Cotton and slavery—by 1854 the two words became synonymous. The Cotton Empire was straining its borders. More land was needed for the “silver fleece,” and slaves must break the land and plant the seed and pick the delicate soft pods. There was no other way.
Then a shrewd bidder for the presidency made an offer to the South—western territory for their votes—and they sprang at the bribe. Passage of the Nebraska Bill stacked the ammunition for civil war dangerously high.
This scrapping of the Missouri Compromise struck antislavery men all in a heap. The line against slavery had been so clear—no slaves above the line. It should have run to the Pacific, stretching west with the course of empire. But now, by means of the clever wording of the Nebraska (Territory) Bill—“to leave the people ... free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way”—a vast tract embracing upward of four hundred thousand square miles was being thrown open to slavery. Stephen Douglas drove the Bill through Congress. It was his moment of triumph.
The North reacted. Harriet Beecher Stowe led eleven hundred women marching through the streets in protest. Great mass meetings assembled. They hanged Stephen Douglas in effigy. State legislatures met in special sessions and sent manifests to Congress. William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, Henry Highland Garnet, and Henry Ward Beecher raised their voices like mighty trumpets; they filled the air with oratory.
The five sons of John Brown set out for Kansas.
They were among the less important people who saw that if “the domestic institutions” were to be left to those who lived there to decide, it was going to be necessary for antislavery men to settle on the land. The brothers’ combined property consisted of eleven head of cattle and three horses. Ten of this number were fine breeds. Thinking of their value in a new country, Owen, Frederick and Salmon took them by way of the Lakes to Chicago and thence to Meridosia where they were wintered. When spring came, they drove them into Kansas to a place about eight miles west of the town of Osawatomie, which the brothers had selected as a likely spot to settle.
Seven hundred and fifty men set out that summer under the auspices of the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society. Some traveled by wagon over lonely trails. Others sailed down the Ohio River, their farm implements lashed to the decks of the boats.
They found a lovely land—wide open spaces, rolling prairies and wooded streams under a great blue dome. They set up their tents and went about breaking soil. They dreamed of cattle herds, waving fields of corn and wheat, orchards and vineyards. There was so much of the good, rich earth in Kansas.
Election Day—when members for the first territorial legislature were chosen—came on March 30, 1855. Horace Greeley himself went out to Kansas to cover the election for his paper, the New York Tribune.