The Delaware Indians, as their name implied, had inhabited a wide area in the mid-Atlantic region, centered between the Hudson and Delaware Rivers. From the late 1700s on, they were forced to move further and further west, until the majority of the tribal members settled in Kansas. Their land in Kansas was substantial—nearly two million acres—and fertile. Further, the Delaware people proved to be successful farmers and ranchers, attracting many Delaware people who had scattered from earlier forced moves to congregate in Kansas to share in the bounty. Now, their livelihoods were threatened. To abrogate its 1829 treaty, the government agents cleverly negotiated with Delaware leaders who were amenable to the new treaty. Or, more likely, the leaders were not even sure what the treaty said—as evidenced by the signing of the new treaty with numerous “Xs.” The lands ceded by the Delaware Indians became some of the most desirable lands for white settlement in Kansas. Eventually Kansas’s other nations—the Shawnee, Ponca, Kansa, Kiowa, Osage, Otoe, and others—would be squeezed onto smaller reservations or removed from Kansas altogether.
Eli Thayer, Amos Lawrence, and other leaders of the Emigrant Aid Company were aware of the treaties, and instructed their agents to make sure that the land they selected for settlement did not have any encumbrances associated with former Indian lands. But before anyone worried about land in Kansas, they had to make the prospect of migrating more than one thousand miles to an entirely new and very different territory attractive. The goal, of course, was to lure strong antislavery advocates, but the promoters were cognizant that the passion to end slavery likely would not be enough to tip the balance in favor of emigration. They needed to provide incentives to potential emigrants.
An undated document in the Kansas State Historical Society Collection provides some insight into their thought processes to entice emigration. The Emigrant Aid Company would “organize emigration to the West.” In doing so, there would be three benefits—one to the emigrants, another to the nation, and a third to the company itself. For the emigrants, the company would provide transportation, food, and shelter at the lowest possible cost while they were settling into their new homes, as well as assistance in helping them locate and secure home sites. The company would immediately assist in establishing newspapers, schools, and churches, “so that the morals and intelligence of their children shall not be forfeited by a life of semibarbarianism [sic] as often happens to settlers in the West.”
The company would benefit the country because it would create new, free states. Further, western settlement would provide a safety valve, relieving the pressures of poverty and overpopulation in the East. The assistance provided by the company would provide a means for the urban poor to move west. In other words, what was “vicious here [in the East] will be virtuous there [in the West].”
Finally, the Emigration Aid Company itself would benefit, because new settlement would increase the value of the land. Investments in new mills and other machinery would further benefit the investors. And, if nothing else, “the pleasure of founding new and free states which bless everybody and injure nobody and of binding them forever to Massachusetts by the strongest ties of gratitude and filial love” would have benefits at least equal to, if not superior to, any monetary benefits.29
Of course, the efforts to organize, raise money, and facilitate the emigration to Kansas and fulfill these lofty ideals would have been to no avail if the Emigrant Aid Company could not recruit settlers and get them to Kansas. Eli Thayer, Amos Lawrence, and the other officers in the company understood that they needed to move quickly, so in June 1854, they hired Dr. Charles Robinson and Charles H. Branscomb to go to Kansas and conduct a reconnaissance to identify the best locations for settlement.
Dr. Robinson almost immediately became a key figure in the Emigrant Aid Company and in the settlement and politics of Kansas. Robinson was born in Massachusetts in 1818. He attended but did not graduate from Amherst, studied medicine, established a practice in Belchertown, Massachusetts, and married Sarah Adams in 1843. His wife died in 1846, throwing him into a deep depression, which forced him to leave his medical practice. In 1849, he joined the Congress and California Mutual Protective Association as the group’s physician and headed to California to hopefully snap out of his depression and find his fortune. On the way to the goldfields, he traveled through Kansas and was immediately drawn to the land. In his diary entry for May 11, 1849, he wrote that “as far as the eye can reach, he sees nothing but a beautiful green carpet; … he hears nothing but the feathered songsters of the air, and he feels nothing but a solemn awe in view of this infinite display of creative power.”30
Robinson, like many other prospectors, recognized quickly that the diggings meant hard work with little reward, so he settled in Sacramento, opened a restaurant, and became involved in land issues in California. Robinson led an effort to secure the rights of squatters to their land claims. He was elected to the California House of Representatives when it became a state and appeared destined to be a major figure. But in 1851, he left California and returned to Massachusetts. Romance beckoned.
While in California, he corresponded with Sara Tappan Doolittle Lawrence, a distant relative of Amos Lawrence. They had met in Massachusetts just before he headed west. It appears that Sara’s charms held sway over the warm weather, business, and political prospects of California. A little more than a month after he arrived back in Massachusetts, the couple married. Charles and Sara settled in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, where he edited the local newspaper and practiced medicine part time. Sara Robinson was an amazing woman, and her marriage to Charles was a true partnership. Charles would jokingly remark that she became so well known in the East, he was known as “the husband of Mrs. Robinson.”31
Dr. Charles Robinson. Kansas State Historical Society.
Sara Robinson. Kansas State Historical Society.
In 1854, Robinson attended an antislavery meeting conducted by Eli Thayer and was immediately drawn to Thayer’s plan to flood Kansas with antislavery settlers. Shortly after the meeting, he offered his services to the Emigrant Aid Company. With Robinson’s journey through and affinity for Kansas on his way to California, he became the ideal candidate to scout settlement locations there. So, in June, Thayer and Lawrence hired Robinson along with Charles H. Branscomb to do just that.32
Charles H. Branscomb, Robinson’s reconnaissance partner, was a young lawyer in Holyoke, Massachusetts. A native of New Hampshire, Branscomb attended Phillips Exeter Academy, graduated from Dartmouth College, and studied law in Cambridge Law School. He practiced law for about six years. Clearly he was drawn to the Emigrant Aid Company, and just as clearly, Thayer and Lawrence were drawn to him as well, offering him the opportunity to accompany Robinson to find the best location to start a settlement in Kansas. Lawrence agreed to finance the reconnaissance with up-front money and a note to draw on credit if necessary.
Robinson and Branscomb arrived in Kansas in early July. On the steamer trip up the Missouri River, they experienced what they would be up against in settling Kansas. Members of the Missouri Legislature boarded the riverboat in Jefferson City, boasting that they planned to do whatever it took to keep abolitionists out of Kansas. Robinson noted that during the conversation he “was a listener rather than a talker.”33 But when they arrived in Kansas Village (the future site of Kansas City), they found some of its businessmen more amenable. They arranged for the purchase of the Gillis House, a substantial brick hotel that would serve as temporary housing, and they further arranged to use Mr. Riddlesbarger’s “commodious warehouse” as a temporary storage facility. From Kansas City, they agreed that Robinson would head up the Missouri River to Fort Leavenworth and that Branscomb would head up the Kansas River to Fort Riley, searching for the best land for settlement.
They knew that Delaware Indian lands under the new treaty would be sold to the highest bidder. The same would likely be the case with the Shawnee lands. So, to assist Robinson and Branscomb with land issues, Amos Lawrence hired James Blood, who was an
expert in preemption and other land laws.34 Blood scouted the land as well, and preferred a site near where the Wakarusa River entered the Kansas River, about forty miles west of the Missouri line. The site appeared to be unencumbered by any potential title issues.
When Robinson arrived back in Kansas City, a message was waiting that the first wave of emigrants was ready to leave Boston for Kansas. Robinson was directed to meet the party in St. Louis, then return to Boston. He sent a note to Branscomb to wait for the emigrants in Kansas City and guide them to the new settlement.35 When the first group arrived, Blood and Branscomb guided them to the settlement, at first called Wakarusa.36
One of the earliest recruits to head west under the auspices of the Emigrant Aid Company was Dr. John Doy, a resident of Rochester, New York. He later described how he was attracted to the company. In June 1854, “in consequence of what was published in the newspapers … to settle Kansas with intelligent and industrious citizens from the Northern States, a public meeting was held at the Court House in Rochester, New York, to consider the propriety of sending a delegate to Massachusetts, where the movement originated.”37 He was selected as the delegate and was sent to meet with Thayer and officers of the Emigrant Aid Company in Boston.
Dr. Doy, a homeopathic doctor, originally from Hull, in Yorkshire, England, met with Thayer and several “leading citizens” of Boston, and was so impressed with the enterprise that he returned to Rochester and prepared for the journey to Kansas. He recruited Daniel R. Anthony, Susan B. Anthony’s brother, to join the first party. From Thayer and others, Doy understood that he and the other members of the “first pioneer party” were “to ascertain if the soil was … fertile, well wooded and well watered,” and thus “good agricultural and manufacturing country. If they found this to be the case,” they were to inform the main party, which would follow soon after, that everything looked favorable.38
John Doy was one of twenty-nine who made up the first party. He and B. R. Knapp, a mechanic from Massachusetts, recalled the journey and early settlement. The party was made up of eleven mechanics, five farmers, two physicians, two speculators, a reporter, a clerk, a lawyer, a banker, a laborer, a merchant, a builder, an architect, and one who gave his occupation as a “sportsman.” They left Boston on July 17, 1854, and arrived in St. Louis on July 20. The route took the party from Boston, through Rochester, Buffalo, and eventually to St. Louis.
Years after the city of Lawrence and the state of Kansas were well established, Ferdinand Fuller, George W. Goss, Dr. S. C. Harrington, and J. F. Morgan posed for this photograph. All four men were members of the first party to leave Boston for Kansas with the New England Emigrant Aid Company on July 17, 1854. Kenneth Spenser Research Library, University of Kansas.
According to Dr. Doy, when the party arrived in St. Louis, “we made a bargain with the captain of a steamboat the Polar Star to take us to Kansas City, Missouri, for twelve dollars a head. Everything went on well.” He continued, writing that at “Lexington, Missouri, some of us strolled about on shore while the boat wooded, and certain persons, having learned who we were … informed us that a large party was waiting for us at Kansas City, and would give us a warm reception … as might induce us to go back.” Doy and his companions were prepared, however, and “on nearing Kansas City, our little army of twenty-nine was drawn up in a line on deck, with rifles and revolvers all ready to give a fitting response to the promised warm reception.” Nothing came of the incident, and the party “quietly went on shore in a body, and attended to our own business.39
In Kansas City, the party bought two yoke of oxen and a wagon and hired a four-horse team, wagon, and driver to carry their trunks, provisions, tents, and other baggage the rest of the way. Doy reported that “as soon as we crossed the line of Kansas, our driver said he had come as far as he had agreed, and must have more money, or he would go back. We reasoned with him, however, and he finally consented to go with us as far as the backbone hills,” their final destination. They arrived at Wakarusa on August 1, 1854.
B. R. Knapp wrote that they established their camp and pitched their twenty-five tents, “which made a fine appearance, although a little soiled.” The next day, Knapp and the others went to work setting up their claims to the land, “preparing for a permanent settlement.” They paced off half-mile squares, marked the corners with stakes, and wrote on each stake that the owner claimed “160 acres of the lands within the bounds, from the date of the claim.” Each owner registered and recorded his claim. Knapp also claimed eighty acres of timberland at Mount Hope, several miles from the “new city.” Several members of the party made their claims and returned east, intending to come back with their families in the spring.40
Dr. Doy wrote that as the group were setting up their tents and staking out their claims, a squatter “stood by and watched our proceedings.” Since with preemption laws, a squatter had first claim to the land, the group offered to buy him out. “He was sure, if [we] wanted it, his claim was worth at least five hundred dollars, and he wouldn’t take a red cent less.” Doy continued: “we made a bargain with him, and took possession on the first day August, AD 1854.”41
Another member of the pioneer party, who staked a claim next to Dr. Doy, was twenty-three-year-old Samuel F. Tappan. Tappan was a member of one of the most prominent abolitionist families in New England. His cousins, Arthur and Lewis Tappan, were successful silk merchants in the Northeast who donated much of their fortunes to support antislavery programs and causes. Samuel could have stayed in Massachusetts and earned a comfortable living in his father’s cabinet-making shop or in his extended family’s profitable businesses; instead he joined the first party going to Kansas to do his part to ensure that the territory would be free. He frequently sent reports to eastern newspapers reporting on the free-state activities in Kansas, and later became an active “conductor” on the Underground Railroad.
Charles Robinson arrived back in Boston and prepared to lead the second party to Kansas. His partner on this trip was Samuel C. Pomeroy. Pomeroy was from an old New England family, graduated from Amherst College, and demonstrated clear antislavery credentials, having organized the Liberty Party in Massachusetts and serving in the Massachusetts Legislature as a member of the Free Soil Party.
This second party was much larger than the first, consisting of seventy-eight members, including women and children and four musicians from Hartford, Connecticut, who brought along their instruments. They left from the Boston and Worchester train station on August 29, 1854, with an impressive send-off, singing a hymn written for the occasion by noted poet John Greenleaf Whittier. They made it to Kansas City on September 6, and nearly everyone arrived in Wakarusa by September 11.42
Euphoria reigned among the New England abolitionists with the tremendous response to the summons to Kansas. But behind the scenes, Amos Lawrence worried that the Emigrant Aid Company was teetering on insolvency. He did not personally go to Kansas at this time. He believed that he could best serve the cause working from Boston. In his August 27, 1854 diary entry, he wrote that “the subscription goes slowly and hard: people have no confidence in land stock…. This is, and it has turned out as I supposed. Still it must not fail: Kansas must be a free state, if possible.” On September 3, he reported that the first large party left for Kansas, and he lamented that “all the expenditures thus far [have] been met by myself, but I cannot go further without funds in hand: these must be raised soon.” Then, at the end of September, he recorded that he had devoted a great deal of time to “the Kansas business,” and if Kansas “and Nebraska do not become free states, it will not be for want of hard work to settle them.”43
After the community organized, selected its officials, and began to settle into more permanency, the inhabitants debated whether their community should be called Wakarusa, Yankee Town, New Boston, or Plymouth. Instead, on October 6, they settled on Lawrence City in honor of Amos A. Lawrence, who everyone knew had contributed substantial money to the Emigrant Aid Company and the settlement
of Kansas. One settler jokingly observed that “the name sounded well and had no bad odor attached to it in any part of the Union.”44 The residents of the new town probably were unaware that Lawrence would have preferred not to have his name attached to the town. His own choice would have been Wakarusa. To his diary, he wrote “1. That being a trustee … will cause my motives of action to be doubted and thus will lessen my influence. 2. It will create dissatisfaction among the other trustees. 3. The Indian name Wakarusa is excellent.”45
The New England Emigrant Aid Company was remarkably efficient at populating Kansas with antislavery settlers, but it was not the only such organization, and Lawrence was not the only destination. Isaac Goodnow, a teacher in Providence, Rhode Island, heard a lecture from Eli Thayer and caught the bug to go to Kansas to join the antislavery cause, but he wanted to start a new community. Goodnow led another advance party in March 1855. He carried a letter of introduction from Thomas Webb to Samuel Pomeroy, which showed that even serious abolitionists had senses of humor. “This will introduce to you I. T. Goodnow Esq.,” he wrote, “who not only is good now, but I trust will remain good thro’ all time for freedom & justice.”46
When Goodnow arrived in Kansas and conferred with Pomeroy, he decided to travel up the Kansas River to where it was joined by the Big Blue River, about 120 miles west of Kansas City. Two tiny settlements were already nearby that joined forces to create the community of Boston. In June 1855, not long after Goodnow arrived, a steamboat, carrying seventy-six members of the Cincinnati and Kansas Land Company, chugged up the Kansas River and landed at the settlement. Goodnow and the citizens of Boston agreed to join forces with the Cincinnati group, which instantly doubled the population. The Cincinnati group was committed to calling the community Manhattan—no one knows exactly why—but Goodnow and the others agreed to the name change, and it stuck.
Stark Mad Abolitionists Page 4