The Pre-Kansas Saga of James Henry Lane
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University of Arkansas, Fayetteville ScholarWorks@UARK Theses and Dissertations 5-2012 A Family Affair: The rP e-Kansas Saga of James Henry Lane James Robert Bird University of Arkansas, Fayetteville Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd Part of the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Bird, James Robert, "A Family Affair: The rP e-Kansas Saga of James Henry Lane" (2012). Theses and Dissertations. 399. http://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/399 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UARK. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UARK. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. A FAMILY AFFAIR: THE PRE-KANSAS SAGA OF JAMES HENRY LANE A FAMILY AFFAIR: THE PRE-KANSAS SAGA OF JAMES HENRY LANE A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment Of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History By James Robert Bird Pittsburg State University Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, 1969 Pittsburg State University Master of Science in Political Science, 1970 Pittsburg State University Master of Arts in History, 2003 May 2012 University of Arkansas ABSTRACT Historian Craig Miner suggests that territorial Kansas between 1854 and 1861 was “a nursery of weird and manic figures.” Foremost among the weird and manic figures of Kansas history stands James Henry Lane, formerly a U.S. congressman from Indiana, and destined to become one of Kansas’ first pair of senators. Writing at the midpoint of the twentieth century, Albert Castel pronounced Jim Lane “the most colorful and fascinating personality in the history of Kansas,” adding that “Very likely, too, he was mentally unbalanced and paranoid.” Yet, James H. Lane never set foot on Kansas soil until he was well into his fortieth year of life. Thus, the individual who by 1860 earned a national reputation as “the Grim Chieftain of Kansas” hardly sprang full-blown from the prairies of his adopted state. He was, rather, haunted by a tragic past that has been largely overlooked by historians. So traumatic were the events that predated Jim Lane’s arrival in Kansas that they arguably determined his behavior after he settled in the territory, and ultimately became part of the mix of variables that led to his suicide shortly after the Civil War. In 1854, Lane’s mother, Mary Foote Howse Lane, warned her son, “What a man is at forty, he will continue to be through the remainder of his life.” The present study aspires to shed light on what made Jim Lane the man he was as he celebrated his fortieth birthday, just under a year before he immigrated to Kansas. Lane biographer Ian Spugeon recently noted “the habit of historians to focus almost solely on Lane in Kansas,” as well as a need “to interpret Lane’s actions in the broader context of the collapse of the second-party system and the sectional conflict.” Aspiring to help fill that gap, the present study suggests that a leitmotif of the Lane story involves the inception, as much as the collapse, of America’s second two-party system. Moreover, the saga of Jim Lane before Kansas was essentially a family affair. Enablers so far largely neglected by historians inspired and helped him along the way. This dissertation is approved for recommendation to the Graduate Council. Dissertation Director: _____________________________________ Dr. Daniel E. Sutherland Dissertation Committee: _____________________________________ Dr. Elliott West _____________________________________ Dr. Patrick G. Williams DISSERTATION DUPLICATION RELEASE I hereby authorize the University of Arkansas Libraries to duplicate this dissertation when needed for research and/or scholarship. Agreed _________________________________ James R. Bird Refused _________________________________ James R. Bird TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTERS 1. Historiography 9 2. North Country Origins 23 3. Starting Over on the Ohio 39 4. 1812 and Beyond: Continuity, Contingency, and Opportunity 58 5. The Political Transition of Amos Lane, 1824-1828 76 6. 1824 to 1828: John Lane's West Point Years 93 7. Old and New Enemies, the Green-eyed Monster, 114 and the Coronation 8. An Election, a Wedding, and a Wagon Stuck in the Slough 144 9. Congress, a New Assignment, and a Honeymoon on the Ohio 169 10. Hubris and Nemesis: Wages of the Gentleman’s Code 200 11. The Great Transition: 1836 – 1845 233 12. “As if Fighting Had Been Their Trade from Childhood Up:” 256 Jim Lane and the Mexican War, 1846 – 1847 13. Beyond Buena Vista: Western Phoenix Rising, 1847-1854 282 14. “Ho, For Kansas!:” Jim Lane’s Move to the Territory, 1854-1855 310 CONCLUSION 344 NOTES 358 BIBLIOGRAPHY 442 INTRODUCTION “At the Heart of the Matter Stands the Issue of Consistency”1 Mary Foote Howse Lane went to her grave in the waning days of 1854 unmindful that within less than a decade her son, James Henry Lane, would be known throughout the country as a U.S. senator from the new state of Kansas. Throughout most of her seventy-five-years Mary had embodied personal self-effacement. For that reason a suggestion from anyone that details of her life should be included in a chronicle of her famous son quite probably would have met with a response similar to that given by Thomas Wentworth Higginson more than a half-century later when Katherine Mayo asked to interview him for a soon-to-be-published work on John Brown.2 Higginson formerly numbered among a half-dozen men—popularly dubbed “the Secret Six”—who provided Brown with funding and logistical support for his famous raid on Harper’s Ferry. Higginson asked Mayo in 1909, “why do you want to know of us? Did any historian ever bother to write down the name of the man who bought the donkey on which Christ rode into Jerusalem? We of the Six were not—are not—great men. We do not deserve remembering.”3 However nondescript Higginson felt his own life to be in comparison with John Brown’s, Oswald Garrison Villard’s seminal biography of Brown would have been remiss had it failed to acknowledge the role of the Six. A similar consideration should inform any contemplated study of Jim Lane. To the extent that individuals who shaped Lane’s personality during his formative years remain invisible to history, scholars lack some essential tools prerequisite for gauging his rightful place in the pantheon of memorable American politicians. Perhaps that partly explains why twenty- first century historian Nicole Etcheson and a number of her colleagues can still ask, “What did James H. Lane represent? We expect biographies of leading historical figures to show us what 1 they stood for, but Jim Lane’s chameleonlike blending into shifting political backgrounds challenges the biographer’s ability to categorize.”4 In part the present study aspires to achieve a better grasp of formerly undiscovered complexities that viscerally affected James Henry Lane’s character. Selectively examining Lane’s pre-Kansas life renders his behavior less mysterious, and perhaps also less chameleon-like, than previously thought. Without question, James Henry Lane was and remains one of Kansas’ leading historical figures. A difficulty arises, though, when a journalist or historian asserts, as Daniel Webster Wilder and Noble L. Prentis both did in the late nineteenth century, that Jim Lane was so uniquely Kansan as to be “one of our own things.” To argue that Lane “was the most original, and the most interesting human being who has figured in Kansas affairs” unavoidably focuses exclusive attention on a historical period that only began in May, 1854, and ended in July, 1866 with Lane’s suicide. Thus, what Ian Spurgeon says of his own recently-published work incidentally holds true for virtually all Lane biographies: they mainly concern “the last twelve years of his life, from 1854, when he served as a freshman congressman from Indiana, to 1866, when he died while serving as a senator from Kansas.”5 Jim Lane’s demonstrated penchant for acting bizarrely after he reached Kansas predictably raises questions about what most affected him during the four decades that preceded his emigration to the territory. With good cause Spurgeon observes that “we have little knowledge of Lane’s personality as a young man.” Students of James Henry Lane have always contended with a paucity of primary source material. In the 1950s, the venerable Albert Castel remarked, “unfortunately only a few of the letters of…James Henry Lane, have survived or been collected.” That no marked improvement in this situation has occurred over the past fifty years is suggested by Spurgeon’s description of the quest for primary Lane sources to a “scavenger 2 hunt.” Yet neglected documents in the Tennessee State Library and Archives and scattered among other repositories can help us understand the environmental stresses and influences that shaped Lane during his formative years. The present study argues, as Mary Lane did in 1853, that “what a man is at forty he will continue to be through the remainder of his life.” As Mary Lane penned those words she had barely a year left to live. Her son turned forty the following June, and less than a year after that he, with family in tow, arrived in territorial Kansas.6 A modest cache of family letters and a diary kept by Mary Foote Lane, all in the safe keeping of the aforementioned Tennessee State Library in Nashville, provide important clues to the trials and successes that James H. Lane experienced before leaving Indiana. That Jim Lane’s brother George resided intermittently in their native state until his death in 1891 brings a measure of continuity and context to the family story.