo of such distinguished and learned people.. At breakfast I became acquainted with at least a half dozen majors and captains, and in fact, I myself was honored at various times with the rank of a 'Captain.' This matter, which leads to many a delightful caricature, is due in part to the militia and in part to the Mexican War."

The local militias were democratic armies in which troops elected officers whose qualifications included charisma, generosity with a whiskey cask and occasional military experience. Every town had a militia and with it a ration of majors, captains and colonels. The Mexican War of the late 1840s added officers with real field experience to the mix. By the end of the century, Civil War veterans who inflated their war records meant that a man without a title was indeed a nobody. Journalist William Allen White summarized the situation in his description of Colonel William Rockhill Nelson of the Kansas City Star. "Not that he was ever colonel of anything. He was just coloneliferous." (600)

The attachment is a postcard of a portrait of Amos Lawrence painted by Chester Harding in 1849, that belongs to the National Gallery of Art. If you'd like to see a color photograph of the intimate portrait of the textile magnate in his slippers and paisley dressing robe go to their website and search the collection for artist "Chester Harding" and title "Amos Lawrence."

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Jean Rio Baker diary. Kenneth L. Holmes, editor. Covered Wagon Women, Volume 3, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987) Pg. 226.

Moritz Busch, Travels Between the Hudson and the Mississippi, 1851 - 1852 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1971) Pp. 108-109.

Fitchburg (Massachusetts) Sentinel, September 8, 1854

Letter to Giles Richards June 1, 1854, Amos Lawrence, Letterbook, Volume 2.

Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (London: Whittaker, Treacher & Co., 1832) Pg. 182.

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Week of September 12 - 18, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

In September, a tobacco factory failed in Chariton, Missouri. Henry Clay Bruce, a slave who'd worked there eight months, was then hired out by his master to a farmer. Bruce worried about his new position. The farmer, fresh from Louisiana, was reputed to be a hard master to his thirty slaves. Bruce's job was clearing land and splitting rails, something he knew nothing about, and his teacher, a slave named Ike, spent more time telling stories than cutting logs. When the slaveholder came upon Ike sitting in the shade entertaining Henry, he cut a hickory switch and ordered Ike to remove his shirt. Henry recalled feeling "scared almost to death, thinking my turn would come next.. I had determined to run if called and take chances on being shot, for I could not and would not stand such punishment." Thirty lashes on a bare back was typical punishment for a malingering slave, but Henry escaped the master's wrath. Industrious and responsible, he was proud to recall that he served out his term, which ended on Christmas Day, 1854, "without even being scolded."

At the store at Salt Creek, near Leavenworth, K.T., on September 18th, Isaac Cody stopped to watch a neighborhood discussion. His daughter Julia recalled that Cody's reputation inspired the free-state men to ask him to speak in their favor. "He tried to beg off, offering every excuse [but] they grabbed him, and put him put on a big Dry goods box, and he seen no way out of it when they called out, Speech, Speech." While outlining his hopes for peaceful settlement of the issues, Julia remembered, Cody was asked if he was in favor of a free Kansas. His affirmation inspired Charles Dunn to curse him as "a Damed Abolicetionist" as he stabbed him through the lung.

The Liberty Democratic Platform reported the incident as a claim dispute. "Cody is severely hurt, but not enough it is feared to cause his death. The settlers on Salt Creek regret that his wound is not more dangerous, and all sustain Mr. Dunn in the course he took. Abolitionists will yet find 'Jordan a hard road to travel!'" While Cody recovered at his brother's home in Weston, his neighbors drove off his horses and burned the hay he'd laid up to sell to Fort Leavenworth. Dunn was never prosecuted.

On September 15th, a newspaper was issued in the city of Leavenworth by two recent arrivals. Editors Osborn and Adams noted "all the type.has been set under an elm tree.ourselves and our compositors have been, like the Patriarchs of old 'dwellers in tents' for the past two weeks." The Kansas Weekly Herald published an informal census of the tent city, estimating the "population of this town is nearly as follows: 99 men, 1 woman and 0 babies. Total 100."

During September, free-state newspapers announced a contest: "The Emigrants Aid Society will pay a prize of $50 for the best song, to be sung by emigrants to Kansas, en route, adopted to a popular melody or national tune." Whittier's Song of the Kansas Emigrants had been surprisingly effective. Sympathizers gathered at railroad stations to sing it as Aid Company colonists passed by. Prospective emigrants hummed it to keep up their spirits as they packed their belongings. Why the Aid Company felt the need for another song is unclear, but the promised reward of $50 inspired many to pick up their steel-nibbed pens. (570 words)

There are two attachments this week. The big rock jpg is an old photo taken in 1929 of a memorial to the first settlers of Lawrence. The Robinson Park jpeg is a photo of the memorial today.

This memorial, situated in a little triangle of land called Robinson Park at 6th and Vermont, is a rather odd reflection of the hubris of Lawrence's "old settlers." The rock, a pink quartzite boulder, was dragged from what is now South Dakota by glaciers and laid in Shawnee County on what the Native tribes eons later would call Shunganunga Creek . The enormous rock, so out of place in limestone Kansas, impressed the natives enough that they believed it to have spiritual significance. One night in 1929, on the 65th anniversary of the settling of Lawrence, a group from the town secretly removed the rock from its place of honor in Topeka, propped it up overlooking the Kaw and later afixed a bronze placque, honoring the 125 or so settlers who arrived in Lawrence between August 1 and September 15, 1854. Settlers who came on their own were ignored as were, following the practice of the day, the native people. The monument does not mention any members of the "third party" sponsored by the New England Emigrant Aid Company, who arrived in town three weeks later on October 7th. The door to being a true "pioneer" was apparently shut on September 15th, 1854.~

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Henry Clay Bruce, The New Man: Twenty-Nine Years a Slave, Twenty-Nine Years A Free Man (York, PA: P Anstadt & Sons, 1895) Pg. 69.

Robert A. Carter, Buffalo Bill Cody, The Man Behind the Legend (New York: J. Wiley, 2000) Pp. 19-20

(Leavenworth) Kansas Weekly Herald, September 15, 1854.

Don Russell (editor), "Julia Cody Goodman's Memoirs of Buffalo Bill," Kansas Historical Quarterly. Volume XXVIII, Number 4, Winter, 1962. Pg. 459.

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Week of September 19 - 25, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

On Sept 19th, Commissioner of Indian Affairs George Manypenny solicited bids from wholesalers and manufacturers to supply Native American tribes with goods they'd been promised in their negotiations with the government. The list of items published in the newspapers included the following textiles, telling us something of tribal wardrobe in Kansas:

200 dozen flag handkerchiefs
10,000 yards of Merrimac calico
35,000 yards of calico
8,000 yards of plaid linsey
1,000 flannel shirts
1,500 calico shirts

Indians living on reserves received annual cash payments plus tools, stock, food, clothing and bedding. Over the year, they could also purchase goods from the officially licensed traders on each reserve. Traders extended credit, debt that might be paid off by the Indian Agent or by tribe members flush with their annual windfalls. Gatherings for annuity payments took on a festival air, with traders stocking food, goods and liquor for their temporarily wealthy customers.

Realizing the problems inherent in this annual payment system, Manypenny advocated reforms, among them semi-annual installments. He also believed that payment in goods useful to farming would encourage acculturation better than cash. He was a Pierce appointee from Ohio, another Northern Democrat with Southern sympathies, another failed politician. Ambitions to be Ohio's Governor or Senator were thwarted by free-state leaders like Senator Salmon Chase who characterized him in a January, 1854, letter to a fellow Ohio politician: "I am sorry to hear that you have electioneered for Manypenny. I like him personally, but I would cut off my right hand sooner than aid him or any other man to reach a position in which he will make Ohio the Vassal of the Slave Power."

Manypenny had spent his first 18 months as Indian Commissioner traveling in Kansas, Nebraska and the far western territories, assuring tribes that ceding their lands was in their best interests. His signature was first on the treaties made in the spring of 1854 with the Kansas tribes---the Delaware, the Munsee, the Shawnee, the Iowa, the Sauk and Foxes, the Kickapoo, the Miami, the Kaskaskias, Peorias, Piankeshaws and Weas.

Samuel Pomeroy was staying at the Gilliss House on the levee between Delaware and Wyandotte Streets in the City of Kansas. The Emigrant Aid Company had recently bought the hotel to provide a safe haven for anti-slavery emigrants debarking from Missouri river boats. On the 22nd, Pomeroy wrote a letter to Amos Lawrence, treasurer of the organization, updating him about the territory. The hotel, eventually renamed the American, would be profitable, he predicted. It "will be the best property.to make money on---for a long time to come." A Philadelphian who'd joined the emigrants, John Smith, had come down with cholera and died at the Shawnee Baptist Mission during the week. More bad news included the steady stream of Missouri emigrants. "The roads are lined with teams from the border States. And in every fifth or eighth wagon you will see a sprinkling of Negro slaves." Pomeroy had spent the last week in "our new city," the town generally called Wakarusa, but he told Lawrence that "a majority are for calling it Lawrence."

On the 21st, David Atchison was in the Kansas town named for him, where he gave a speech that he described in a letter to his old college friend Jefferson Davis. ""[I advised Missourians] to give a horse thief, robber, or homicide a fair trial, but to hang a Negro thief or Abolitionist without Judge or Jury. This sentiment met with almost universal applause, and I could with difficulty keep the "Plebs" from hanging two gentlemen.We will before six months rolls round, have the Devil to pay in Kansas and this State. We are organizing to meet their Organization. We will be compelled to shoot, burn and hang, but the thing will be soon over.." (632 words)

The attachment this week is a portrait of John Gill Pratt and Olivia Evans Pratt at the end of the century. The Pratts were missionaries to the Delaware tribe during Territorial days. Like Commissioner Manypenny and many other bureaucrats, agents and missionaries, the Pratts might have had good intentions, but cultural bias, acquisitiveness, and western expansionism combined to create actions that today can only be viewed as corrupt and greedy. An 1858 treaty with the Delaware included a provision to give John Pratt 1,280 acres of their land and $5,000 if he could persuade the tribe to sign. The photograph is from Territorial Kansas Online.

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National Intelligencer, September 19, 1854, Pg. 4.

Letter from Salmon Chase to Ed Hamlin, January 23, 1854. John Niven, (Editor), The Salmon P. Chase Papers (Kent: The Kent State University Press, 1993) Pg. 382.

Letter from Samuel Pomeroy to Amos Lawrence, September 22, 1854 in the Manuscript Collection of the Kansas State Historical Society

Letter from David Atchison to Jefferson Davis, September 24, 1854. (This letter has been edited for spelling and punctuation) in Lynda Lasswell Crist, (Editor), The Papers of Jefferson Davis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985)

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Week of September 26 - October 2, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

On September 27th, John and Joseph Speer arrived from Medina, Ohio, to start a newspaper in the future territorial capital. After discussing the infant settlements, the brothers decided that Wakarusa/Lawrence, thirty miles from Missouri, was "hardly far enough west for the capital." Their assessment was colored by the belief that Kansas would be settled only along the eastern quarter. The territory beyond the junction of the Smoky Hill and Kaw Rivers could not be farmed. "Missourians inculcated that idea to keep Yankees away."

Having determined that Tecumseh, twenty miles west of Lawrence, might be the logical choice for a capital, they disembarked and spent the night at the only house on the site, the home of Thomas and Julia Stinson, the town's founders. There, they encountered a Southern Methodist minister who lectured about Biblical support for the Fugitive Slave Act. When informed that their newspaper would have a free-state bias, Stinson told them he could not encourage that editorial stance as it might drive Missourians away. The Speers "concluded if he desired to try town building exclusively on Missouri slaveholding enterprise he ought to be permitted to go on in uninterrupted happiness. We returned to Lawrence."

The brothers hoped to hire a job printer in Westport to print the first edition of their Lawrence newspaper, but again, their anti-slavery position won them no friends. As the week wore on, they considered returning to Ohio where printers took jobs regardless of editorial content.

In Pennsylvania, George W. Brown also planned to start a newspaper in Lawrence, but was crating his own press and newsprint to ship. Commissioned by the New England Emigrant Aid Company, Brown was leading a group of emigrants from Conneautville, a town near the Ohio border by Lake Erie. The Fitchburg, Massachusetts Sentinel picked up a story about him, printed on the 29th, entitled "For Kansas, Ho!" Brown, the article said, "takes with him a power press, and material for a first class printing office, with which he is to print the Herald of Freedom. He also takes a large bookstore with him, and expects to supply the people of the territory with their reading matter, school books, stationery, &c."

The Sentinel was full of such second-hand stories, reprinted from other newspapers in a system of "exchanges." Editors filling a four-page weekly newspaper printed a bit of local news, a column foot or so of advertisements and an occasional letter from a "correspondent" such as Daniel Anthony and Samuel Wood, who wrote the editors in their home towns of their Kansas adventures under their initials or a nom-de-plume like "Charleston."

The bulk of the "news" was reprints, unrestricted by copyright laws. National and international news was thus exchanged, as were correspondent's stories, which were picked up by newspapers around the country. A local editor with a free-state bias might comment on the story about Brown with congratulations, while a pro-slavery editor might lament that hordes of demented abolitionists were heading west.

Sunday, October 1st marked another anti-slavery holiday. In Syracuse, New York, law officials, empowered by the Fugitive Slave Act, had attempted in 1851 to arrest a runaway slave named Jerry, but were foiled by a citizen mob. The Jerry Rescue Celebration touted the Liberator, was the 3rd anniversary "of that enterprise which, in the future history of our country, will be commemorated as [more memorable] than the destruction of the Tea in the harbor of Boston.. If you can, rejoice together with the Rescuers of Jerry." (578 words)

The attachment is a cased photo from 1859 of a Kansas newspaper office, the Neosho Valley Register in Burlington. Newspaper offices were popular social centers. Newcomers came by to announce their arrival; gossip and political news showed up there first, and brides were obligated to bring a piece of wedding cake for the editor. The photo is from Territorial Kansas Online, a website of the Kansas State Historical Society.

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The Boston Liberator # 1053, September 30, 1854, page 3.

Fitchburg (Massachusetts) Sentinel, September 29, 1854

John Speer, "Told By A Pioneer," Bulletin of the Shawnee County Historical Society, Number 12, December 1950, pages 55-56.

"Douglas," in the Manuscript Collection at the Kansas State Historical Society

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