Under the auspices of this society a pioneer company of about thirty persons arrived in Kansas in July, 1854, and founded the town of Lawrence. Other parties followed from time to time, sending out off- shoots, but mainly increasing the parent settlement, until next to Fort Leavenworth, the principal military post, Lawrence became the leading town of the Territory. The erection of the society hotel, the society saw-mills, and the establishment of a newspaper also gave it leadership in business and politics as well as population. This humane and praiseworthy enterprise has been gravely charged with the origin and responsibility of the political disorders which folio wed in Kansas. Nothing could be further from the truth. Before it had assisted five hundred persons to their new homes, the Territory had by regular and individual immigration, mainly from the Western States, acquired a population of 8601 souls, as disclosed by the official census taken after the first summer's arrivals, and before those of the second had begun. It needs only this statement to refute the political slander so industriously repeated in high places against the Lawrence immigrants.
Deeper causes than the philanthropy or zeal of a few Boston enthusiasts were actively at work. The balance of power between the free and slave States had been destroyed by the admission of California. To restore that balance the South had consummated the repeal of the Missouri Compromise as a first and indispensable step. The second equally indispensable step was to seize the political control of the new Territory.
Kansas lay directly west of the State of Missouri. For a frontier State, the pro-slavery sentiment of Missouri was very pronounced, especially along the Kansas border. The establishment of slavery in this new region had formed the subject of public and local discussion before the Nebraska bill, and Senator Atchison had promised his western Missouri constituents to labor for such a result. From the time the unlooked-for course of Senator Douglas made it a practical possibility, Atchison was all zeal and devotion to this object, which he declared was almost as dear to him as his hope of heaven. When it finally became a question to be decided perhaps by a single frontier election, his zeal and work in that behalf were many times multiplied.
Current reports and subsequent developments leave no doubt that this Senator, being then acting Vice-President of the United States, [Footnote: By virtue of his office as President pro tempore of the United States Senate. The Vice-Presidency was vacant; William R. King, chosen with President Pierce, had died.] immediately after the August adjournment of Congress hurried away to his home in Platte County, Missouri, and from that favorable situation personally organized a vast conspiracy, running through nearly all the counties of his State adjoining the Kansas border, to decide the slavery question for Kansas by Missouri votes. Secret societies under various names, such as "Blue Lodges," "Friends' Society," "Social Band," "Sons of the South," were organized and affiliated, with all the necessary machinery of oaths, grips, signs, passwords, and badges. The plan and object of the movement were in general kept well concealed. Such publicity as could not be avoided served rather to fan the excitement, strengthen the hesitating, and frown down all dissent and opposition. Long before the time for action arrived, the idea that Kansas must be a slave State had grown into a fixed and determined public sentiment.
The fact is not singular if we remember the peculiar situation of that locality. It was before the great expansion of railroads, and western Missouri could only be conveniently approached by the single commercial link of steamboat travel on the turbid and dangerous Missouri River. Covering the rich, alluvial lands along the majestic but erratic stream lay the heavy slave counties of the State, wealthy from the valuable slave products of hemp and tobacco. Slave tenure and slavery traditions in Missouri dated back a full century, to the remote days when the American Bottom opposite St. Louis was one of the chief bread and meat producing settlements of New France, sending supplies northward to Mackinaw, southward to New Orleans, and eastward to Fort Duquesne. When in 1763 "the Illinois" country passed by treaty under the British flag, the old French colonists, with their slaves, almost in a body crossed the Mississippi into then Spanish territory, and with fresh additions from New Orleans founded St. Louis and its outlying settlements; and these, growing with a steady thrift, extended themselves up the Missouri River.
Slavery was thus identified with the whole history and also with the apparent prosperity of the State; and it had in recent times made many of these Western counties rich. The free State of Iowa lay a hundred miles to the north, and the free State of Illinois two hundred to the east; a wall of Indian tribes guarded the west. Should all this security be swept away, and their runaways find a free route to Canada by simply crossing the county line? Should the price of their personal "chattels" fall one-half for want of a new market? With nearly fifteen million acres of fresh land to choose from for the present outlay of a trifling preemption fee, should not the poor white compel his single "black boy" to follow him a few miles west, and hoe his tobacco for him on the new fat bottom-lands of the Kaw River?
[Speech in Platte County. Wm. Phillips, "Conquest of Kansas," p. 48]
Even such off-hand reasoning was probably confined to the more intelligent. For the greater part these ignorant but stubborn and strong-willed frontiersmen were moved by a bitter hatred of "abolitionism," because the word had now been used for half a century by partisans high and low—Governors, Senators, Presidents—as a term of opprobrium and a synonym of crime. With these as fathers of the faith and the Vice-President of the United States as an apostle to preach a new crusade, is it astonishing that there was no lack of listeners, converts, and volunteers? Senator Atchison spoke in no ambiguous words. "When you reside in one day's journey of the Territory," said he, "and when your peace, your quiet, and your property depend upon your action, you can without an exertion send five hundred of your young men who will vote in favor of your institutions. Should each county in the State of Missouri only do its duty, the question will be decided quietly and peaceably at the ballot-box. If we are defeated, then Missouri and the other Southern States will have shown themselves recreant to their interests and will deserve their fate."
Western water transportation found its natural terminus where the Kaw or Kansas River empties into the Missouri. From this circumstance that locality had for years been the starting-point for the overland caravans or wagon-trains. Fort Leavenworth was the point of rendezvous for those going to California and Oregon; Independence the place of outfit for those destined to Santa Fe. Grouped about these two points were half a dozen heavy slaveholding counties of Missouri,—Platte, Clay, Bay, Jackson, Lafayette, Saline, and others. Platte County, the home of Senator Atchison, was their Western outpost, and lay like an outspread fan in the great bend of the Missouri, commanding from thirty to fifty miles of river front. Nearly all of Kansas attainable by the usual water transportation and travel lay immediately opposite. A glance at the map will show how easily local sentiment could influence or dominate commerce and travel on the Missouri River. In this connection the character of the population must be taken into account. The spirit of intolerance which once pervaded all slaveholding communities, in whatever State of the Union, was here rampant to an unusual degree. The rural inhabitants were marked by the strong characteristics of the frontier,—fondness of adventure, recklessness of exposure or danger to life, a boastful assertion of personal right, privilege, or prowess, a daily and hourly familiarity with the use of fire-arms. These again were heightened by two special influences—the presence of Indian tribes whose reservations lay just across the border, and the advent and preparation of each summer's emigration across the great plains. The "Argonauts of '49" were not all gamblers and cut-throats of border song and story. Generally, however, they were men of decision and will, all mere drift-wood in the great current of gold-seekers being soon washed ashore and left behind. Until they finished their last dinner at the Planter's House in St. Louis, the fledgelings of cities, the lawyers, doctors, merchants, and speculators, were in or of civilization. Perhaps they even resisted the contamination of cards and drink, profanity and revolver salutations, while the gilded and tinseled Missouri River steamboat bore them for three days against its muddy current and boiling eddies to meet their company and their outfit.
[Illustration: DAVID R. ATCHISON.]