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Kansas Territorial Sesquicentennial Commission Kansas Troubles Kansas Territorial Sesquicentennial Commission Kansas Troubles: This Week in Territorial History #1 Week of January 1- 3, 1854 (2004) By Barbara Brackman In the slave-holding state of Missouri, 19-year-old Henry Clay Bruce's time of service for J. B. Barrett was over on December 31, 1853. Slaves were often hired out as laborers by the year, with their wages paid to their owners. Barrett owned a tobacco factory in Brunswick in central Missouri, where Henry Bruce and his brothers had worked during 1853 for room and board. January 1was the traditional date for slave contracts to begin after a week long vacation of sorts between Christmas and New Year's Day. Frederick Douglass remembered his time in slavery when the holiday was "used or abused nearly as we pleased. Those of us who had families at a distance were generally allowed to spend the whole six days in their society." Slaves might spend the time working for themselves making tools and baskets or hunting meat. "But by far the larger part engaged in such sports and merriments as playing ball, wrestling, running foot-races, fiddling, dancing and drinking whiskey. A slave who would work during the holidays was considered by our masters as scarcely deserving them." Henry's last week of service was probably spent in relative freedom after 51 weeks of hard labor in the tobacco factory. In his autobiography he recalled his temporary master: "Although he was a noisy kind of man, cursed a good deal and threatened to whip or have it done by his overseer . he seldom punished anyone, especially those who were grown . [I] was whipped only once and that for fighting another fellow who struck my younger brother." On New Year's Day, Henry reported back to his owner to find out what type of labor would be assigned him in the year 1854. (290 words) ____________ Henry Clay Bruce, The New Man: Twenty-Nine Years a Slave, Twenty-Nine Years A Free Man (York, PA: P Anstadt & Sons, 1895) Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Edited by Houston A. Baker, Jr. Originally published in 1845. (New York: Penguin Books, 1982) See PDF format Kansas Troubles: This Week in Territorial History #2 Week of January 4 - 10, 1854 (2004) By Barbara Brackman In Washington City, Senator Stephen A. Douglas was chairman of the Committee on the Territories, a powerful position in a country with an abundance of "unorganized" land beckoning to railroad builders, farmers, land speculators, and politicians. On January 4, 1854, his committee suggested a bill to organize a new territory west of the states of Missouri and Iowa, land ranging from the Canadian border down to what is now the northern border of Oklahoma. Initially called Nebraska, the vast space was named for the river we today call the Platte, the river American Indians called "Ni-bthaska." Douglas represented the free state of Illinois, but was a slaveholder. His late wife Martha had inherited a Mississippi plantation worked by more than 100 African Americans in slavery. In the same way he had made a personal compromise between keeping slaves and representing those opposed to the "peculiar institution," Douglas believed he had found a way to compromise between North and South. The men who settled the new territory would vote on whether slavery would be permitted, thus removing the decision and any political backlash from Washington. Douglas hoped his bold gesture would propel him into the White House in the election of 1856. Hindsight permits us to see that Douglas' bill to organize Nebraska Territory with a popular vote on slaveholding was disastrous for both his country and his own political life. Within the year, he was so vilified throughout the Northern states that he joked he could ride from Boston to Chicago on a path brightly lit by the fires of his own burning effigies. While many in the northeastern states worried that opening a new territory might open a Pandora's box of troubles, many in the slave-holding state of Missouri wanted to settle the land west of the Missouri River. The city of St. Joseph invited hopeful emigrants to a "Nebraska Convention," opening January 9. The result of the two-day meeting would be a petition demanding that the government "take measures promptly for throwing open the territory to settlement and extinguishing the Indian titles." Organizers also invited politicians with an interest in pleasing the voters of the western states. Senator Douglas and Iowa's Senator A. C. Dodge turned down the requests, but Senator Dodge assured Missourians that organizing Nebraska Territory had long been a priority. "For ten years I have been the ardent friend of this measure.The friends of progress and expansion will triumph and the best interests of the public [will be served] by opening to settlement the fat lands West of Missouri and Iowa." [425 words] _______ Letter from A.C. Dodge to St. Joseph Gazette, December 15, 1853, published March 22, 1854 See PDF format Kansas Troubles: This Week in Territorial History #3 Week of January 11 - 17, 1854 (2004) By Barbara Brackman A dollar mailed by W. Moore of Greenfield, Indiana, arrived at the offices of the St. Joseph Gazette with his subscription to the Missouri newspaper. Moore wanted news about Nebraska Territory, its climate and forests, the status of the Indian treaties and plans for railroads across the Indian lands. "I expect to remove to your city or west of it into Nebraska, the coming spring; hence I only send six month's subscription." Moore, like many other westerners, was counting on Congress to create the new territory. Newspapers published in towns along the edge of the Indian lands encouraged the attitude that settlement was inevitable. "Once the embargo [is] removed which now restrains settlement of Nebraska by whites, there will be such a rush to Nebraska, that emigrants will have to be counted by hundreds and thousands." Earlier attempts to develop the Indian territories were blocked in Congress, but not because of any sense of obligation to the native Indians or those tribes that had been moved there 25 years earlier. Discussion turned to dissension over the question whether the land next to Missouri, a slave state, would also be open to slavery. New territories would become new states, which must be delicately developed to avoid tipping the balance of power between the North and the South. The balance had been sustained for decades by the Missouri Compromise, written when Missouri became a state in 1820. The compromise permitted Missouri to bring slavery into the western territories acquired in the Louisiana Purchase, but stated that Missouri would be the last such state north of the Arkansas border to welcome a slave economy. The Missouri Compromise maintained a tentative truce between North and South for only 24 years. On January 16, 1854, Kentucky's Senator Archibald Dixon amended the Nebraska Act to include a repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Any area in the new territory, most of which was above the line of compromise, could now be voted a slave economy. [330 words] ________ Letter from W. Moore, dated Jan. 8, printed in the St. Joseph Gazette, Jan. 25, 1854 (Fremont County Iowa Journal, reprinted in the St. Joseph Gazette Dec. 18, 1853.) Kansas Troubles: This Week in Territorial History #4 Week of January 18 - 24, 1854 (2004) By Barbara Brackman During this week in Washington City, Congress first mentioned the name "Kansas" for a new territory. One attempt to satisfy both slaveholders and free-soilers was the idea of three new territories west of Iowa, Missouri and Arkansas. The northernmost area, reaching from the Iowa-Missouri border up to Canada would retain the name Nebraska. The land west of Missouri would be Kansas, usually spelled Kanzas. The southern area between Kansas and Texas would be called Cherokee after the native people who lived there. The middle territory was named for the river there that flowed into the Missouri and the tribe who'd once thrived on its banks, a nomadic tribe called by their neighbors the People of the South Wind. Their name in the native language must have been so foreign to European ears that everyone who tried to spell it arrived at a different solution from "Canses" to "Ka," the reason the river is still known by two names, Kansas and Kaw. On Sunday, January 22, Senator Stephen Douglas and several Senators with an interest in a pro-slavery Nebraska Territory met with Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, a good friend of President Franklin Pierce, asking him to arrange a meeting with the President. Although Pierce, a pious man, preferred to keep the Sabbath, he agreed to conduct business with the men and approved of the dramatic change they proposed. The next day Senator Douglas announced yet another version of the Nebraska Bill, this time proposing two territories, Nebraska to the north and Kansas to the south. Among the men who met with Pierce was Senator David Atchison of Missouri, one of the most powerful Southern voices in the Senate. Atchison had long advocated settlement of the territory on Missouri's western border, but because the Missouri Compromise had outlawed slavery there, he'd believed that no territory was better than a free territory. If the Missouri Compromise could be repealed, Atchison was pleased to support the bill now named the Kansas/Nebraska Bill. [330 words] Kansas Troubles: This Week in Territorial History #5 Week of January 25 - 31, 1854 (2004) By Barbara Brackman In Cleveland, Ohio, on the 28th of January, citizens met to protest Stephen Douglas's proposal for a territory allowing the possibility of slavery above the line running along the southern border of Missouri.
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