USA > Kansas > Douglas County > Lawrence > The Kansas memorial, a report of the Old Settlers' meeting held at Bismarck grove, Kansas, Sept. 15th and 16th, 1879 > Part 16
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At this glad yet solemn hour we have with us distinguished friends who have journeyed half-way across the continent to enter into our rejoicings. You come strangers to our section, but your names are household words around every hearthstone in every Old Settler's cabin in Kansas. We have made the record to which I alluded because you and others like you have stood by us and fought our battles with us before the American people. All along the weary and dusty way, the Old Settlers have turned their eyes backward toward the older States for hope and encouragement. The two Hales, the Sumners, the Thayers and the poets of New England, Seward and Greeley, of the Empire State, Forney of the Keystone, Chase and Giddings, of Ohio, and Julian, of Indi- ana-these men and others have been our pillar of fire by night and our cloud by day. Kansas never could have emerged from the wilderness with songs of deliverance upon our lips, but for their leadings.
This fact alone, it seems to me, constitutes your glory and our own exceeding great reward.
Before presenting the distinguished orator of to-day, allow me to call for the Marseillaise hymn of America, " Old John Brown."
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ADDRESS BR REV. EDWARD EVERETT HALE.
After the hymn, Mr. Emery, taking Rev. E. E. Hale by the hand, said : It is a great joy, Mr. Hale, now for me, to present you to the largest assembly that ever convened within the limits of our young State.
New England sends her greeting to Kansas to-day. You are proud of your own State. New England is as proud of you as you are of yourselves. You rejoice in your matchless prosperity. New England rejoices with you. You try hard, but you cannot try hard enough, to forecast the future which is before you. There are those in New England who paint as brilliant pictures as the boldest of you can do of your achievements that are to be. As the news of your congratulations of yesterday flashes up the Connecticut valley, and across the Merrimac, and down to the farthest town- ship on the Aroostook, there are thousands of fathers, and mothers, and brothers, and sisters, who read, even as I am speaking, the words of your pride and enthusiasm. They rejoice with your joy. They recall your memories of blood and of sorrow. They pray with your prayers, and they hope with your hopes.
New England has been indebted to Kansas for one great de- liverance, and that, I may say, came before Kansas herself was born. The Kansas-Nebraska bill, and the men who made it-and I was glad to hear yesterday that among the bad men who made it there were some very good men-the Kansas-Nebraska bill cut for the men of conscience in New England the cruelest bonds that ever tied their hands. It was somewhat as my friend Mr. Forney found himself-free to do what he chose, and to lead Pennsylvania at his will, after James Buchanan had gone back on him! It has been the distinction of New England from the beginning-from the time of Pym. and Eliot, and Hampden, and Cromwell and Win- throp-that she has always mixed up in her politics a great deal of conscience. People who do not understand her are apt to ridicule her new parties as "conscience parties," as they ridiculed them once as " Puritan parties." All the same, that is her way. In such a community, men of conscience, which is to say men of honor, felt terribly the entanglements which, in the process of time and the developments of this nation, were woven about them by the compromises of the Constitution, and of 1820. But with the cour- age of conscience, a very large majority of the best men of New England held their allegiance to the unpopular and even cruel leg- islation which had followed on those compromises, because they or their fathers had given a pledge and that pledge had not been withdrawn. The South held them to the compact; it held them to it with a cruel hand and insulting tyranny. The Abolitionist party winced under this insult, so as to accept the alternative which the Calhouns and Jefferson Davises wished for. The Abolitionist par- ty was willing to condemn the Union as heartily as even Calhoun, or
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Davis or the Kentucky resolutions of old times condemned it. It was willing at any moment to cut the tie, and let the slave States go with their horrid odium; let them sink to the deepest bottom where God might choose in the ocean of disunion. But, to the great body of New Englanders of either political party, this seemed as unmanly as it seemed unwise. They did not think they escaped the responsibility of this leprosy by sending the leper into the des- ert shrieking, "Unclean, unclean." They had taken the benefit of the union and of the compromises. They did not see that they had a right, when the other side was presented, to repudiate the contract because it came hardly. " Repudiate " was no word of their invention nor of their politics. It belonged to another state and another social order.
LAW AND LIBERTY .- Those are the mottoes of New England.
" O Law! fair form of Liberty ! God's light is on thy brow ; O Liberty ! thou soul of Law, God's very self art thou. One the clear river's sparkling flood that clothes the bank with green, And one the line of stubborn rock that holds the waters in ; Friends whom we cannot think apart seeming each other's foe ; Twin flowers upon a single stalk with equal grace that grow. O fair ideas ! we write your names across our banner's fold ; For you the sluggard's brain is fire ; for you the coward bold. O daughter of the bleeding past ; O hope the Prophets saw ; God give us law in liberty, and liberty in law !"
The New Englander does not know and cannot tell to which of the two his fanatic allegiance is more close. And when the two seem to be parted, when he must choose between one and the oth- er, then comes the tragedy of his history.
Such a crisis had come in 1854 and in 1855.
The old Whigs of New England and the old Democrats of New England hated slavery as thoroughly as you do; but their hands had been tied, till on one blessed morning of emancipation, the pass- age of the Kansas Nebraska bill set them free. That reason have they and their sons for being grateful to Kansas, even before she was born !
In fact, the announcement that a cool proposal was made to open Kansas to slavery waked the whole conservative North to union. Men had had a theory, till then, that the Southern states- men were men of honor. They supposed that at least they would hold to their word. And now and here was the announcement, that the promise of thirty-three years, confirmed by "no end" of enactments, was to be falsified. Men who had fought against the Missouri compromise to the last, had all the same assented to it after it had passed. Missouri had been admitted under it, and Arkansas and Florida; and now they were told that, because the time had come when the other side of the bargain was to be enforced, now it was torn to tatters. The honor of the South, so blurted on every breeze, proved to be a mere name. The solid South had no hesitation in saying that, in holding the nation to the
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compromise, it had meant nothing. It had driven a harder bargain than ever a Connecticut peddler made ; but the moment it had its pay it meant to break the bargain without even giving one nutmeg. In that proclamation of her shame, the South released all her Northern allies, in all parties. As Mr Forney has told you, even when the Southern congressmen voted for "Squatter Sovereignty," they voted merely in a fashion of speech for a gilded generality. In such double-tongued breach of faith, the solid North was set free. Who can keep faith with liars ?
The announcement released for action on the side of freedom two sets of men, who had till now been held back, enraged at their own inaction. There were the older men of both political parties -silver-gray men-who had held themselves bound in honor to maintain the compromises. There was the young generation which had never voted for the Missouri compromise nor in any way assented to it, which, all the same, had been chafing under the lash both of anti-slavery orators and of Southern slave-masters, as they ridiculed the Northern dough-faces. Such young men had seen no field for action. The abolitionists simply proposed a dissolution of the Union. This was, at bottom, but a confession of defeat. Of what use to the slave to take a desperate measure like that in the hope of avoiding responsibility ? They thought that this was but a very unsatisfactory proposal. And to go to anti-slavery fairs, to sustain anti-slavery journals, to sign anti-slavery petitions, to work the under-ground railroad, seemed to young America but a very milk-and-water business, even though the orators proclaimed disso- lution, and begged men to avoid complicity with slavery. Hun- dreds of thousands of such young men were chafing with indigna- tion ; not suppressed, because there was no field for the issue.
At last the bell struck for both these sets of handcuffed men. The South, by a mysterious madness, repudiated the Missouri compromise. A fair field was given young America for the battle, and on the instant young America picked up the glove.
Whoever thought that those fatal provisions were "glittering generalities," which gave to the first settlers here the right to estab- lish forever your fundamental institutions, soon woke to a sense of his folly. Indeed, any man who, in his study of history or in his forecast of history, keeps out of sight the processes of emigration, shows that he knows very little of the philosophy of history. Why, there have been men, and wise men, who have thought and argued that no tribe or nation ever made any substantial advance without this divine help of the advent of a superior race! So the Peruvians were uplifted by the Incas; so the Gauls were civilized by the conquering Romans. And, though one may not make that extreme statement, it is safe to say that the very courage, patience, endurance, enterprise and restlessness which go to the make-up of an emigrant, are qualities which, of themselves, by a law of natural selection, " winnow out the best wheat" from the harvest of old lands for the planting of new. If any man doubt this, let
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him study the blessing which Hengist and Horsa brought to Eng- land in that Anglo-Saxon emigration of tribes whose names we retain so proudly to this day Let him study the awakening by which Anglo-Saxon England in its turn was blessed by the inva- sion of the Normans. Let him study the new life which Italy received in the emigration of the Lombards. Nay, let him study the results which came to Spain in the invasion even of conquering Visigoths. And with us this Genius of Emigration, who had been chafing in the prison whose door the Solomons of another genera- tion had sealed, who was now set free by the fated folly of Jefferson Davis and those other fishermen of the South who were throwing their nets and dragging here and there-he was no bottle-imp to be fooled with by a conjuror-he was, he is and he will be, one of the great elemental powers which move forward the civilization of the world.
The "glittering generalities" of the Kansas-Nebraska bill said : "The first settlers shall settle its institutions forever." What more could our neighbors here in Missouri ask ? Jefferson Davis supposed, and Mr. Atchison supposed, that our friends here in Independence, Platte City and Westport would step over the boundary between night and morning, and in an hour stamp slavery on your soil forever. When that was once done, they knew that no freeman would ever come upon land thus cursed. Witness South Carolina, witness Arkansas, witness Mr. Davis' own Mis- sissippi. What freeman had ever migrated to such "sacred soil ?" Such was the hope and plan of squatter sovereignty.
But alas for the plan! The free North took up the words, and made of them no " glittering generality," but a terrible reality. "The first settlers shall decide this question? Very well, we will be of the first settlers."
It is in such words that young America answered the great challenge-when, as I said, young America picked up the glove.
All that was needed was some form of organization, enough to show all adventurers that they were not alone. Here was the great Northwest, full of young men and women who had drunk in freedom with their first breath. They had grown up under the ægis of Nathan Dane's ordinance, the freedom ordinance of 1787, whose language has been copied in every free-ordinance from that day to this day. They were used to the prairie, used to the open air, used to campaigning, used to be free. They had been held in the leash by their allegiance to law. The ordinance of squatter sovereignty was no gilded generality to them. It released them, and they sprang into the field at the call of Liberty. Thousands upon thousands of such men were ready to go down the Mississippi, to go up the Missouri, to make their homes here-our friend Sam Wood has told you how-the moment the prairie was open to them.
And for what did they come ? For liberty of religion ? They had that at home. For bright jewels of the mines? Thank God,
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they have never found them in Kansas. For virgin soil or home- stead farms ? They could have those in Iowa, in Minnesota, or in Nebraska; and that without a struggle. If all they wanted was freedom, freedom for themselves and freedom for their children, those were to be had for asking, without the flash of one shot-gun, without the crack of one rifle. But these men wanted more. They wanted more and they won more. It was for other men's children that they looked forward. It was for the future of the whole country that they looked forward. That the advance of slavery should at last be arrested, which had been as steady as it had been stealthy since Eli Whitney invented the cotton-gin. These settlers from the Northwest meant to establish that barrier, and to establish it forever-a barrier against which the surf tide of slavery should break, and dissolve like the invisible spray which plays over the porphyry headlands of New England. " Thus far shalt thou come and no farther, and here shalt thy proud waves be stayed."
It is this utter unselfishness, this fanaticism, if you please-I like the word-of the Northern movements, when the Northern mind is possessed with an idea, that the Southern leaders never could comprehend and for which they never provided. They do not comprehend it to-day, and that is the reason why they do not provide for it to-day. Mr. Jefferson never comprehended its grandeur nor its terror. In the only conversation I ever had with Mr. Calhoun, he occupied the whole time in describing this divine frenzy for an idea, as it existed in Cromwell's Puritans. But it was clear to me, even then, that he had no conception of its pent-up wrath, all ready to burst upon him and his, when the roll- ing wheel should strike the stroke, and the descendants of the Puritans, in the grand fanaticism of the nineteenth century, should be set free. Jefferson Davis and his crew did not suspect it, when in the glee of triumph they gave a joyful assent, as Mr. Forney told you, to what they thought these glittering generalities of squatter sovereignty in the Nebraska Act. No more did General Beauregard suspect it when he fired the fatal shot against Sumter. With that shot began the ceaseless march of hordes upon hordes of Northern freemen, the descendants of Cromwell and Hampden, and the men who charged at Naseby and Marston Moor, who would march and bleed and die and conquer, till the meanest slave in the whole land was free. And no statesman, Northern or Southern, will ever rightly lead this country, or rightly apprehend its forces, who does not understand the devotion of the North, when it is roused in one of its divine frenzies to an idea.
Now I am proud of my own Puritan blood. I am glad that I descend from a regicide. I am glad that my children descend from the pilgrims of Plymouth Rock. I am glad that my ancestors came over to the bay with Winthrop and with Dudley. That Puritan emigration was a noble emigration for conscience' sake. But, all the same, let me say, and that not for the first time, that the next
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great emigration for conscience' sake contained one additional ele- ment of moral grandeur. In 1620, those Englishmen from whom you are born left their homes in England to make other homes in New England according to the divine pattern, as they thought God had given it to men. A noble desire indeed, and kindly has God answered it. But in the next emigration for conscience' sake, which came after two hundred and twenty-five years, came when the freemen of Ohio and Indiana, Illinois and Iowa, and Michigan, the freemen of the great Middle States, and the freemen of poor, cold, storm-beat New England, marched and rode, and sailed, and fought, up rivers, over prairies, through friend or through foe, that they might plant Kansas, there was one other element of no- bility which that first emigration did not know. The Puritans sought to make a State for themselves and their children. You sought to save a State which you saw endangered, to save it forever for God and for mankind.
In this movement there was only one point of weakness. It is to this hour the weakness of all emigration. It is the danger that comes to the lonely emigrant. " It is not good for man to be alone." It would certainly happen that the Atchison people would put our friend Mr. Butler into the river. It would certainly happen that Barber would be murdered in the wilderness. It would be easy to pick off one here and one there. The great Northern movement must have the strength and magic of the great Christian word " together." There must be some organization, though it were the simplest, to give unity to the Northern movement. The lack of such unity would be certain failure, and here it was that the boding prophets prophesied failure. For the slave-holding in- terest was a unit, from the nature of the case, and acted as a unit without even meaning it or intending it. It was organized al- ready. The institution it was pledged to, compelled its unity of action.
It was at this point that Eli Thayer's work, in organizing the simple, abused, misunderstood Emigrant Aid Company, has an ex- quisite interest, as it proved it had an infinite value. As Gov. Rob- inson told you, before the fatal bill passed Congress, Eli Thayer had his charters from Massachusetts and Connecticut. Before the bill passed Congress, Gov. Robinson and Mr. Branscomb were here, in the work of the Company, looking up sites for settlements. Before the year was ended, nearly five hundred emi- grants from New England sent forward by this Company were here. They were not one-tenth of the emigration of that year. But what was important was that they were in compact settlement. They were in towns.
Now towns, gentlemen and ladies, towns and cities have al- ways been the fortresses of freedom. It was so in the crisis of Kansas.
I need not remind you of what Mr. Wood said so well yester- day. Why did not the ruffians wipe out his little cottage, and
10
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leave him and his dead in the doorway? Because they must first handle Lawrence. What struck the real terror into marauding com- panies, till they found marauding a bad business ? It is, as he told you, "the Stubbs" that are worth more than twenty "resolu- tions," and the "Stubbs " always form themselves in the intimacies · and confidences of men together. Man is a gregarious animal. We separate, and we are broken, as Æsop said, like the stalk of a dead sun flower. They tie us in faggots, and there is no heat so hot as the blaze of the burning !
Let me, then, in a few words describe the methods of the work of the Emigrant Aid Company. I have often heard it described, but almost always it was misrepresented.
In the first place, it never hired a man to go to Kansas, or of- fered any inducement under heaven to tempt him to go, if he did not mean to. All that stuff of the time about shipping paupers to Kansas was so much clear falsehood. Good heavens, we had no - need ! The whole of the East and North and Northwest was on the alert. Men and women were wild to go. We never paid any man's passage. We never gave a cent toward any man's passage ; not so much as a paper of popped corn to feed him on the way. If he went, he bought his own ticket; and when he came, he se- lected his own home. Only we kept our traveling agents coming and going ; we sent one of them with every party of settlers. These parties were apt to hold together, and from such parties grew such towns as Lawrence, Topeka, Manhattan, Osawatomie and more. All we had to do with the settlers was to induce them to keep to- gether. Together ought to be the motto of Kansas.
But the Company had other business as pressing. Mr. Mill or Mr. Spencer would tell you that these new communities must go forward only with such assistance as only the instincts of capital will supply. But I can tell you, my friends, that capital is very shy about sending steam engines and saw-mills and grist-mills and printing presses into regions which are the scenes of warfare, and where people who carry them are unpopular. It was the business of our Company to step in and do what timid capital was afraid to do. So soon as a settlement was made in Lawrence, it was our business to put a saw-mill here, and I dare say many a man who had never heard of the Emigrant Aid Company when he left Ohio was glad to have his logs sawed by the Emigrant Aid Company's saws. We used to head our appeals for money in New England with the words, "Saw-mills and Liberty." Where there was a saw- mill, there would be a town, we said. Where there was a town there would be a company of " Stubbs," and, when you had com- panies enough, you were sure of liberty.
So when our friend Mr. George Brown came to us, and told us of his grand enterprise of the Herald of Freedom, we were glad to risk $2,000 with him in that operation. And when his type was thrown into the Kansas river here, we were not sorry to hear that
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it had been fished out to be cast into cannon balls to fit the old Sac- ramento twelve-pounder.
But perhaps the machinery that will interest this audience now was more portable machinery.
In the spring of 1855, my friend Mr. Deitzler came on in haste to New England, to say that fighting was certain, and that you must have more weapons. The breech-loading rifle was then a new and costly arm. It was then that we gave to Sharpe's Rifle Com- pany, of Hartford, the first of a series of orders which became his- torical. In the next year, Henry Ward Beecher won the nickname which he has never lost, "Sharpe's Rifle Beecher ;" and I fancy there is no nickname of which he is more proud. With your per- mission, I will read the answer of the company to that order, and then I will ask our friend Mr. Adams to accept that letter as an historical document for his society :
SHARPE'S RIFLE MANUFACTURING Co., HARTFORD, May 7, 1855.
THOS. H. WEBB, EsQ .:
Dear Sir: Annexed, find invoice of one hundred carbines, ammunition, etc., delivered Mr. Deitzler this morning. For balance of account, I have ordered on Messrs. Lee, Higginson & Co., at thirty days from this date for $2, 155.65, as directed by you.
We shall be pleased to receive further orders from you, and will put up arms at our lowest cash prices to the trade, with interest added for time. The sample carbine for your use shall go forward immediately.
Our negotiations with you, I trust will be entirely confidential, as the trade in Boston and elsewhere might take offense if they understood we had made you better terms than we grant to others.
Your obedient servant, J. C. PALMER, Pres.
You know the history of that invoice, and of the invoices which followed. You can tell where our mountain howitzer is to- day, and I can tell you where it came from. But I must not dwell on such memories. It was our happy fortune to send to Kansas, in her infancy, the bells which should proclaim liberty to the land, the clocks which should tell the time from the towers of her churches, the books which children should study in her schools, the Bibles which men should read from her pulpits, and the precious chalice with which, at the Lord's table, men and women should unite in the cup of fellowship and communion. Selfish capital, eager for a reward, ought to have supplied these things, according to the theorists. But selfish capital did not do any such thing. These necessities of life were sent to Kansas, not by the meanness of greed, but by the voluntary contributions of men and women who were willing to sacrifice everything for an idea. These belong to the sleepless "fanaticism " of New England.
I am bound in mere gratitude to Dr. Stringfellow and Mr. Atchison, and our friends at Westport and Independence, and in all the border counties of Missouri, to say that they did everything they could to help us in our work in New England. My part of that work was lecturing up and down the country, and feeding the
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