The idea for Manhattan, Kansas, was born in the turbulent years of the early 1850s, when America was alive with ideas, yet divided as never before—and lurching toward civil war. A call to take direct action to oppose slavery inspired this curious transplanting of architecture and people from New England to the far-flung frontier.

At the time, Southern states were grasping ever more tightly at their insistence that no changes could be made to the compromises that had permitted slavery to persist since the time of the Founding Fathers. An 1852 convention in South Carolina denounced “the fiendish fanaticism of an abolition spirit” and declared the state’s right to secede from the United States if the federal government sought to change existing slave laws.

Meanwhile, New England was percolating with progressive thought. This “American Renaissance” advanced not just the idea of a unique national literature, but larger convictions about racial and gender equality. In 1850, the first National Women’s Rights Convention met in Worcester, Massachusetts, featuring addresses by Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass. And by 1852, the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a sensation, described as the “finest picture yet painted of the abominable horrors of slavery” in a Boston Post review.

It was in this divided atmosphere that the May 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act opened the Kansas and Nebraska territories to settlement and eventual statehood. The assumption was that Nebraska Territory would become a free state, while Kansas, under the sway of its pro-slavery neighbor Missouri, would become a slave state. The Act infuriated Northerners because it undid the Missouri Compromise of 1830 and allowed for the expansion of slavery.

New England Emigrant Aid Company trade sign made of sheet metal, painted black with gold lettering. The sign was most likely used at the Boston headquarters of the New England Emigrant Aid Company. Courtesy of Kansas Memory.

But the assumptions of the Act were disrupted by the social movements and civil rights discussions occurring in New England. An organization called the New England Emigrant Aid Company hatched a bold plan to transport New England settlers to the open hills and plains of Kansas Territory in 1854 and 1855, for the purpose of voting for Kansas to become an anti-slavery “free state.” In line with the ideals of the American Renaissance in New England, the principal founder of the Company, Eli Thayer, wrote that its goal was “to go and put an end to slavery.”

Thayer later wrote that the idea of an organization to support New England emigration to Kansas Territory struck him as divine inspiration, a way to respond with positive action to an intolerable political situation. As the U.S. Senate debated the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Thayer obtained the first corporate charter for his company from the Massachusetts governor.

Thayer was a Yankee reformer who had earlier founded a college for women in Worcester, Massachusetts. It’s not clear where Thayer, the son of a failed Massachusetts shopkeeper, found his zeal for progressive causes, but it fits squarely in line with his purported Unitarian faith and his lifelong appreciation for his education at the Worcester Manual Labor High School, which provided poor children, like him, a quality education in exchange for work on its farm.

By the time the Kansas-Nebraska Act was signed into law on May 30, 1854, the idea of emigration to Kansas Territory was becoming widespread. In a speech, New York Senator William Seward declared: “We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to the side that is stronger in numbers.” Thayer had been the first to propose the idea of organized emigration to Kansas; following his lead were the Union Emigration Society in Washington, D.C., and the American Settlement Company in New York City. (Pursuing a somewhat different approach was the Vegetarian Kansas Emigrant Company, founded in 1855.) Because the vote for the Kansas Territorial Legislature was coming in March 1855, Thayer and others wanted to place as many settlers as possible in Kansas by that time.

Throughout 1854, Thayer was extremely active in fundraising, speaking, and organizing parties of settlers. By December, Thayer’s company succeeded in sending off more than 600 New Englanders to Kansas Territory and had established one settlement, Lawrence. But the company needed even more colonists and wanted a second settlement in 1855. Fortunately, Thayer soon found the right man to help him fulfill those plans.

That month, Thayer spoke in Providence, Rhode Island, on the importance of Kansas emigration. “We have seldom listened to a more effective speech on any subject,” the Providence newspaper Freeman wrote of Thayer’s speech. Sitting rapt in the audience, his words captured the attention of a thin, stern Vermont native by the name of Isaac Goodnow. Goodnow was a 40-year-old teacher of Natural Science at an academy in nearby East Greenwich. After hearing Thayer’s speech and holding a private 90-minute conversation with him afterward, Goodnow became determined to support the movement by emigrating to Kansas Territory himself. He would go on to become the driving influence in gathering the group of settlers who would found Manhattan, Kansas—authoring speeches, letters, and newspaper columns supporting the movement. He was the acolyte that Thayer needed to ensure the new settlement’s success.

While Thayer saw the colonization of Kansas as an opportunity to achieve a worthy cause, he also recognized it as a potential moneymaking operation for its investors. On the other hand, Goodnow cared only for the cause. He viewed the settling of Kansas as one of the few ways a New Englander could live by his or her lofty ideals. In January 1855, Goodnow wrote a column in East Greenwich Weekly Pendulum pleading for action: “Kansas is, and may be for years to come the great battle ground of Freedom and Slavery! … While we talk, slave holders act. We have had enough of abstract, easy-chair speculations, it is now time for every man to show his principles by his works…. The only way to save the territory from the curse of human bondage, is for the men of … New England to rouse themselves, and emigrate by hundreds and thousands…. [W]e must be willing to endure hardship and privations. But who would not make sacrifices in one of the most philanthropic enterprizes of this age?”

Isaac Goodnow. Courtesy of Kansas Memory.

Shortly afterward, Goodnow was besieged with letters containing questions about Kansas Territory and requests to join the movement. “I am truly happy when I hear of men of influence who … go on to the ground with companies of men and contest the battles of freedom. Action is what is wanted,” one acquaintance wrote to him. Ultimately, through Goodnow and Thayer’s efforts, hundreds of New Englanders were motivated to make the trip in early 1855.

On an unseasonably warm March 6 afternoon, Goodnow and an advance group of 68 boarded a smoky coal-fired train in Boston to begin the first leg of their journey. It was a “tedious and tiresome” trip that would require more than two weeks of travel by rail, steamboat, and wagon. Crowding, lack of sleep, and dirty drinking water caused many illnesses along the way, some fatal.

The New Englanders had to pass directly through increasingly hostile Missouri to reach Kansas Territory, and the steamboats carrying the 1855 emigrants were sometimes stormed by drunken and armed mobs of pro-slavery Missourians. The pro-slavery newspaper Squatter Sovereign wrote of the New Englanders, “We hope the Quarantine Officers along the borders will forbid the unloading of that kind of Cargo.” The paper added, ominously, that “horrible disease, and one followed by many deaths … may be the consequence if this mass of corruption … is permitted to land and traverse our beautiful country.”

For some New Englanders, the discomfort and threats were too much. Although hundreds began the trip in early 1855, many turned back. Goodnow wrote in his diary that he “had to spend much time almost every day in encouraging the young men & keep[ing] them from going home.” Goodnow optimistically spun the situation, writing that the journey “has been so trying, owing to the dust, wind, and scarcity of provisions and fodder, that we get the wheat, while the chaff of emigration blows away, or does not reach us.”

When the New Englanders finally reached the spot Goodnow had selected for the settlement, many slept on the open prairie, unprepared for the cold early spring nights. Just days after their arrival, more than a dozen armed Missourians, described as “fierce, ignorant partisans,” stormed their camp on horseback, firing guns at their tents, intending to drive them out of Kansas. Ultimately, only about 50 New England settlers remained in Manhattan when it was officially established in April 1855.

But more continued arriving throughout 1855 and 1856, and the combined forces of nature and hostility did not succeed in driving all of the settlers out. The few hundred that remained throughout Kansas Territory from the estimated 2,000 who initially set off with the New England Emigrant Aid Company proved sufficient in number to create the anti-slavery stronghold of Manhattan and to decisively swing Kansas to become a free state.

The victory wasn’t immediate, and it wasn’t easy. When the vote was held for the first Territorial Legislature in March 1855, Manhattan was the only settlement in Kansas to vote for anti-slavery delegates, as pro-slavery men from neighboring Missouri flooded the territory’s other election sites. Things grew even worse in 1856, with bloody violence throughout Kansas Territory as pro-slavery and anti-slavery zealots battled. In August, a band of armed Georgians marched through Manhattan threatening violence, and troops from nearby Fort Riley were promptly dispatched to protect the town. Despite the threats and violence, Manhattan’s settlers remained committed to a peaceful process.

Through it all, Goodnow’s company kept their faith in the future, and in the end, Thayer’s audacious plan for New England Emigrant Aid Company worked.

Though they could be unrealistic and overly idealistic, the New England founders provided Manhattan with a powerful sense of purpose, as well as amenities that other frontier settlements rarely offered, such as a schoolhouse, a sawmill, and private college, which was converted into Kansas State University in 1863. Fortuitously, a group of 75 settlers arrived by steamboat from Cincinnati in June 1855 and focused on developing commerce in the new village. The combination served the town well. Goodnow later wrote, “The union of the two companies, of the East and of the West, produced a grand practical combination, the best kind of business compound to make the right kind of a town to live in and to educate our children.”

Ultimately, the New Englanders left a lasting imprint. Even 25 years after Manhattan’s founding, during Kansas’s Wild West era, visitors to the town opined that it presented a refined “Eastern” appearance. Beyond its physical aspect, to this day, the city continues to embody ideals and visions that the New Englanders carried to the plains in the 1850s—notably an emphasis on religion and progressive education.

Contemplating the long-term legacy of the New England Emigrant Aid Company settlers, Eli Thayer wrote in 1889: “Justice, though tardy in its work, will yet load with the highest honors the memory of the heroic Kansas pioneers who gave themselves and all they had to the sacred cause of human rights.”

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Dovers Cottage was originally built in Abilene, Kansas, during a cattle boom in the late 1860s, when Abilene was the first great railhead connecting the cattle ranches of Texas to the emerging national rail network. But Abilene’s fortunes soon turned—when Ellsworth, Kansas, took its place as the new cattle boomtown.

Ellsworth rose to prominence in 1872 after it embarked on an audacious scheme to attract railroad construction and launched a whisper campaign against Abilene. In the words of one Abilene defender, the situation was “utterly unscrupulous” and “full of low cunning and despicable motives.”

A Santa Fe Train passes through Ellsworth, Kansas, 1867. Photo by Alexander Gardner. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Still, following the herd, the owner of Drovers Cottage moved his hotel, board by board, the 60 miles from Abilene to Ellsworth. The hotel would not prosper for long, though. While tens of thousands of cattle would pass through Ellsworth in 1872, three years later the town was declining just as Abilene had. Cattle trailers and railroads moved on to new towns, like Wichita and Dodge City.

The wrenching boom and bust cycles that roiled 19th-century Kansas cattle towns have much to teach us about how economic development reshapes communities, even today.

The emerging national market for cattle brought new opportunity to towns like Ellsworth, but it also tied their fates to distant economic forces beyond their control. Today, communities still rise and fall with the ebb and flow of global capitalism, as manufacturers make cities compete to host and subsidize new plants, and sports teams threaten to relocate if local leaders don’t hand over generous tax breaks.

Ellsworth’s rise and fall was dictated by the railroads. During the late 1860s and early 1870s, the nation’s rail network was only starting to push toward northern Texas—so Texas ranchers had to trail their herds northward to the nearest rail access points if they wanted to transport cattle to far-off buyers. Kansas towns at the leading edge of railroad construction vied to become hubs that could capture the majority of the cattle trade.

But any of several towns could potentially serve this function; the winners in this contest would be determined by where rail lines were built. A promoter of one town might negotiate with a railroad manager, while competing promoters in nearby towns were doing the exact same thing—with bribes in hand. Another external factor exacerbated the competition: uneven enforcement of quarantines intended to prevent transmission of the cattle disease known as “Texas Fever.” Town leaders, balking at the expense of quarantine compliance, often pushed state officials to enforce rival towns’ compliance while asking that a blind eye be turned to their own potential violations.

Thus, Ellsworth captured the cattle trade in early 1872 by attracting the Kansas Pacific Railway and pushing for tougher enforcement of cattle quarantines in Abilene. But rail lines soon reached southward to Wichita, and within a couple of years Wichita captured the trade from Ellsworth—until enforcement of quarantines in Wichita made Dodge City, far to the west, the newest Kansas cattle shipping center. Eventually, the railroads reached Texas, increased settlement in Kansas made quarantines unavoidable, and Kansas cattle towns all entered decline. So ended a frenzy in which an individual town might win in the short-term, but all towns, eventually, were set to lose.

That competition between towns sparked tension within communities as well. Ellsworth had vocal supporters of the cattle trade (merchants and the editor of the local paper) and passionate critics—especially local farmers. Cattle were hungry when they reached the area and could eat local fields bare or spread disease to local livestock.

Critics also contended that the cattle trade enriched a few merchants at the expense of the region’s long-term residents. One angry Ellsworth citizen asked, “What safeguard can be set up to protect … from the encroachments of men whose souls are wrapped up in the almighty dollar; men whose highest and only object is to increase their wealth even if it destroys the prospects of a whole community?”

Such criticism echoes today in the fight over the location of Amazon’s second headquarters.
At first, Amazon was able to get American cities to bid against each other to host the company, garnering offers of over $1 billion in tax breaks and other incentives. The company ultimately chose two locations—northern Virginia just outside Washington, D.C., and in the New York City borough of Queens. But in New York there was a backlash, as community leaders argued that an Amazon facility would benefit rich residents of the city while leaving Queens’ poor behind. In this way, by entering a community, a business can heighten pre-existing divisions and precipitate local power struggles. Amazon eventually had to pull out of the Queens deal.

Can communities embrace national markets while protecting local interests? The history of Ellsworth, Kansas, suggests that economic development contests pose challenges too big for any individual place to solve for itself.

In 1875, a night watchman in Ellsworth spotted a small light coming from the now-neglected Drovers Cottage. When he went to investigate, he discovered a fire in the hotel. The blaze was extinguished, but residents’ relief turned to outrage when they found oil-soaked mattresses in a backroom and realized it had been attempted arson. Suspicion fell on the hotel’s proprietor, who soon fled the town. It would be the most dramatic example of a general trend: merchants were leaving Ellsworth in search of fortunes elsewhere.

Ellsworth’s rise and decline unfolded over less than 10 years. It was not as dramatic—nor painful—as the 20th-century ascent and decline of places like Detroit, Michigan, and Gary, Indiana. But the scale of the business briefly centered in Ellsworth—hundreds of residents, hundreds of thousands of incoming cattle—and the speed of the tiny town’s changing fortunes offer an enduring lesson: When small communities are pitted against each other, or made subject to distant markets, only larger government entities—state or federal—can limit ruinous competition.

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California wasn’t always America’s winemaking leader. During the mid-19th century, that distinction went to Kansas and neighboring Missouri, where winemakers and grape-growers led the U.S. wine industry in production. Bold entrepreneurs, industrious Kansas farmers—many of them German-speaking immigrants—produced 35,000 gallons of wine in 1872. That volume jumped more than six-fold by the end of the decade.

But the growth in Kansas’ wine industry (and its sister industry, brewing) coincided with dramatic changes in the state. From 1860 to 1880, Kansas’ population mushroomed from 107,206 to nearly one million people. Kansans battled over slavery in the Kansas-Missouri Border War (1854-1861) and again during the Civil War (1861-1865). Kansas vintners faced a dynamic and challenging moral, social, business, and political climate. The region’s civic and religious leaders railed against the use of alcohol, which they believed contributed to moral decay and spiritual rot, leading them to implement the first statewide prohibition on selling and manufacturing alcohol in the United States in 1881. For more than a century, this ban caused a slowdown from which the Free State’s winemakers are only now beginning to emerge.

For centuries, Wild Catawba, Concord, Norton, and other grapevines thrived, uncultivated, in the rich soil of the territory. When the explorer Étienne de Veniard de Bourgmont ventured to northeastern Kansas in 1724, Indians supplied his expedition with wild grapes from the Missouri River bluffs, which the captain and his men used to make wine. 80 years later, Lewis and Clark encountered summer and fall grapes at the very same site.

Several thousand German-speaking immigrants who settled nearby in the mid-19th-century sought a “new Rhineland,” a fresh start that offered religious freedom, economic opportunity, and refuge from political and military turmoil in their homelands. These immigrants not only brought large numbers of people, but also cash to foster trade in emerging frontier towns and the know-how to grow grapes and produce wine. Several skilled winemakers and vineyard nurserymen came to Doniphan, Kansas, from Deidesheim, a town in the German Palatinate region known for its winemaking and viticulture since the 13th century. Hardworking and entrepreneurial, they transformed small-scale farm vineyards and wineries into a burgeoning industry.

Winemaker Adam Brenner emigrated from Deidesheim and settled in Doniphan in 1857. As proprietor of Doniphan Vineyards, he manufactured native wines and brandies that were known “world-wide” for their “medicinal qualities.” According to William G. Cutler’s History of the State of Kansas, Brenner’s vineyards spanned 50 acres and had their own cellars, press houses, warehouses, bottling, and packing rooms. One cellar, used for sales, could hold 30,000 gallons of various wines. Two more cellars stored an additional 30,000 gallons each. Later his brother and his nephew both opened vineyards producing thousands of gallons of wine annually, some of it for sacramental use.

Still photograph of teetotaler women from the satirical short film Kansas Saloon Smashers (1901), which spoofs the Wichita temperance activist Carrie Nation. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

No records indicate what the Brenners’ wines tasted like. Since they were commonly sold for medicinal and sacramental purposes, and sugar was an expensive commodity, the wines were likely dry, sweetened only by natural sugar from the grapes. But whatever their aesthetic qualities, they were clearly highly-regarded. By the early 1880s, vineyards in and around Doniphan produced one million pounds of grapes and 75,000 gallons of wine every year. They grew 24 varieties of native American and American-bred grapes and shipped wine to customers in Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Colorado, Texas, Michigan, and Montana by steamboat and later by rail.

Other parts of Kansas produced wine, too. In A History of Wine in America, a definitive account of winemaking in the United States, author Thomas Pinney noted that a man named A.M. Burns established a nursery specializing in grapevines in Riley County, west of Topeka, in 1856. Within a decade, Burns’ catalog offered more than 150 grape varieties to farmers, including many that he had bred and developed himself.

In 1866, Burns wrote with exuberant optimism about the relationship between Kansas and grapes. “I now think I can with safety predict a glorious future for the grape in Kansas,” he boasted. “It is only a matter of time, and some who, when I commenced to test the vine, sneered at the idea, may yet live to see the day when our bluffs will be teeming with millions of dollars of wealth, while they ought to hang their heads with shame at their own ignorance.” For a time, it seemed that his vision would come to pass. In 1880, the Kansas State Board of Agriculture reported that Kansas produced a whopping 226,000 gallons of wine and reached its peak as a leading producer in the industry.

But just as the optimistic prognostications of A.M. Burns and others seemed to bear fruit, a wave of moral and political action unleashed drastic upheaval in the state. Temperance spread west throughout the U.S., fueled by organizations such as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. During its early statehood and explosive population growth, Kansas was awash with wineries, breweries, and saloons—as well as large numbers of gamblers and prostitutes who frequented them. Prohibition proponents, especially women, loathed the lawlessness and vice. Men who drank had a reputation for being abusive, and poor providers. By 1855, the Kansas Territorial Legislature passed a law “to restrain dramshops and taverns, and to regulate the sale of intoxicating liquors.” Citizens voted in special elections on local liquor laws. And in 1871, even the Kansas State Horticultural Society had initiated discussions against the use of grapes for winemaking in the state.

Prohibition also appealed strongly to evangelical Kansans who viewed alcohol as an obstacle toward gaining eternal salvation—and who regarded the German winemakers, some of whom were Catholic, with suspicion. By the late 1870s, Kansans regularly heard anti-alcohol rhetoric at church revivals. Many were swayed to the temperance cause by the fiery, religion-fueled oration of reformed drunk Francis Murphy of Portland, Maine, who addressed a large crowd in August 1879 at a national temperance rally at Bismarck Grove, near Lawrence, Kansas. Kansas Women’s Christian Temperance Union president Drusilla Wilson, who was present at the rally, also won many converts to the cause. An indefatigable speaker and advocate, driven by her Quaker beliefs, she traveled 3,000 miles across Kansas by carriage to enlist support for state Prohibition. She organized 13 temperance unions, led efforts to obtain petition signatures for a prohibitory state amendment, and later worked to ensure the legislature passed the amendment in a general election.

In an address to the state legislature in January 1879, Governor John P. St. John framed temperance as an economic, moral, and social issue. “Could we but dry up this one great evil that consumes annually so much wealth, and destroys the physical, moral and mental usefulness of its victims,” he suggested, “we would hardly need prisons, poorhouses, or police.”

Kansas amended its state constitution on November 2, 1880 to prohibit “the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors … except for medical, scientific and mechanical purposes.” The statute went into effect from in May 1881 and preceded national Prohibition by four decades. Most Kansas winemakers, brewers, and other alcohol manufacturers went out of business. Some relocated across the state line to Missouri. As late as 1900, 20 years after state Prohibition, grape growers in Kansas continued to cultivate thousands of acres of grapes, selling them to bootleggers in Kansas or to winemakers working legally in Missouri, or for consumption as fruit.

A temperance poster, circa 1903, claimed that Kansas “reduced the annual consumption of intoxicants from the U.S. average of 16 gallons per capita” to less than two, that the state saved an average of more than $6 million “which otherwise would go to the saloon,” and that Prohibition saved annually “more than 1,200 persons from drunkards’ graves.”

Of course, Prohibition—in Kansas and throughout the United States—did not result in a more morally-driven society. The law unintentionally spawned criminal activity by bootleggers and their customers, and ultimately lost support during the Great Depression. National Prohibition was repealed in 1933. In Kansas, too, people drank. But the state remained officially dry, with its voters in 1934 vanquishing a proposed state constitutional amendment that would have legalized alcohol use. Kansas didn’t repeal statewide prohibition until 1948. Some counties still do not allow liquor sales.

Kansans haven’t exactly raced to revive the state’s wine industry. With the earlier generations of winemakers long gone, and the state’s lingering moral and political distaste for alcohol persistent, there was little incentive for investments in new vineyards or wineries. Meanwhile, grape-growing and winemaking have flourished in Missouri.

In the mid-1970s, a horticultural research center near Wichita conducted experiments on soil and climate, and planted trial grapevines with promising results. Encouraged, Dr. Robert Rizza of Halstead, Kansas, planted a vineyard in 1978 and began advocating for the passage of a law that would allow farms to again produce wines on site. In 1983 the state legislature finally approved a farm winery law and amended it in 1985 to reduce costly fees and to permit tastings and sales at wineries as well. The state Department of Agriculture established an advisory program on viticulture and enology, and Kansans began to apply for official licenses and established wineries.

Two decades later, 13 licensed farm wineries in Kansas were harvesting 170 total acres of grapes to produce 50,000 gallons of wine. By 2010, wine production had more than doubled to 107,419 gallons. Today winemakers throughout Kansas plant native and hybrid grapes in the same mineral-rich soils that their 19th-century forebears once so fruitfully worked, producing an impressive range of wines from French-American hybrid and native grapes. A long-abandoned way of life, practiced by some of the state’s first frontier entrepreneurs, is on the rise again.

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To the people of Boston, his capture was an outrage. Seven thousand citizens tried to break him out of jail, and the finest lawyers in Boston tried to make a case for his freedom, all to no avail. On June 2, Burns was escorted to a waiting ship and returned to bondage.

This entire episode had a profound impact on many Bostonians, but one in particular: Amos Adams Lawrence. The Burns episode likely was the first time Lawrence came face-to-face with the evils of slavery, and shortly after Burns was returned to bondage, he wrote to his uncle that “we went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.” (The Whig Party was divided over slavery at this time; by 1854, when the Republican Party was organized, the Whigs were no longer a strong force in U.S. politics.)

A print created in Boston in the 1850s showing Anthony Burns and scenes from his life. Image courtesy of Library of Congress.

Lawrence was a somewhat unlikely abolitionist. He was born into one of the bluest of blue-blood families in Boston and had every benefit his family’s wealth could provide, attending Franklin Academy, an elite boarding school, and then Harvard. True, the Lawrence family had a strong philanthropic ethic. Amos’s uncle, Abbott Lawrence, donated $50,000 to Harvard in 1847—which at the time was the largest single donation given to any college in the United States—to establish Lawrence Scientific School, and Amos’s father, also named Amos, retired at age 45 to devote the remainder of his life to philanthropy. In 1854, Amos Adams Lawrence wrote in his private diary that he needed to make enough money in his business practices to support charities that were important to him.

But those business practices made backing an anti-slavery charity unlikely. His family made its fortune in the textile industry, and Lawrence himself created a business niche as a commission merchant selling manufactured textiles produced in New England. Most of the textiles Lawrence and his family produced and sold were made from cotton, which was planted, picked, ginned, baled, and shipped by slaves. This fact presents an interesting conundrum. The Burns episode made Lawrence, as he wrote, “a stark mad abolitionist,” but, as far as we know, the fact that his business relied on the same people he was trying to free did not seem to bother him.

Lawrence very quickly had the opportunity to translate his new-found abolitionism into action. On May 30, 1854, in the midst of the Burns affair, President Franklin Pierce signed into law the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which established Kansas and Nebraska as territories but allowed each to decide for themselves, under the concept of popular sovereignty, whether they wanted slavery or not. To many abolitionists, this was an outrage, because it opened the possibility for another slave state to enter the union. Also, with the slave-holding state of Missouri right next door, the pro-slavery side seemed to have an undue advantage.

This was Lawrence’s chance. A friend introduced him to Eli Thayer, who had just organized the Emigrant Aid Company to encourage antislavery settlers to emigrate to Kansas with the goal of making the territory a free state. Lawrence became the company’s treasurer, and immediately began dipping into his pocket to cover expenses. When the first antislavery pioneers arrived in Kansas, they decided to call their new community “Lawrence,” knowing that without their benefactor’s financial aid, their venture likely would not have been possible.

Lawrence was frequently frustrated that the company’s leaders were not aggressive enough to raise money, but he quietly continued to cover the bills. At one point, he confided to his diary, when bills for the Emigrant Aid Company came due, he did not have enough of his own money on hand, so he sold shares in his business to cover the expenses. Whenever there was a need for special funding in Kansas, Lawrence would donate and ask others to do so as well. Lawrence and his brothers, for example, contributed to the purchase of Sharps rifles—the most advanced weapons of the day—for citizens of Lawrence.

44-caliber Sharps percussion sporting rifle used by abolitionist John Brown, ca 1856. Image courtesy of National Museum of American History.

They needed those guns. Because Lawrence, Kansas was the center of the antislavery movement, it became the bullseye of the target of pro-slavery folks. In late 1855, Missourians lined up planning to attack Lawrence in what was called the Wakarusa War. Nothing happened that time, and the Missourians returned home. But less than a year later came the “Sack of Lawrence,” in which pro-slavery Missourians burned much of the town to the ground. Amos Lawrence continued to support the effort to make Kansas a free state. In 1857, Lawrence again dug into his pocket and donated $12,696 to establish a fund “for the advancement of religious and intellectual education of the young in Kansas.”

Eventually, in 1861, Kansas was admitted to the Union as a free state. The town of Lawrence played an important role in this development, and several of its residents became leaders in the early state government. But the wounds of the territorial period continued to fester. In August 1863, during the Civil War, Lawrence burned again: Willian Clarke Quantrill, a Confederate guerrilla chieftain, led his cutthroat band into the town, killed more than 200 men and boys, and set the place on fire.

Just several months before, Lawrence had been granted approval from the new state legislature to build the University of Kansas in their town. Citizens needed to raise $15,000 to make this happen, and the raid had nearly wiped out everyone. Again, Amos Lawrence came to the rescue, digging into his pocket for $10,000 to make sure Lawrence, Kansas would become the home of the state university.

In 1884, Amos Lawrence finally visited the town that bore his name. Citizens rolled out the red carpet to honor their namesake. He was honored by the university he was instrumental in creating. He was invited as the guest of honor for several other events. But Lawrence had always been a very private person, and the hoopla over his visit was too much. He stayed for a couple of days, then returned home to Boston. He never visited again.

To the people of modern-day Lawrence, Amos Lawrence has faded from memory. A reporter writing about him in a recent local newspaper article was unaware that he had visited the town. But Lawrence’s support and money were essential in making Kansas a free state. When Lawrence responded to Burns’s brutal treatment, he showed how a citizen can be shocked out of complacency and into action—and thus made history.

The post The Bostonian Who Armed the Anti-Slavery Settlers in “Bleeding Kansas” appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

To most Americans, Kansas is a state experienced in transit: flown over or traversed without stopping. But it’s also a fabled place of internal struggle, where John Brown helped start the Civil War, and where warring ideologies continue today (we haven’t elected a Republican or Democrat governor twice in a row since 1965). In spite, or maybe because, of these conflicts, it’s become the nation’s metaphor for the authentic American experience.

I grew up in the capital city, Topeka (T-town to the natives). I attended elementary, junior high, high school, and college all within a 25-minute drive (22 minutes for my mom) from my childhood home, where distance is measured by speed–your personal best in minutes, not miles. Topeka is where I watched the culture wars play out in my backyard, from the antics of the Westboro Baptist Church and founder Fred Phelps, who is known for his extreme hostility toward homosexuality, to the State Board of Education’s decision not to require teaching evolution in the classroom (grossly twisted into the headline “Kansas Bans Teaching Evolution”).

Topeka in the early ’90s was a city of controversy–Monday through Saturday, that is. Most of the population agreed that Sunday was sacred. Nearly 90 percent of Kansans are practicing Christians, almost a third of whom are Roman Catholics, like half my family. Divorce may have been shunned, but my parents, who split up when I was seven, were in good company: 1990 marked the highest number of filed divorces the state has ever seen.

I spent a significant portion of my childhood going to mass or learning scripture in the parochial school’s basement during CCD (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine–aka Sunday school for the public school kids). Religion provided a sense of consistency in the unpredictable times and was the mechanism for inviting new people into your life. When someone asked you to church, it was like they were asking you to coffee. Churches were the diners and coffee shops of larger cities, and they were vibrant every Sunday morning.

I moved east for graduate school–just 30 minutes, but it felt like more. Lawrence, Kansas, home of the University of Kansas and its fictional mascot (the Jayhawk), is a splash of blue in a sea of red, a haven for creative types and dreamers. But my dream was to live in the Big Apple, not the Little Apple an hour west. So I headed to New York City. Neither a visitor nor a native, I became the typical New Yorker: I surrounded myself with like-minded individuals, spent summers in the park and winters in the museums, and relished giving tourists directions on the subway. But I also found myself becoming closer to Kansas.

The summer of my arrival in New York, Thomas Frank’s New York Times bestseller, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, topped every must-read list and stared back at me from every bookstore display window. Without election, I became Kansas’s unofficial spokesperson within my circle of new acquaintances. Hastily, I read the book and finally learned some of my state’s history.

And so, after just a week in “The City,” I became “Joe Kansas”–or, as I thought of myself, a reborn-again Kansan. I read every book on Kansas’s history. I took on any quip or question about Kansas that came my way (and there were a lot). The old adage “absence makes the heart grow fonder” could not have been more apt. The question “Where are you from?” could send me into an impromptu oration on The Sunflower State’s history: “Kansas’s motto, Ad astra per aspera, ‘through hardships to the stars,’ describes the state perfectly …”

From there I’d explain the origin of the nickname “Bleeding Kansas” (a border war with Missouri over slavery in the 1850s), offer the story of John Ritchie’s Underground Railroad station, and explain the roots of the Monroe School–the center of Brown v. Board of Education.

I fought preemptively against the assumption that I was suffering from culture shock in the Big City–and the implied apology for my home state’s lack of diversity and culture:

Kansas is home to many who made a “first” happen. My fellow Topeka native Charles Curtis was the first recognized Native American to be vice president, under Herbert Hoover. In 1940 Hattie McDaniel (from Wichita) received an Academy Award for her role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind, making her the first black person ever to win. Amelia Earhart was from Atchison. And yes, we have opera, classical music, and Picasso there, too.

I’m not embarrassed to admit that, when I felt it was necessary, I also offered up Cawker City (pronounced the way it is spelled), home to the World’s Largest Ball of Twine. The sign at city limits reads, “Welcome to Cawker City: We Have One Big Ball.”

More often than not, my diatribe was greeted by silence, or, worse, a dreaded reference to the first film credited to be in color–The Wizard of Oz. It sometimes felt as though every New Yorker, and every transplanted New Yorker from anywhere else, had been waiting his whole life to grace an actual Kansan’s ears with the infamous quote.

I wasn’t there any longer. And five years after moving to “The City,” I began to feel like a fish in an ocean full of many that were just like me. Not exactly what a creative type ever wants to admit. I wanted more. I needed more.

I knew New York was not the center of the universe, or even the country. Kansas is both the geodetic center of North America and the geographical center of the contiguous United States.

Back in the middle, the lost Transatlantic Ocean, I could be the fish in the pond. I may have poked fun at our state slogan when it was changed in the late ’90s, but “Kansas, As Big As You Think” called to me. I was going home–but I wasn’t going to click my heels to get there.

Salina (pronounced “Sah-lie-naw”) is two hours from my hometown, in the center of the state, where the Flint Hills end and the Great Central Plains begin. Unlike New Yorkers who proudly claim “The City,” Salinans are not quite sure what Salina is or has to offer. The town’s unknown potential hooked me. The possibilities of what I could do and build there would be limited only by my ambition.

Salina is a typical Kansas town in a lot of ways, with a city plan that’s almost identical to those of Topeka and Lawrence: Art Deco architecture in the historic downtown located in the north, the Smoky Hill River winding through the eastern quadrant, and a commercial sprawl of chainsstores and a mall on the southwest border. With a population just over 47,000 it’s not large enough to be a city, but too big to be a town. Smack dab in the middle, literally and figuratively.

The climate varies as much as the topography. Just this week we’ve seen highs in the 70s and lows in the 20s, snow one hour and sunny skies the next, and 60 mph winds. A tornado watch is looming even as I write now: twister season is just around the corner.

The hot topic when I first settled in was whether or not Salina needed a Starbucks. Affirmative and negative teams were formed (this is the land of debate and forensics), and heated arguments about capitalism pursued. The verdict is still out, but I’ve heard rumors that next fall there will be one at the gas station out by the highway: out of sight for the residents, yet accessible to the transients.

I’m not a fan of burnt coffee, and besides, I much prefer Ad Astra, the corner bookstore/coffee shop hybrid where I’m working now. Here a guy wearing shit kickers and spurs leans over, as the tornado alarm sounds, to say, “Maybe next time,” and the music of Melissa Etheridge (who, I’ve just learned, is from Leavenworth) plays over the speakers. Down the street are several more independent shops like this. There’s the newly renovated Stiefel Theatre where I get my performance fix (Garrison Keillor and the Wichita Grand Opera next month) and an independent cinema that’s showing The Artist now and A Separation next (mind you I select the films, so I’m creating part of this cultural ferment).

When I first moved to Salina, I was often asked, “Where did you come from?” When I answered “New York City,” the follow-up was inevitable: “So, why did you move here?” And so, once again, I have become Joe Kansas, the Free State’s number-one cheerleader, responsible for educating my fellow Kansans on the history they either forgot, never were taught, or just don’t think is worth being proud of.

Here, my recitations (“Your fellow Kansans–the stars behind Ethel Mertz, Mr. Grant, Rebecca Howe, Cam Tucker–have been on TV since the beginning of the modern sitcom!”) are greeted not with quotes from The Wizard of Oz, but nods of agreement, and another question: “So, where are you from?” This time, I reply, “Kansas,” and more often than not, we look to the stars and sigh.

Joseph Keehn II is an artist, and pays his debt by performing as the Curator of Public Programs for the Salina Art Center. He is co-editor of and contributor to Rethinking Contemporary Art and Multicultural Education, a resource text for teachers and art enthusiasts, and executive producer for The Orange Party, a traveling tent show created by and for the community in which it temporarily resides.

*Photo courtesy of the people of Lebanon, Kansas.

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