USA > Kansas > Kansas : the prelude to the war for the union > Part 2
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" The winged Hippogriff, Reform."
They did not melt into the great popular move- ments which their personal heroism, their bril- liancy of newspaper and platform utterance, their genius of moral intuition had made possible. Free-Soilism is the masterpiece of later abolition- ists, who, declining to abjure politics, entered the arena of party-building; but Free-Soilism reached its highest uses in offering a convenient rallying point for the great Northern uprising. That memorable outburst of moral indignation against the slave-oligarchy was no fire of straw. £
The comparatively insignificant anti-slavery vote cast in 1852 swelled, under its powerful stimulus, to a total in 1856 of more than thirteen hundred thousand. From this relative and partial success the mighty revolution stormed on to a complete triumph in the presidential election of 1860. Beyond that decisive event lie the tremendous
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years of war for the Union. " We are on the eve of a great national transaction," said Mr. Seward, in the concluding hours of the Kansas-Nebraska debate, - "a transaction that will close a cycle in the history of our country."
CHAPTER II.
THE FIELD.
THE territory of Kansas extended westward from Missouri to the summit of the Rocky Moun- tains and northward from the thirty - seventh to the fortieth parallel, embracing an area of about one hundred and twenty - six thousand square miles. The history of this vast, mid-continent re- gion belongs mainly to yesterday. Barely the life-period of a single generation has elapsed since civilization touched it otherwise than casually and fugitively.
Francisco Vasquez de Coronado is reputed to be the first European who visited Kansas. In 1540 he set out from Mexico with a small army of Spaniards and Indians to seize Cibola, a province situated somewhere in New Mexico, and rumored to abound in magnificent cities which the prose of actual investigation discredited into a few wretched hamlets.
Coronado's disappointments did not end at Ci- bola. Notwithstanding that dissuasive experience, he fell into the toils of a smooth-tongued fabling Indian nicknamed the Turk, "on account of his
2
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resemblance to the people of that nation," a ras- cal who vapored about a country of remarkable wealth and splendor lying far eastward across the plains and called Quivera.
In the spring of 1541 the credulous Spaniard broke camp at Tiguex, a province of the Rio Grande valley, near the mouth of the Puerco, to which he retired after a bootless exploration of Cibola, and began a new quest. In thirty-seven days he reached the Arkansas. Here provisions began to fail, and the bulk of the expedition re- traced its steps to New Mexico. The route of Coronado, who pushed on with a few picked men, is bestead with uncertainties. Nothing better can be offered in regard to it than conjectures more or less plausible. He appears to have advanced from southwestern Kansas " through mighty plains and sandy heaths, smooth and wearisome and bare of wood. ... All that way the plains are as full of crook back oxen as the mountain Serena in Spain is of sheep. . . They were a great succor for the hunger and want of bread which our people stood in. One day it rained in that plain a great shower of hail, as big as oranges, which caused many tears, weaknesses, and vows." The expedition probably called a halt in northeastern Kansas near the Nebraska line. One point only is abso- lutely clear - Coronado had been duped again. No rich spoils, no flamboyant fervors of architec- ture, were discovered ; no imperial cities
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THE FIELD.
" Such as vision
Builds from the purple crags and silver towers Of battlemented cloud, as in derision Of kingliest masonry."
It is doubtful whether any single feature of the expedition afforded the Spaniards more retrospec- tive satisfaction than the fate of the tricky Turk. Confessing that he had lured them into the desert to accomplish their ruin, he was promptly and it may be presumed enthusiastically strangled. This first reconnaissance of civilization upon Kansas achieved nothing of practical importance.
After the departure of Coronado no Europeans visited Kansas for an interval of more than a hun- dred and seventy-five years. Meanwhile Louisi- ana, a vast territory vaguely denominated as the region drained by the Mississippi and its affluents, passed into the possession of France. Of this enormous tract Kansas, with the exception of some unimportant territorial additions from the Texas cession of 1850, formed a portion. It was not until 1719 that Frenchmen found their way thi- ther. In that year M. du Tissenet, acting under orders of M. de Bienville, governor of Louisiana, made a hasty tour of exploration, found the coun- try " beautiful and well timbered," native war- riors "stout, well made and great," lead mines "abundant, ... and erected a column with the arms of the king placed upon it 27th of Septem- ber, 1719."
This cursory and inconsequential visit alarmed
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the Spaniards. In New Mexico there was a movement to save Kansas from the Frenchmen. An armed caravan left Santa Fé in 1721 on this errand, but it was ill-managed, and blundered into total destruction.
To guard against danger from New Mexico in the future, the French erected in 1722-23 a forti- fication called Fort Orleans, upon an island in the Missouri River near the mouth of the Osage, and M. de Bourgmont was put in command. During the following year Bourgmont made an extended tour in Kansas. With the various Indian tribes who inhabited the region he assiduously cultivated pacific relations. There were receptions, speeches, pipe-smokings, distributions of presents, peace- dances, and general assurances of profound and mutual regard. It is singular that the finale of this much-protesting intercourse should have been a tragedy of utter completeness and atrocity, but such is the case. In 1725 Fort Orleans was captured by Kansas savages and the garrison slaughtered. Details are wholly unknown, as not a white man survived to recount the story, and the stolid, close-mouthed Indian never broke silence.
The massacre effectually blighted the enthu- siasm of Frenchmen for explorations in Kansas. Indeed, from 1725 until the United States pur- chased it of Napoleon Bonaparte, in 1803, the ter- ritory dropped almost completely out of the knowl- edge of mankind - glided back into the blankness
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THE FIELD.
and vacuity of a terra incognita. The expeditions of Lewis and Clark in 1804-06, and of Lieutenant Z. M. Pike in 1806-07, furnish almost the ear- liest scientific and trustworthy information. A portion of it was traversed in 1819-20 by a detach- ment of Major S. H. Long's party. To these early American explorers Kansas hardly present- ed an attractive or promising appearance. The beautiful prairies of the eastern border,
"Billowy bays of grass ever rolling in shadow and sunshine,"
kindled their enthusiasm, but in the interior and to the westward they found a hopeless reach of desert, well enough for Indians-for white men untenantable. Lieutenant Pike considered " the borders of the Arkansaw river . .. the paradise (terrestrial) of our territories for the wandering savages. . . . I believe there are buffalo, elk, and deer sufficient on the banks of the Arkansaw alone, if used without waste, to feed all the savages in the United States territory one century." But the region could not support white men in large numbers even along " the rivers Kanses, La Platte, Arkansaw and their branches. . . . The wood now in the country would not be sufficient for a mod- erate share of population more than fifteen years, and then it would be out of the question to think of using any of it in manufactories, consequently their houses would be built entirely of mud-brick (like those of New Spain) or of the brick manufac-
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tured with fire. But possibly time may make dis- coveries of coal mines, which would render the country habitable."
With the establishment of American occupancy an era of migration set in through Kansas toward the Pacific slope - a migration at first slender, capricious, and without system, but acquiring ulti- mately volume, method, and persistence sufficient to imprint clear-cut trails sheer across the mighty plains. Traders, eager to seize upon new and in- viting avenues of commerce ; travelers, ambitious to compel the half unknown world beyond the Missouri to yield up its secrets; Kearney's sol- diers, with greedy eyes fixed on New Mexico ; Mor- mons, fleeing into the wilderness before the wrath of civilization ; gold-hunters, aflame with visions of sudden wealth among the mines of California, - such was the heterogeneous, intermittent mob that trooped across Kansas during the years im- mediately preceding the Kansas-Nebraska legisla- tion.
At the time of organization the territory was an Indian reservation, inhabited by about a score of native and imported tribes, among which a white population of six or seven hundred civilians had drifted, who congregated mainly around the mili- tary stations, the trading posts, and the half dozen denominational mission schools. The Kansas-Ne- braska bill ejected the Indians from their homes and sent them elsewhere. This consideration was
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THE FIELD.
not overlooked by its opponents. Edward Everett protested in polished phrase. Senator Bell of Ten- nessee denounced federal unfaith in the matter of Indian treaties, which " set aside at our discretion and trample under foot the most explicit and sol- emn guarantees." General Sam Houston made an impassioned plea in behalf of Indian rights, but the spoliating measure could not be arrested. The aborigines were successfully bargained out of the way. Some of them removed at once, and others more leisurely.
Thus in the heart of the nation there was staked off a great territory for experiments in popular sovereignty as a Union-saving expedient, a terri- tory substantially unhistoried, with no intrusive, meddlesome past that could mar the trial. Thither hurried partisans of the North and South - repre- sentatives of incompatible civilizations - to take a hand in the impending struggle. It was a cross- purposed and variorum migration, - hirelings, ad- venturers, blatherskites, fanatics, reformers, phi- lanthropists, patriots. That such a medley of humanity, recruited from Moosehead Lake to the Rio Grande, responsive to all the sectional ani- mosities which distracted and imperiled the coun- try, conscious after some vague sort that great destinies might hinge upon their mission, would transform the wilderness of Kansas into an imme- diate Utopia was hardly to be anticipated.
" So foul a sky clears not without a storm."
CHAPTER III.
DRIVING DOWN STAKES.
WESTERN Missouri, containing in 1854 fifty thousand slaves, worth at a moderate valuation twenty-five millions of dollars, was fully awake to the momentous social and political perils that lurked in the compromise of 1820. Throughout that region an uneasy, apprehensive, feverish state of affairs existed. The declaration of a large and representative pro-slavery convention at Lexing- ton, Missouri, in July, 1855, that "the enforce- ment of the restriction in the settlement of Kansas was virtually the abolition of slavery in Missouri," gave formal expression to convictions that had gradually become general.
Leadership in these graver exigencies fell mainly upon David R. Atchison, senator from Missouri during the years 1841-55, a man of commanding presence, social, generous, passionate, a stump orator of no mean order. " Senator Atchison
· may be considered the exponent of South- ern opinion," said "Lynceus " in "Letters for the People on the Present Crisis," writing at St. Louis, September 7, 1853. " In speeches he has been making in various portions of the State
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DRIVING DOWN STAKES.
he is reported as taking the ground ... that he will fight the admission of Nebraska unless it shall come in as a slave territory, or, at least, with the question left open and all done to foster slavery that is possible." Atchison de- nounced the restriction, and painted with a heavy brush the calamities that would follow if aboli- tionists should get a footing in Kansas. On this point the Lexington convention faithfully echoed his sentiments - " a horde of our western savages with avowed purposes of destruction would be less formidable neighbors." Atchison thought that the interests of Missouri required nothing beyond formal repeal of the offensive legislation which laid restrictions upon slavery. In that event Missouri would be able to take care of her- self, and of Kansas also.
The Missouri border abounded in igneous and explosive materials. Typical Southern folk of the better grade, intelligent, hospitable, courteous, high-minded, were not wanting. Yet other sorts of humanity had large representation : numerous and unhappy varieties of " white trash," demoral- ized veterans of the Mexican war, adventurers graduated from the plains or the mountains of Col- orado or the mining camps of the Pacific coast, - thoughtless, passionate, whiskey-guzzling, guf- fawing, unconventional men
" Who meeting Cæsar's self, would slap his back, Call him ' Old horse ' and challenge to a drink."
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KANSAS.
The border experienced a boisterous revival of pro-slaveryism, and the reputation of abolitionists, never very high thereabouts, sank into utter dis- credit.
No sooner had President Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska bill than companies of Missou- rians pushed into Kansas and seized upon exten- sive tracts of the best lands, not waiting, in some cases, for the Indians to get out of the way. A convenient simplicity marked their proceedings. The laws of preemption, literally interpreted, re- quired the erection of cabins and periods of actual residence : but exigencies are unfriendly to restric- tive and dilatory technicalities. At all events, they must not be allowed to imperil great public interests. That the squatter should simply notch a few trees in evidence of occupancy, or arrange half-a-dozen rails upon the ground and call it a cabin, or post a scrawl claiming proprietorship and threatening to shoot intermeddlers at sight, seems to have been all that was considered absolutely essential. These energetic first-comers were mostly amateur immigrants, - men who bestirred them- selves in the interest of slavery rather than at the solicitation of personal concerns, who proposed to reside in Missouri, but to vote and fight in Kansas should necessity arise for such duality.
On the 10th of June, 1854, more than six weeks before the arrival of the earliest New England colony, though disquieting rumors of invasion
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DRIVING DOWN STAKES.
from the East had begun to be rife, there was a convention of pro-slavery men at Salt Creek Valley to discuss territorial affairs. The senti- ments of this initial Kansas convention, - forerun- ner of an enormous brood of partisan meetings, - sentiments loudly chorused by the whole pack of border newspapers, took form in a series of twelve resolutions which, in addition to considerable frank advice for the benefit of abolitionists, an- nounced that slavery already existed in Kansas, and urged its friends to lose no time in strength- ening and extending it to the utmost.
Missouri leaders perceived the necessity and the expediency of immediately flooding Kansas with slaves. They believed at that time and still be- lieve, that this strategy, courageously and persist- ently prosecuted, would have won the day. Dur- ing the winter of 1854-55, B. F. Stringfellow visited Washington in the interest of an extensive slave-colonization. He unfolded the project in a conference of prominent Southern congressmen, and showed that servile labor could not be less suc- cessful in Kansas than in Missouri, a notably prosperous commonwealth ; that the territorial crisis called as loudly for negroes as for voters. " Two thousand slaves," urged Stringfellow, " ac- tually lodged in Kansas will make a slave state out of it. Once fairly there, nobody will disturb them." This not unpromising scheme elicited ample pledges of cooperation, not one of which was ever redeemed.
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KANSAS.
Several pro-slavery towns sprang up in the terri- tory, situated principally on the Missouri River be- tween Kansas City and the Nebraska line: Kicka- poo, a savage, implacable little burg, containing in its palmiest days twenty-five or thirty cabins, now utterly collapsed ; Atchison, christened in honor of the Missouri senator, second only to Kickapoo in political venom, but unlike that almost expunged hamlet surviving its early mistakes and growing into the most important town in northeastern Kansas; Leavenworth, ruled mainly though not wholly by Southern sentiment, which more than once maddened into deeds of brutal violence, sur- passing all Kansas rivals, during the first quarter century of its history, in population and commer- cial importance ; Lecompton, somewhat inland, political headquarters of the pro-slavery party, blighted in its downfall, rudely awakened from brilliant dreams to the realities of a ragged, straggling frontier village.
Early in the summer of 1854, rumors that pow- erful capitalized societies were forming in New England for the purpose of sending anti-slavery colonies to Kansas alarmed the people of western Missouri, and suggested doubts whether the re- peal of the old restrictive compromise legislation would eventually prove as fortunate for their in- terests as they dreamed. They had looked upon Kansas as an easy, inevitable prey, a likelihood almost universally conceded throughout the North-
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DRIVING DOWN STAKES.
ern States. " The fate of Kansas was sealed," said " The Liberator " of July 13th, 1855, "the very moment the Missouri Compromise was repealed."
In the midst of general despondency it oc- curred to Eli Thayer, of Worcester, Massachusetts, that the public had misread the situation ; that apparent disasters were only successes disguised ; that the calamities befallen the anti-slavery cause in Congress might be retrieved by tactics of organ- ized emigration, - a contest in which the South- ern oligarchy, much-cumbered and heavily shod, could not cope with freedom in its nimbler move- ments. While the congressional struggle was in progress, before the fate of the Kansas-Nebraska bill had been settled, he wrote out a constitution for the " Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company " and procured a legislative charter. Thayer orig- inally contemplated a formidable corporation, with a capital of five millions of dollars, by which he expected to control migration - the vast west- ering flux of natives as well as foreigners - in the interest of liberty ; to marshal it against the ag- gressions of the South ; to secure the territories in the first place, and then turn his revolutionizing agencies upon the slave states themselves.
The public declined to embark in this wholesale and magnificent project. Abolitionists repudiated expedients of colonization as " false in principle," and able to compass at best only " a transplanted Massachusetts," - a futile and unworthy consum-
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KANSAS.
mation, since even " the original Massachusetts has been tried and found wanting," - while the gen- eral skepticism took practical and disastrous shape in failure of contributions. The enterprise was verging toward financial collapse when Amos A. Lawrence, of Boston, came to the rescue and ad- vanced out of his own pocket the funds necessary to put life into it.
No organization was ever effected under the first charter. It saddled objectionable monetary liabilities upon the individuals who might associ- ate under it, and was abandoned. The whole busi- ness then passed into the hands of Thayer, Law- rence, and J. M. S. Williams, who were consti- tuted trustees, and managed affairs in a half per- sonal fashion until February, 1855, when a second charter was obtained and an association formed early in March with slightly rephrased title - " The New England Emigrant Aid Company " - and with John Carter Brown, of Providence, Rhode Island, as president. In the conduct of the com- pany. the trustees who bridged the interval be- tween the first and second charters continued to be a chief directive and inspirational force. Mr. Thayer preached the gospel of organized emigra- tion with tireless and successful enthusiasm, while Mr. Lawrence discharged the burdensome but all- important duties of treasurer. Among the twenty original directors were Dr. Samuel Cabot, Jr., John Lowell, and William B. Spooner, Boston; J. P.
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DRIVING DOWN STAKES.
Williston, Northampton ; Charles H. Bigelow, Lawrence, and Nathan Durfee, Fall River. The list of directors was subsequently enlarged to thirty-eight, and included the additional names of Dr. S. G. Howe, Rev. Edward Everett Hale, Bos- ton ; George L. Stearns, Medford ; Horace Bush- nell, Hartford, Connecticut ; Prof. Benj. Silliman, Sr., New Haven, Connecticut ; and Moses H. Grin- nell, New York. The company in its reorganized shape receded, at least temporarily, from all whole- sale projects, and devoted itself to the problem of planting free-labor towns in Kansas.
The facilities offered by the Boston organiza- tion, in addition to the obvious advantages of as- sociated effort, were reduction in cost of trans- portation, oversight by competent conductors, in- vestments of capital in mills, hotels, and other improvements which would mitigate and abbrevi- ate the hardships of pioneering. Though the de- sign of the organization was frankly avowed, yet anybody, whether in sympathy with its mission or not, might freely avail himself of its advantages. The obligations of the emigrants who went to Kansas under its wing were wholly implied and informal. Assuredly it offered no premium for extremer types of anti-slavery men. On the con- trary, a Hunkerish strain of conservatism prevailed among the colonists which naturally provoked crit- icism. " The Liberator " of June 1st, 1855, speak- ing of the personnel of the companies already sent
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KANSAS.
on to Kansas, remarked that "hardly a single abolitionist can be found among all who have mi- grated to that country. ... Before they emi- grated they gave little or no countenance to the anti-slavery cause at home. ... If they had no pluck here what could rationally be expected of them in the immediate presence of the demoniacal spirit of slavery ? . .. To place any reliance on their anti-slavery zeal or courage is to lean upon a broken staff."
The number of colonists who reached Kansas over the lines of the Emigrant Aid Company was not large. During the summer and autumn of 1854 five companies were dispatched, which com- prised a total of seven hundred and fifty souls. From the opening of navigation on the Missouri River in 1855 until July as many more companies were fitted out, though the numbers fell off to six hundred and thirty-five. About one hundred and forty thousand dollars were expended first and last in prosecution of Kansas colonization.
But the work of the Boston organization cannot be adequately exhibited by arithmetical com- putations. A vital, capital part of it lay in spheres where mathematics are ineffectual - lay in its alighting upon a feasible method, which was copied far and wide, of dealing with a grave polit- ical emergency, and in the backing of social and monetary prestige that it secured for the unknown pioneers at the front.
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DRIVING DOWN STAKES.
If volume and bitterness of criticism afford any trustworthy standard by which its efficiency may be tested, the Emigrant Aid Company played no subordinate part in the Kansas struggle. Doug- las declared that popular sovereignty was struck down " by unholy combinations in New England." In the opinion of Senator J. A. Bayard, of Dela- ware, " whatever evil or loss or suffering or injury may result to Kansas, or to the United States at large, is attributable as a primary cause to the ac- tion of the Emigrant Aid Society of Massachu- setts." Senator Green, of Missouri, said in 1861, long after the Kansas question had been practi- cally settled, that "but for the hot-bed plants that have been planted in Kansas through the instru- mentality of the Emigrant Aid Society, Kansas would have been with Missouri this day."
The principal representative of the Massachu- setts corporation in Kansas - the man who sus- tained toward it the most intimate and confiden- tial relations, and who mainly shaped its politico- financial policy in the territory - was Dr. Charles Robinson, of Fitchburg, Massachusetts. To him Kansas was not wholly an unknown region when the Emigrant Aid Company commissioned him as its agent. In 1849 he passed across it on an over- land trip to California, and was favorably im- pressed with the possibilities of the country. He participated rather prominently in the stormy experiences through which California passed in
3
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1849-51 -experiences which Kansas subsequently repeated in many of their salient features. Both contests sprang up on the border, abounded in anomalies and expedients for which little prece- dent could be cited, and exhibited all the law- less, blustering, open-throated peculiarities that distinguish such events. Not only were the types and sorts of humanity involved substantially iden- tical, but also, in a degree worthy of passing notice, there was repetition among the actors. Missou- rians in particular returned betimes from the Pa- cific coast to mingle in a fray nearer home. Rob- inson learned an effective lesson in the California school for the Kansas epoch.
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