USA > Kansas > A standard history of Kansas and Kansans, Volume I > Part 45
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After defining the boundaries of the new territory it was enacted as follows: "And the same is hereby ereated into a temporary government by the name of the Territory of Kansas, and when admitted as a State or States, the said Territory, or any portion of the same, shall be received into the Union with or without slavery, as their constitution may pre- seribe at the time of their admission."
The enabling aet provided for a Governor and various other offieers, to be appointed by the President of the United States. The Governor was to hold his office for a term of four years, unless sooner removed by the President. It was required that he should reside within the territory. The legislative power was composed of the Governor, and the Legislative Assembly-a Council and a House of Representatives. The Council was to consist of thirteen members having the qualifieations of voters. The number of members of the Assembly might be increased with the inerease of the population of the Territory. The Governor was required to take a eensus of the inhabitants and qualified voters of the Territory before ealling any election therein. The election for members of the Council and House of Representatives was to be called by the Governor, who was to deelare in his proclamation the number of members of the Couneil and of the House each district was entitled to. The Governor was to pass on the returns and make the declaration as to who was elected. His basis for sneh declaration was embraced in the phrase, "the person having received the highest number of legal votes." If a tie should result in any ease, a new election was to be called. The Governor was to select the time and place for the first meeting of the Legislative Assembly, the term of which was limited to forty days in any one year, except the first session, when a term of sixty days was permitted. The qualifications for voters were as follows :
Every free white male inhabitant above the age of twenty-one years, who shall be an actual resident of said Territory, and the qualifications hereinafter prescribed, shall be entitled to vote at the first election, and shall be eligible to any office within the said Territory ; but the qualifiea- tions of voters and for holding offiee at all subsequent elections shall be such as shall be preseribed by the Legislative Assembly ; Provided, that the right of suffrage and of holding offiee shall be exercised only by citizens of the United States and those who have declared, on oath, their intention to become sueh, and shall have taken an oath to support the Constitution of the United States and the provisions of this aet; And provided further, that no offieer, soldier, seaman or marine, or others attached to troops in the service of the United States, shall be allowed to vote or hold offiee in said Territory by reason of being on service therein.
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If it had been the desire of Congress to formulate a provision which would prove vexatious and troublesome to the inhabitants of Kansas Territory, no better paragraph could have been drawn.
The Judicial power of the Territory was vested in a Supreme Court, District Courts, Probate Courts and Justices of the Peace. The Supreme Court was to consist of a Chief Justice and two Associate Justices. They were to hold their offices four years, and they were required to hold, at the seat of Government, a term of court each year.
The Fugitive Slave law of 1850 was declared to be in full force in Kansas Territory.
It was provided that there should be appointed an Attorney for the Territory, and the appointment of a Marshal was also authorized. They were to serve terms of four years, but they could be removed by the President at any time.
The temporary seat of government was located at Ft. Leavenworth, and it was ordered that such publie buildings there as were not in actual use and not required for military purposes might be occupied by the Territorial officers by direction of the Governor and Legislative Assembly.
A Delegate to the House of Representatives of the United States was to be elected. It was not necessary that he should be a resident of Kansas Territory ; the only qualification appearing in the aet being as follows: "Who shall be a citizen of the United States."
In Section 32 was found the Repeal of the Missouri Compromise in the language already shown in a previous chapter. The final section pro- vided that all treaties, laws, and other engagements with the Indian tribes in the Territory, should remain in full force and be rigidly observed.
These sections comprised the enabling aet-the fundamental law of Kansas Territory. They were to the Territory what a constitution is to a State. And they had been formulated with the design of giving slavery everv advantage.
The white population of Kansas Territory consisted, first, of some seven hundred soldiers of the United States, who were not voters, as they were not legal residents of the territory. They were expressly disqualified for suffrage in the enabling act.
Soldiers were found at Fort Leavenworth, where there were two com- panies, consisting of thirteen officers and one hundred and fifty-eight men. There were also at that fort about seventy servants and members of the families of officers. Fort Riley was then in the course of construction. At that post there were four companies, consisting of sixteen officers and two hundred and twenty-eight men. There was one company, consisting of two officers and seventy-five men, at Walnut Creek, on the Upper Arkansas.
White settlers were found at Council Grove, where there were six trading establishments, with two blacksmith shops, and the Kansas Indian Mission. It is estimated that there were altogether thirty white people at Council Grove.
Isaac Munday lived at the Delaware Crossing-where the military
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road between Fort Leavenworth and Fort Scott crossed the Kansas River. At that point there was a post office. Munday was the blacksmith for the Delaware Indians, and there were some ten or twelve white people around him.
Attached to the Missions of the various churches among the Indian tribes were numerous white people, as there were at the trading posts. In the Wyandot Nation, in what is now Wyandotte County, there were a number of white men and women. Some of these were members of the tribe, and probably not citizens of the Territory under a strict construc- tion of the law. They numbered about fifty persons. In the Shawnee reservation there was the Shawnee Mission of the M. E. Church, South, the Shawnee Baptist Mission and Labor School, and the Quaker Shawnee Labor School. There were possibly forty-five white people connected with these institutions. There were Catholic Missions among the Potta- watomies and the Osages. About these missions were some forty white persons. At the missions of the Iowa and Sac and Fox Indians in Doni- phan County, and at the Indian Agency near, it is supposed there were forty or fifty white residents. The trading point of most importance was at Uniontown on the Kansas River. This was in the west line of what is now Shawnee County. Many of the Indians were paid their annuities there, and in 1854 there were probably twelve families living in that vicinity. There were other white people in the Territory, some of whom lived at Fort Scott. There was a trading post on the Grasshopper and one on the Blue. At both of these there were white families. At posts on the Oregon Trail whites were to be found who were in the service of stage lines and freighting companies. This is true also of the Santa Fe Trail. There were always to be found in every Indian community some white men. All the white residents of the Territory, when the act for its erec- tion was signed, numbered less than fifteen hundred, counting the mili- tary. Whether any of these whites were legally inhabitants of Kansas Territory at the time of its establishment, depended upon their attitude and intentions. If they decided to remain and become citizens of the Territory, they would be entitled to vote. If it was their intentions to return to some point in the states, they were not to be counted as citizens.
In 1853, when it was apparent that the country west of Missouri would be given some form of territorial government, it was decided that the Indian titles to the lands in that country must be extinguished. The Commissioner of Indian affairs, George W. Manypenny, was sent out to induce the Indians to enter into treaties surrendering their lands to the United States. In 1854 treaties were made with most of the tribes whose reservations adjoined the State of Missouri. The treaties were concluded at Washington, to which city the chiefs and principal men of the various tribes had been summoned. Knowledge of the terms of these treaties was withheld for a time from the general public, and it was charged that this was done in the interest of the people living along the western border of Missouri, and who were supposed to favor the institution of slavery.
The Missouri counties adjoining the east border of Kansas Territory contained a population of about eighty thousand whites, as shown by the
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Census of 1850. They owned some twelve thousand slaves. The popula- tion of the entire State of Missouri was composed of five hundred and ninety-two thousand whites, eighty-seven thousand slaves, and twenty-six hundred free negroes. The western counties were the most populous counties of the State. With the exception of those employed in the freighting and stage serviee over the Oregon and Santa Fe Trails, the population of Missouri was composed largely of farmers and small tradesmen. They were principally of Southern ancestry. Kentucky and Tennessee had furnished the greater number of the pioneer settlers, and emigration from those states to Missouri always exceeded that from any other section of the Union. Their forefathers had conquered the wilder- ness west of Virginia and North Carolina. These first settlers of Missouri understood perfectly the processes of subduing a new country, and of developing a civilization therein. By experience, inherited traits, and characteristics, and by proximity to the uninhabited lands, the people of Missouri were better fitted for the settlement of this new country than were the people of any other portion of the United States. Next to these in suitability for pioneers for Kansas Territory, were the people of Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and the western portion of Penn- sylvania. All these people understood the manner in which a new country would have to be settled and developed. They were self-reliant and conld secure a cabin of logs and plant such erops as were suitable to a new country. They were skilled in the arts of home-manufacture. In the homes of Western Missouri at that time, were to be found the spin- ning wheel, the hand cards for cotton and wool, the warping-bars and the loom. Many households manufactured their own shoes as well as their eloth.
A point which has been overlooked by the historians of both Missouri and Kansas, is this ; in Missouri there was a large element utterly opposed to slavery. The same is true of the states of Kentucky and Tennessee, at that time. Missourians moved into Kansas Territory in greater numbers than did people from any other state, and a large portion of those Mis- sourians were in favor of making Kansas a free state. It should be re- membered in reading the following pages that the majority of the Mis- sourians who made so much trouble in Kansas were not those who had taken up a permanent residence in the Territory.
The Missourians who became the Border-Ruffians were the followers of Senator Atchison. No justifieation of their course ean ever be made. In opposing the organization of Nebraska Territory, Senator Atehison often addressed the people of Platte County and other counties in West- ern Missouri. In a speech which he made early in 1853, from a dry-goods box, in the City of Weston, he defined his position on Nebraska Territory as connected with slavery.
He would oppose the admission of Nebraska into the Union as a Free State with the last drop of his blood; he would oppose the Missouri Compromise to his last breath; he would have that odious Missouri Compromise repealed, which made men either give up their negroes, or give to Northern eattle the finest farms in Nebraska. Ameri-
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can citizens should be privileged to go where they pleased and carry their property with them, whether that property was furniture, mules or niggers. On that question, when it should come up, he pledged himself to be faithful; that the Missouri Compromise should be repealed. What will you do if the Missouri Compromise is not repealed ? Will you sit down here at home, and permit the pigger thieves, the cattle, the vermin of the North to come into Nebraska and take up those fertile prairies, run off your negroes and depreciate the value of your slaves here? I know you well; I know what you will do; you know how to protect your own interests; your own rifles will free you from such neighbors and secure your property. You will go in there if necessary with bayonets and with blood. But we will repeal the Compromise. I would sooner see the whole of Nebraska in the bottom of hell than see it a Free State.
This was the language which made Border-Ruffians. Senator Atchi- son continued his rabid harangues after the organization of Kansas Terri- tory in his efforts to have slavery prevail. His utterances on this subject were always of this same nature. ITis followers were often instigated by his inflammatory speeches to perpetuate ontrages on the citizens of Kansas. They especially delighted to vent their wrath on any former citizen of Missouri favoring a free state whom they found living in Kansas.
In proof of what is here said concerning the Missouri people and their sentiments toward slavery, it is only necessary to remember that the followers of Benton were almost unanimously opposed to slavery. His faction of the democracy diminished in power and numbers with his successive defeats, it is true, but a great body of that faction remained loyal to the Union and opposed slavery. They became the rallying point for the supporters of the Federal Union. Among them were Hon. Frank P. Blair, who organized the forces at St. Louis in favor of the Union, and, with General Lyon, did save Missouri to the United States. In support of this position it may be said also that not more than 45,000 Missourians ever enlisted in the Confederate Army, while more than 200,000 were enrolled in the army of the United States. Most of these were militia, but in the matter of enlisted volunteers there were more Union than Con- federate soldiers.
Additional proof of the conditions existing in Missouri in 1854 is shown in the following extract from a letter written by the leader of the pioneer party sent out by the Emigrant Aid Company. It was dated, St. Louis, Steamer "Polar Star," July 24, 1854:
Nowhere has the Party been more kindly- received than in St. Louis. We are visited daily by intelligent citizens, who express a warm interest in the movement. We are assured that throughout the State the great bulk of the honest inhabitants desire just such a neighbor State as an encouraged emigration from the respectable inhabitants of the North would make of Kansas. The Jackson and Platte County resolutions are denounced in the strongest terms, and you will see that already the back track is taken, and that some of the papers in that section of the State are endeavoring to put a very harmless construction upon them, and one altogether different from the obvious meaning. We are told that at another meeting, held in one of the border counties quite recently, similar resolutions against Northern emigration were voted down, eight
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to one. We apprehend no trouble. Popular sentiment has been too decidedly manifested against the fanaticism of the late Jackson County meeting.1
1 The letter will be found at page 22, of Organization Objects, and Plan of Operation of the Emigrant Aid Company. Third edition, Bos- ton, 1854. It is signed "Charlestown," and was probably written by Charles H. Branseomb, an agent of the Company.
CHAPTER XVII
FORMING THE BATTLE-LINES
The debates in Congress on the Kansas-Nebraska bill stirred the country. Its enactment eaused enthusiasm in the South and indigna- tion in the North, but neither the North nor the South was unanimous in its attitude toward the bill. There was an anti-slavery element in the South. In addition, some slaveholders there were not in favor of the aggressive policy of the slave power. They were opposed to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. But it was impossible for them to assert themselves in any effective manner against the radical pro- slavery coalition, which had seized upon the Demoeratie party as a means of accomplishing its purpose. The Alleghany Mountain system projects itself into the South from Pennsylvania and Ohio to Central Georgia. Its whole range was inhabited by a people animated by the love of liberty. As a body these people were opposed to slavery. They owned a few slaves. They never faltered in their allegianee to the Fed- eral Union.
In the North there was an element subservient to the slave power. It maintained close political relations with the slave propagandists. For the Sonth, as a whole, loved slavery more than public office. It selected Northern men as its eandidates for President of the United States, caring nothing about who held that great office so long as it could control the policy of the Government.
Generally, the North was deeply offended by the repeal of the Mis- souri Compromise, and the South was filled with joy. In the Northern states there were meetings to protest against the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and in some localities this resentment engrossed the atten- tion of the people to the exclusion of ordinary affairs. It attained its greatest volume in New England. It was elear that the people there would not accept the Repeal without serious opposition. The people of the North had followed closely every step in the process of the enact- ment of the Kansas-Nebraska bill. By the terms of the bill, the great Northwest lay open to slavery. To prevent the South from reaping the full benefit of its vietory, there was no assistance in any appeal to the law-making body of the land. It was necessary that this appeal should be made to public sentiment. An appeal to the moral sense of the people is rarely made in vain.
There are always and everywhere persons anxious to enter any con- test as leaders. By hasty and ill-advised actions they often bring mat-
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ters to a deplorable issue. The theory of organized emigration was not a new one. America had been peopled to some extent by such emigra- tion. Many plans to colonize various parts of the world had been dis- cussed in the United States before the repeal of the Missouri Com- promise.
At a meeting held in the City Hall, Worcester, Massachusetts, on the 11th of March, 1854, more than two months before the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska bill, Eli Thayer proposed to fill up Kansas with free men-"with men who hated slavery and who would drive the hideous thing from the broad and beautiful plains where they were going to raise free homes." Thayer was serving his second term as a Representative from Worcester, in the Legislature of Massachusetts. He was a visionary man given to the evolution of fantastic schemes by which to accumulate money.1 He struck upon the plan of connect- ing the anti-slavery sentiment of the North with a speculative enter- prise to be carried out in Kansas. He says: "I pondered upon it by day and dreamed on it by night. By what plan could this great prob- lem be solved? What force could be effectively opposed to the power which seemed to be about to spread itself over the Continent? Sud- denly it came upon me like a revelation. It was organized and assisted emigration." 2
1 About this time Mr. Thayer was in some manner interested in a business in Kentucky. It was a factory erected for the purpose of extraeting oil, called coal oil, from bituminous coal, designed to be used in lamps for lighting purposes. Later Mr. Thayer was a member, the leading spirit, in a colonization scheme at the mouth of the Big Sandy River. The land was in the fork of the Ohio and Big Sandy rivers. There a town was laid out and named Kenova,-composed of syllables from the names of each of the states of Kentucky, Ohio, and Virginia. This Virginia scheme was probably the second one to be established in his great plan to build a cordon of free states across the South. Just what Mr. Thayer realized out of this venture is not known. John Brown was condemned for attempting to establish anti-slavery communities along the Allegheny Mountain Range, south from Harper's Ferry. These different plans were designed to accomplish the same purpose. Thayer made money by his. John Brown made none and lost his life. As designs for settling the slavery question, one was no more hare-brained than the other.
2 Situated as Kansas was, slavery never had the ghost of a show to impose itself on her institutions. She lay north of the accepted bounds of slavery. People migrate principally along climatic lines. Kansas was much more accessible from that country north of the Ohio River, and its line extended westward, than it was from the South. The farmer of the North was not encumbered with human chattels. He owned a farm, if a landowner at all, usually not to exceed one hundred and sixty aeres, and not a plantation. He could close his affairs and move to a new country much more easily than eould a planter eneumbered with a cotton plantation and his slaves. . Many of these plantations contained several thousand acres each. On them were hundreds of slaves. It requires mueh time and expense to elose up a business of such dimensions and move to a new unsettled country. Every effort to do this, by slave- holders, failed even in Kansas. How could it have been done in Wyo- ming, or Nevada, or Washington, or Montana ?
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Mr. Thayer drew up a charter for the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company immediately after the Worcester meeting. He presented it to the Massachusetts Legislature, where it was favorably reported, and soon afterwards passed. It was approved by the Governor on the 26th day of April. On the 4th of May at a meeting in the State House at Boston, a committee was appointed to report a plan of operation. Mr. Thayer was the first member of the committee, and another member was Edward Everett Hale, then and long afterwards classed as a mem- ber of that hermaphroditic aggregation known as Dough-faces. The committee made a report on the 12th of May. As this report was made the basis of the future operations of the company, it is here set out.
REPORT
1. The objects of this corporation are apparent in its name. The immense emigration to America from Europe introduces into our ports a very large number of persons eager to pass westward. The fertility of our Western regions, and the cheapness of the public lands, induce many of the native-born citizens of the old State also to emigrate thither. At the present time, public and social considerations of the gravest character render it desirable to settle the territories west of Missouri and Iowa; and these considerations are largely increasing the amount of Westward emigration.
The foreign arrivals in America last year were 400,777. In the same year, the emigration to the Western States, of Americans and foreigners, must have amounted to much more than 200,000 persons. The emigration thither this year will be larger still. And from the older Western States large numbers are removing into new territory.
Persons who are familiar with the course of the movement of this large annual throng of emigrants know that, under the arrangements now existing, they suffer at every turn. The frauds practiced on them hy "runners," and other agents of transporting lines in the State of New York, amount to a stupendous system of knavery, which has not been broken up even by the patient labor of the State officers, and by very stringent legislation. The complete ignorance as to our customs in which the foreign emigrant finds himself, and, in more than half the foreign emigration, his complete ignorance of our language, subject him to every fraud, and to constant accident. It is in the face of every con- ceivable inconvenience that the country receives every year 400,000 foreigners into its seaports, and sends the larger portion of them to its Western country.
The inconveniences and dangers to health to which the pioneer is subject who goes out alone or with his family only, in making a new settlement, are familiar to every American.
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