© University Press of Kansas. All rights reserved. Reproduction and distribution prohibited without permission of the Press. table oF ContentS prologue, ix 1 the people, the place, the times, 1 2 1854: “a most appropriate town site,” 18 3 winter 1854–1855: a new england crusade, 28 4 march 1855: “damned yankees” come to kansas, 39 5 spring 1855: becoming manhattan, 54 6 bleeding kansas: “tyranny is now in the ascendant,” 63 7 the wearying work of frontier life, 79 8 1856: waiting out the violence, 89 9 1857: a town built from stone, 99 10 1858: “we do not despair of a free state yet,” 112 11 1859: “a flourishing yankee settlement,” 124 12 1860–1865: drought, violence, and victories, 134 13 post–civil war: triumph of the yankees, 155 14 1870s: “a lively town, full of business,” 172 15 1880–1894: into the modern era, 184 epilogue, 199 appendix, 203 notes, 205 selected bibliography, 259 index, 263 © University Press of Kansas. All rights reserved. Reproduction and distribution prohibited without permission of the Press. © University Press of Kansas. All rights reserved. Reproduction and distribution prohibited without permission of the Press. ProloGUe On a frosty afternoon in Kansas Territory on March 27, 1855, a stern Rhode Island abolitionist named Isaac Goodnow and five other New Englanders wrestled a bulky canvas tent into shape in a tallgrass prairie at the junction of the Kansas and Big Blue rivers. The prairie was colder than Goodnow had imagined it would be in late March. But he and his party were in good spirits as they moved mattresses and supplies from the wagon into their campsite: the men had finally reached their destination after a three-week trip from Boston, covering 1,500 miles, capped by a struggle to get their overburdened covered wagon through the snowstorms and icy riv- ers of Kansas Territory. Happily, the first night at the site rewarded them with a splendid moonlit evening. Only one of the six men who found themselves on the frontier that night was familiar with the conditions. Massachusetts native Luke Lincoln had been to Kansas Territory the summer before, when it originally opened to settlement. The others had rarely been far from New England. Goodnow was a teacher at an academy outside Providence; another, Charles Love- joy, was a noted preacher from New Hampshire; and a third was Lovejoy’s seventeen-year-old son. Yet all were bound and determined to transplant antislavery ideals to the unbroken soils of Kansas Territory. They were not the first pioneers seeking to settle this site. In fact, a shrewd land speculator had already built a log cabin nearby. But they were the van- guard of a larger group of New Englanders who would transform the spot from open prairie into a frontier settlement. Over the next few days, the six men would further reinforce the walls of their tent with sod bricks while welcoming additional Yankees to their camp. The men would also come face-to-face with a band of fifteen mounted and armed Southerners who made bombastic threats, slashed their tent’s ropes, and fired a musket ball through the tent in an effort to scare away the abolitionists. For many New Englanders who ventured to Goodnow’s camp that spring the challenges were too much to bear. Desolation, harassment, and homesickness conspired to drive them back east to the United States. But © University Press of Kansas. All rights reserved. Reproduction and distribution prohibited without permission of the Press. x ] prologue Goodnow was resolute — he was a hard worker who adopted the creed “we should die with the harness on” — and he held his ground to establish an antislavery and educational stronghold on the site: the town of Manhattan, Kansas. It was not an easy task. © University Press of Kansas. All rights reserved. Reproduction and distribution prohibited without permission of the Press. the PeoPle, the PlaCe, the tiMeS 1In the spring of 1855 Manhattan was founded as an “ardent, fire- eating” antislavery settlement on the Kansas Territory frontier.1 The found- ing of Manhattan was part of the rapid westward expansion of the United States. Less than eighty years had passed since English colonists, clinging to the East Coast, issued a Declaration of Independence from the British king. In the turbulent era when Manhattan was established — five and a half years before Kansas became a state — Kansas Territory was sparsely popu- lated with Native Americans, woolly frontiersmen, overwhelmed settler families in covered wagons, and fanatics of all stripes, including Yankee abolitionists, southern proslavery reactionaries, and religious missionaries seeking to convert Native Americans. It was not yet the time of saloons and cowboys, though they were coming soon. And although the United States was on the cusp of a new age of travel and communication, Manhattan was founded during a simpler, slower era. As the author Henry Adams later ob- served, “in essentials like religion, ethics, philosophy; in history, literature, art; in the concepts of all science, except perhaps mathematics, the Ameri- can boy of 1854 stood nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900.”2 (An illustra- tion of the primitiveness of the era is that the tallest building in the world in 1855 was the Strasbourg Cathedral, built by medieval men.) The Pony Express, the transcontinental telegraph, and the transcontinen- tal railroad were marvels of speed that still lay in the future when Man- hattan was founded. In 1855 it regularly took travelers and news reports, traveling overland at a normal rate, five days to make the “long journey” of 125 miles from Manhattan to Kansas City — the nearest village with a population over 1,000.3 Communication with the centers of population and © University Press of Kansas. All rights reserved. Reproduction and distribution prohibited without permission of the Press. 2 ] chapter 1 commerce on the East Coast could take more than a month. One Manhat- tan settler, Thomas C. Wells, in regular correspondence with his family in Rhode Island, excitedly wrote in August 1855, “I am happy to say that I get your letters quite regularly now; the last reached me in less than a month after it was written.”4 Manhattan itself was barely more than a small, remote camp for the first years of its existence. But most of Manhattan’s settlers arrived in this far- away place resolved to outlast any inconvenience or danger. The founders of Manhattan were abolitionist New Englanders and other “Free-Staters,” who raced to Kansas Territory to cast a vote for antislavery candidates for the Territorial Legislature — a vote that would help determine whether Kan- sas entered the Union as a free state or a slave state — and who stood firm afterward in the face of widespread proslavery violence. The founders were a zealous, self-selected group of people who risked their personal safety and left behind civilization and family, all to help curb the spread of slavery. To fully understand the settlers who went to Kansas Territory, it is im- portant to recognize that while all the “Free-Staters” in Kansas opposed the introduction of slavery into the territory, only some were abolitionists. Others insisted they wanted the territory to be free of all African Ameri- cans — whether enslaved or free.5 The editor of the Manhattan Express clearly expressed the Free-State line in an editorial on June 30, 1860: “We oppose slavery in the territories, not for love of the negro but the white man, whom we would save from the condition, either as an arrogant slave holder, or as degraded by him, in which we find him in the slave states. Nor do we want the free blacks, for, degraded as they are, they constitute a pernicious element, like other unfortunate subjects of society.” Confusing the matter, some of those in Kansas Territory who were in fact strident abolitionists falsely claimed that their goal was not to fight slavery in all places, but that they merely wished to prevent its spread to Kansas. The Squatter Sovereign, a virulently proslavery newspaper printed in Atchison, Kansas Territory, recognized this and wrote in March 1855: “[The Free-State leader] knows how the people abhor the open abolitionist, hence he cun- ningly makes a platform, false on its face, but which, regarding as he does the (pro-slavery) squatters as his foes, he hopes may deceive them.”6 To sim- plify the issue, the proslavery editor of the Herald in Leavenworth, Kansas Territory, declared in 1855 that “he that is not for us is against us.”7 Many of Manhattan’s first settlers were sent by the foremost Free-State © University Press of Kansas. All rights reserved. Reproduction and distribution prohibited without permission of the Press. the people, the place, the times [ 3 organization, the New England Emigrant Aid Company, which was or- ganized in 1854 to encourage and finance the emigration of New England Free-Staters to Kansas Territory. It was composed of men who were clearly abolitionists under the modern definition, but who often rejected the la- bel for themselves because “abolitionist” was a highly loaded word in the 1850s. For example, the principal founder of the Emigrant Aid Company, Eli Thayer, asserted that the company was not an abolitionist organiza- tion — equating abolitionism as it was then preached with reckless attacks on the Union by radicals such as newspaperman William Lloyd Garrison.8 Nevertheless, Thayer saw no contradiction in baldly writing that the Emi- grant Aid Company’s goal was “to go and put an end to slavery.” 9 The other main body of Manhattan’s founders came from Cincinnati, Ohio, which was also home to abolitionist sentiment (and home to the Underground Railroad, being located directly across the Ohio River from Kentucky).