Of knightly deeds and dreams.”
KANSAS DURING THE WAR.
Address, read at the annual meeting of the “Military Order of the Loyal Legion,” held at Fort Leavenworth, June 24th, 1887.
Commander and Companions: It is impossible, within the brief limits of an after-dinner talk, to fairly respond to the toast assigned me. “Kansas, in peace and in war,” is a vast theme. It is the meridian of American progress and American heroism. “Ad astra per aspera”—to the stars through difficulties and dangers, but always to the stars; upward, onward, higher, highest, no matter what it cost of labor, sacrifice, or danger—the record of Kansas, through every step and stage of her marvelous history, has been an illustration of her motto.
The Kansas of peace you who have gathered here to-night know something of. Its growth has been phenomenal in the history of American Commonwealths. Four hundred miles long by two hundred miles wide, this great heart of the American continent throbs with warm, ardent, and aggressive life and enterprise, and has sent pulsing through every artery of the Nation the inspiring blood of its splendid example, and the quickening vigor of its magnificent energy. Attracting the best brain and brawn of the civilized world, Kansas has fused all into a homogeneous and cosmopolitan people, whose achievements have been a wonder and a model for all the generations of men. In less than three decades the men and women of Kansas have wiped a desert from the map of America and replaced it with eighty-two thousand square miles of cultivated fields, and fragrant meadows, and towering forests; have dotted the whole of this vast territory with prosperous cities, towns and villages; have sent a locomotive whistling through nearly every county; have planted school houses and churches in every township; and have accumulated greater and more equitably distributed wealth than is possessed by any other equal number of people on the face of the globe. Fairly but very briefly summarized, this is the record of Kansas in peace.
In war, the history of the young State was no less eventful and distinguished. The flash of the gun at Sumter was, to the people of the country generally, like a thunderbolt out of a serene and cloudless sky. But in Kansas its echoes fell upon the ears of a people ready for the contest. The slave power had invaded this State with fire and sword. Around the homes of the pioneers of Kansas, during seven long and tragic years, the fierce tides of civil war had surged and roared. The conflict had drawn hither a host of bright, enthusiastic, daring young men, and had inured them to the hardships and dangers of camp and field. They had illustrated, in their daily walk and life, the sublime virtues of courage, patience, endurance, and self-sacrifice. They had measured the desperate ambitions of slavery; they understood its intolerant and destructive spirit; and when it finally assailed the life of the Republic, they were neither surprised, dismayed, nor unprepared.
The call to arms was, therefore, responded to, by the people of Kansas, with unparalleled unanimity and enthusiasm. Long before the President’s official notification reached the Governor, military companies had been organized in every city, town and hamlet in the State, and the first two regiments sworn into the service of the United States were not recruited—their companies were selected out of enough offered to form half a dozen regiments.
From that day until the close of the Rebellion, the representatives of the young State at Washington were kept busy importuning and begging the War Department to accept and muster in the rapidly-forming military organizations. The official records of the war show that, reducing the troops furnished to a three-years standard, only one State in the Union filled the quotas assigned it, and that State was Kansas. The General Government called on Kansas, during the four years from 1861 to 1864, for 12,931 men, and she furnished a total of 20,661—nearly double the number called for. Reduced to a three-years standard, Kansas furnished 18,706 men, or 5,775 in excess of the number called for.
The quotas assigned all the States were based on their population. The census of 1860 gave Kansas a population of 107,206, and of this number only 59,178 were males, and only 28,097 between the ages of twenty and fifty years. At an exciting election held in the fall of 1860, the total vote of the State was less than 17,000. The young State, therefore, contributed to the Union army nearly 4,000 more soldiers than it had voters in 1860. Such a record of devotion to a cause is, I venture to say, unexampled in the history of any other war that has ever occurred in any age or country.
Under the call of April 15th, 1861, for 75,000 three-months men, no quota was assigned to Kansas, but she furnished 650.