The American ten years' war, 1855-1865

Chapter I. The Opening Conflict (1855-6)

^be ifirst llnvaeion*

During the last days of March, 1855, a small army, some 5,000 men as the account runs, marched from the State of Missouri over its western boundary into the neighboring Territory of Kansas. There was no open proclamation of war, and the country generally supposed itself to be in possession of peace at home and abroad. Still here was a military organization in semblance, belonging to no State legally nor to the United States, commanded by Generals and Colonels and Captains, and accompanied by a train of wagons containing supplies of food and liquor and ammunition. The men were armed with guns and pistols; many of them showed their distinctive weapon in a unicjue way : bowie-knives

6 THE TEX YEARS' WAB.

protruding fi*oin the tops of their boots. They had been recruited chiefly from the western counties of Missouri, which also contributed the main expenses of the expedition, deeming themselves the vanguard of Southern civilization in the great conflict manifestly approaching and ready to break out on their border. Mighty was the enthusiasm, overflowing into multitudinous streams of oratory from the leaders, who were mostly politicians in line of promotion, and who had the power of evoking in their hearers volley after volley of profanity discharged against the Abolitionists over in Kansas and in the North.

War in peace, then, we behold on the Kansas- Missouri border during these fair spring days; what does it portend? Such a mass of men could not have been gathered, drilled and organized without money and much previous effort. It is now known that they were members of a secret oath-bound society called the Blue Lodge mainly, though other names of it were current. A fixed, persistent purpose lies back of it, an idea, we must believe ; it bodes some struggle impending, whereof this is the first little, distant outbreak, the harbinger of mightier events coming on. So these Missourians march across the border, totally unconscious of the colossal, world-historical drama whose first scene they are enacting.

No doubt could be entertained concerninof

Part I. — The Fie St Invasion. 7

their immediate object, for it was openly proclaimed by all; they intended to vote in Kansas, though non-residents, and to elect a Territorial Legislature, which would transform it into a Shive-State. Their scheme was to seize hold of the law-making power by violence, and then render their illegal acts legal. A curious mental condition was this of the Missourians, yet their leaders upheld it by argument as well as by fervid appeals to conscience and to eternal justice, invoking even the God of battles. March 30th the election took place. In a voting population of about 3,000, according to a census taken a few weeks before the election, 6,300 votes were cast, nearly four-fifths of them by Missourians who took possession of most of the pollingplaces, ousted any recalcitrant judges, and proceeded to accept their own ballots for their own candidates. The result was a complete triumph of Missourians choosing themselves for Kansas legislators, who were 39 in number. The Governor, Reeder, had to canvass the returns, and, though an appointee of the Democratic Administration, did not relish the Missouri method of undoing the ballot through the ballot. Still he gave certificates of election to all but seven, looking into the muzzles of cocked pistols, it is said, which had also a significant power of speech, saying to him: We shall spit fire if you go behind the returns. In the seven districts where ballots were thrown out on account of informalities too brazen, a new election took place which resulted in the choice of seven Kansas legislators for Kansas, who, however, were soon unseated by the Missouri members, as usurpers of the sacred rights of Missourians.

Contemplating these events we have to ask ourselves : Is here a mere local trouble, a border foray of outlaws, or is this spirit getting to be general in the South? Is the ballot, the great Anglo-Saxon instrumentality for obviating violence, to be set aside by violence? Is the majority no longer to rule in this country? If so, war must come, since the means of all peaceful settlement between contending parties is broken into fragments and scattered to the winds. Ominous of 1861 is already 1855 in Kansas.

The Missourians declared undisguisedly that their purpose was to make Kansas a Slave- State without any regard for the wishes of her people. To that end they had now seized the legislative power of the Territory, which rightfully belonged to its actual settlers. Already the Missourians supposed that they had both the executive and the judicial branches of the Territorial organization. The Governor and other administrative officials were appointed by the President, Franklin Pierce, who was dominated by the shive power of which the head was already Jefferson Davis,

PABT I. — THE FIRST INVASION. 9

Secretary of War at Washington, The Judiciary of the Territory likewise was a Presidential appointment, and would not fail to co-operate with the Missourians, as time showed. The scheme of the invaders, accordingly, was to get control of the Legislature, preventing the inhabitants from governing themselves, since they were manifesting a decided tendency toward wheeling Kansas into the company of the Free- States, from which most of them had come. Unfortunately Governor Reeder had legalized in form the illegal act of the invaders, through his certificates of election. Thus illegality was made legal and was enthroned not only as law, but as the law-making power of Kansas. Reeder will repent of his action, and will valiantly battle against the consequences of his own mistake, showing his deepest worth by making undone his own ill-doing, as far as lies in his power.

Such is the fierce contradiction in the institutional order of Kansas, rending to pieces her ethical life and making her truly a perverted world. The established authority is used to disestablish the foundation of authority, the consent of the governed ; the three powers of government, legislative, executive, and judicial, are in the hands of those who intend to employ them for undermining their source, the will of the people. The forms of free institutions are turned into destroyers of freedom, and the law is driven to the point of stabbing itself and letting its own heart's blood. In such a perverted institutional world man cannot live in peace. How can he be even legal when illegality makes the law? Still he must remain law-abiding till he can somehow re-make the law by which he abides.

Over all these occurrences gleams the question : Was the act of the Missourians representative? Did it reach beyond their State even to the Atlantic? Did it reveal the spirit and the rising purpose of the South? Many and loud were the exultations in the newspapers from Westport in Missouri to Charleston in South Carolina; the event was hailed as the certain triumph of Slavery. On the whole the Southerners made this deed of their borderland their own, approving it and setting it up for imitation. Still there were protests, some of them pronounced but most of them suppressed. The extremists were in the saddle and were bent on riding at the top of their speed. The conservatives were carried along in the fateful sweep of the time, even when they feaw the stream plunging toward a Niagara cataract.

We have called these invaders Missourians, since they were chiefly recruited from Northwestern Missouri, whose wind-lands, containiusf the finest soil in the United States accordinir to a competent observer, were occupied at an early

PART I. — THE FIRST INVASION. H

day by slaveholders, who became slavery's strongest partisans. But Missouri is a large State, and as a whole hardly approved of these border invasions instigated from the Platte Purchase. This inference may be reasonably drawn from Missouri's vote for Douglas and his Popular Sovereignty in 1860, after his breach with the South just on this Kansas question. Moreover Missouri had during these years (1856-60) an active minority in favor of making it a Free State.

The question of questions, then, looming up over the Border is, Shall this new Territory be tilled with the labor of slaves or of freemen? The conflict has opened on the dividing line between the settled and the unsettled lands of the national domain, on the boundary between States already in the Union and those which are hereafter to come into the Union. We may well regard it as the visible demarcation of the present from the future ; indeed we shall soon see it transformed into a battle-line between the old and the new order, between the outgoing and the incoming civilization. The struggle will reach far beyond the confines of Kansas, will involve the whole United States, and will have an abiding influence upon the destiny of both Americas and of the entire world. So it must be said that in this remote border-land is enacted a scene in the grand drama of Universal History, and that Kansas for a brief period rises to the point of making herself world-historical.

Such a mighty birth lies ensconced in this seemingly insignificant border foray of a lawless horde — an event which otherwise would not be worthy of the record. But the years will speedily show it to have a meaning more than local or even national, and so the historic Muse, sitting at the inner shrine of Time's occurrences and watching their hidden movement, will dip her pen afresh for their deeper and more pregnant portrayal. Before the tribunal of all History, then, have appeared the two contestants with their pressing question : Shall this Kansas be a Slave-State or a Free-State? And underneath yet along with it lurks another profounder interrogation : Shall this Federal Union hereafter brinff forth Slave-States or Free-States? And still more deeply may we catch a gleam of the oracle flashing fitfully upon the night of the future an affirmative response to the question whether or not the Free-State is to be universal.

But limiting our vision to a smaller and more definite round of events, we can say that the American Civil War has now started, and it is not going to stop till the right and complete thing be done. On the Missouri-Kansas border during the vernal tide of March-April, 1855, with the coming. of the invaders the whirlwind rose, or, in

PART I. — THE FIE ST INVASION. 13

Kansas phrase, " the bhzzard broke loose," strangely refusing to blow itself out into nothingness and be pacified till a great historic cycle had evolved itself into completeness. For its conclusion we must look through ten years and note what is taking place during these same spring days in 1865. Sheridan is at Five Forks, Eichmond falls, the Southern Confederacy collapses, and on April the 9tli is Lee's surrender at Appomattox. The border blizzard has swollen up to an all-embracing national cyclone of war ; starting from its little spot in the distant West, it has swept through Missouri and down the Mississippi Valley, overwhelming all the new Slave-States and then all the old Slave-States, really the origin of the whole trouble, and burning up slavery root and branch along its furious path. Such is the end lurking in and unfolding out of this tiny starting-point, and interlinking with it in a kind of circular chain of events, which form one of the most important processes of the World's History. Let the reader note here at the beginning, its inner propulsion to get around to its primal source in the Eastern States, its cyclical tendency to come back to its origin and to transform that.

A new Ten Years' War we witness on our Western Continent, not altogether unhke the far-famed Trojan one ending in the destruction of Ilium and the restoration of Helen. Again every community will muster its contingent of soldiers and send them forth to the war under its leading man or hero, to fight for the great cause, which meant in the olden time that Hellas and not Troy was to determine the civilization of the future. But now a restoration is to take place far deeper than the Grecian or that of Helen ; the mighty struggle is now not for the ideal of beauty but for the ideal of freedom, though its bearer be not the most beautiful woman of the world but the homeliest mortal of God's creation, the black African, most un- Grecian as to nose and feature and foot and form. No Iliad singing rhythmic harmonies and moving with Olympian lines into plastic shapes of Heroes and Gods, can ever be born of such an ideal. No hexametral roll attuned to the sweep of sea and mountain and echoing the subtle concordance of nature and soul in the thousandfold play of its cadences can be evoked out of the prairie-speech uttered by the chief actors in this conflict. And yet an Iliad we may call the action, deepened and widened by the stream of the World's History down the Ages, with its tale of terrible but purifying experiences sent upon the Nation by the Divine Order. As the Greek during his whole national existence never could get rid of the eternal pother over Helen, but had to re-enact her and hers in his art, in his poetry, even in his

PAET I. — THE FIB ST INVASION. 15

history imd religion, with the ever-recurriug conflict between Greece and Asia from Troy till Rome, so the American seemingly cannot bring to an end the eternal pother over the negro after hundreds of trials, but has to spend his thought, his treasure and his blood, till this humblest and by nature most servile of the races of men be transformed and regenerated into a free being, capable of free institutions. Such a task, not willingly laid upon us by ourselves but by the Spirit of total Man, persists in lowering over us, not always to our comfort. Of this task our Ten Years' War is but a stage already past, and henceforth to be looked back at and ruminated upon with profit, and, it is to be hoped, with interest. For History is not merely a line of successive and fortuitous occurrences in Time, but the Soul of all Time, yea, the Soul which makes Time, uttering itself in the events of the past, voicing itself in the deeds and thoughts of men. To hear this voice and to commune with its meaning, may be regarded as the ultimate purpose of historic study.

Such was the First Invasion of Kansas by the Missourians, the beo^inning of woes unnumbered to both the participants, and not only to them, but to all their countrymen connected by ties of sympathy and kinship ramifying through the whole Nation, North aud South. We call it the first, though there was an earlier foray in the preceding year (November, 1854) when a band of Missourians crossed the border and voted for the Congressional delegate, Whitfield, who, however, was not opposed by the people of the Territory. Thus it was a peaceful affair though a wrong with a nemesis lurking in it, even if for the present smothered. But now in 1855, the inhabitants of Kansas want their own Legisla-* ture, which is their right, and get ready to resist, whereat Bellona unties her bag of ills, not to be tied up again for ten weary, desperate years.

The Invasion was an attempt to steal a right, the majority's right of determining their institutions, the right of all others fundamental and peculiar to America's government, making her truly self-governed, and constituting the very symbol of her spirit, of her self-hood. Such was the portentous theft committed in Kansas on that spring-day, really our American Rape of Helen, done by those Missouri borderers who tried to carry off by violence beautiful Freedom in the shape of the ballot, far more beautiful to Americans than beautiful Helen of old Greece, and we believe more virtuous in spite of many insidious attempts at her prostitution. And yet the fact must be recorded that these assailants of Free-

PART I. — THE FllitST INVASION. 17

dom's honor were Americans, speaking English, peculiarly the hinguage of Freedom, just as those old Trojans, the captors and detainers of beautiful Helen, were of Hellenic blood, and spoke Greek, peculiarly the language of Beauty. So the old and the new, the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega of our Occidental History come together and interlink, rounding themselves out into that oft-noted cycle of events which therein are to be seen not merely moving forward to the end, but also o-oino; backward to the beginning. Only thus can we behold the present orbing itself with its own creative past and completing a great historic process, which, while it runs with Time on the one side, runs against Time on the other, returning to its starting-point and therein revealing that periodicity, which from hoary Egypt till now has been felt to be a manifestation of the omnipotent hand controlling the World's occurrences.

In a sense it may be said that the ideal of Freedom has hovered before man since the beginning of History, and that it is, accordingly, nothing new. Still it has been developing all the while and is ever taking new and more adequate forms. This last or American form of the long conflict between Freedom and Slavery puts its main stress upon the political institution, and regards the State as genetic or creative, that is, as productive -of other States. Now this ge-

18 THE TEN VEAliS' WAR.

netic State or Federal Uuion, through its constitution was made to be productive of two kinds of States, free and shive. This dualism is what is threatening to break asunder the Federal Union when the Ten Years' War opens, whose conflict may, therefore, be said to lie between Free- Stateisni and Slave-Stateism. And the future problem, which the popular mind (our American Folk-Soul) is in deep self-communion turning over within itself, may be summed up in the question : Shall henceforth our State-creating Union be the parent of free States or of slave States, or still of both? This we might call the theme or argument of our American Iliad, in which as in the old Greek one, through countless ills of both sides the Will of Zeus was accomplished.

It is evident that the problem turns upon Labor, and the two kinds of States ground themselves upon the two kinds of Labor, that of the freeman and that of the bondman. The Free- State is really the Free-Labor State, and the Slave-State is the Slave-Labor State, though in the latter actual slavery was confined to the black race. Or, to reach down to the depths of the human soul, to the psychical being of man, we must conceive that all Labor is auact of Will, whose freedom it is just the function of the State to secure through its laws. But now we have a State which is to secure a Will enslaved, con-

PAIiT T. — THE FlilST I.VVASION 19

tradictiug- therein its owu essence. And the American Union is to continue bringing forth such States — or is not — which shall it be? Such a question the American Folk-Soul has propounded to itself,, sounding its dee[)est abysses for an answer. But what oracle dwells there within to deliver such a response? Truly that Delphic voice which once spoke at rocky Pytho the words of the God is no longer audible on the outside, but has taken up its modern abode in the Folk-Soul, which receives the divine impress directly and acts from within, according to conviction. Such is the new Zeus, not quite the Homeric one, yet descended from him and inter-related with him through the successive ages.

The American Folk-Soul is, then, going to school and is working at its problem which it sees but cannot yet solve. Kansas is about to give the first lesson, the preliminary courselasting some three years or more; such was the discipline for the great coming task. But wlm prescribes this task? Again we have to go behind the curtain of the thronging, tumultuous, distracting events of Time, and gl!mi)sc the Spirit busied there; call it Civilization, Progress, World-Spirit, or even Zeus, if you like IIoiium's poetic way of imagining the divine order wliidi controls History. For the old Greek bard al>'> has his two worlds; the lower one of mortals

20 THE TEN YE Alt S' WAR.

around aucl in Tioy, full of war, confusion, and cnprice; then the upper Olympian one, the serene abode of the Gods, above whom sits Zeus Supreme, voicing when at his best not only the soul of that little speck of Trojan Time, but of all Time.

In some such way we would fain impress our reader with the thought that this Kansas conflict is not a mere bubble on the stream of the World's History, rising and bursting in the passing moment, but is that etream itself, the whole of it, for the present, till it flows elsewhither on its ceaseless sweep to its goal.

II

Having thus mustered the one side of the Kansas conflict, and caused it to pass in review, we must plainly do the same service for the other side. The assailants with their principle have been witnessed in their march across the border; but who are the assailed, aud whence and for what purpose have they come hither to the untamed prairie aud wilderness? Some account of these hardy spirits is next due.

After the passage of the Kansas -Nebraska bill, the President of the United States had declared the territory of Kansas open for settlement on May 30th, 1854. At once emigrants began to pour in from all parts of the countr}', for the purpose of occupying the land. By far the

PART I.— THE FIB ST IXVASIOJ^. 2l

largest portion came from the Northern States of the West, which always had its pioneers whose nature was to tire of the more tliicklv settled districts and to o-o forth asjain to the frontier, as they and their ancestors had done for generations. As we have seen in more recent times the large crowds ready to rush across the border of Oklahoma, when this territory was thrown open for settlement, so we may conceive the numbers ready to cross into Kansas in the spring and summer of 1854.

These early emigrants were largely though not wholly from the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Iowa. Nearly all of them came singly, or in small neighborhood groups. It was in no sense an organized movement. Each man expected to enter his tract of land and start to work on his own account and in his own way, clearing the soil and putting in his crop; then later he intended to send for family and friends. It was an individual emigration, this of the West to Kansas. These men were the first on the ground, and rapidly grew in number. Tumbling over one another they come like a flock of blackbirds, the rearmost flying above the heads of the rest and lighting down foremost, till these find themselves again in the rear, when once more they rise in flight for the front. Such were the human waves which came rolling out of the Western States over the Kansas border when

22 THE TEX YEARS' WAR.

the barrier was removed. We may deem it auother manifestatioa of that oUl Arj^an iustinct which has driven westward now for thousands of years, propelling its migrating peoples out of Asia, through Europe, across the Atlantic to America, in a succession of Oceanic undulations which have swept over the Alleghenies, and leaping the Mississip})i, have reached the boundary of Kansas, whose plains are now to be the scene of their last great overflow.

They found the land ah'eady surveyed by the Government and divided into sections and quarter sections, each of which might become a farm with its industrious tenant, the like of whom had already filled the North- West with a thrifty, self-reli;int population, all of them makers of their own institutions and ready to fioht for these, if the call came. This is the class of men that began to settle down over Eastern Kansas, clustering at first along its navigable streams. Each little farm became a cell in an ever-increasing honeycomb, and contained a busy bee seeking to gather the honey of industry, but pre[)ared to fly out and sting his foe if disturbed in his work or his freedom. Then these bees made a hive and many hives, which would swarm forth together against their troubler with wonderful celerity and undaunted courage. In 1854 alre;uly this mass of farms began to array themselves against the Missouri border in

PAET I. — THE FIRST INVASION. 23

serried ranks one behind the other, not without many a contest over titles to the hind which the Missouriuns chiimed to have pre-empted. But tiie agricultural fortification of the country went on till it was inexpugnable, since each of these small homes held one worker and fighter at least, and sometimes several. Such was the wall of Hvinof valor with its free labor which was built or rather built itself as a bulwark against the slave-bringinoj invaders.

This is, then, the first, the unorganized, individual migration. But there is another which is organized, having a different source. New England, and a different character. The leader appears who establishes his Emigrant Aid Society for the purpose of colonizing Kansas. The name of this leader rises into great prominence, so that the whole country. North and South, knows of Eli Thayer. His first band, 29 strong, left Boston July 17th, 1854, with a most lavish expenditure of noise. A great multitude gathered at the railroad station to witness their departure, which fact indicates that the fight w^as already expected in Kansas. The cheering crowds lined the tracks for several blocks. The country through which the train passed was everywere roused, and ovations were tendered at several cities to these soldiers o-oino- to the war. A fortnight after leaving Boston they were in Kansas, and August 1st is given as the date of their fouuding of Lawrence, destined for years to be the storm-center of the Territory. This first colony was soon followed by others from the Eastern States.

Such w^as the deafening flourish of truuipets echoing from one end of the land to the othei*, which heralded the advent into Kansas of Eli Thayer's New England regiment of 29. From the prodigious hubbub made over them, people have supposed they were another small Marathoui in band marching forth alone to combat the countless host of slavery. But the fact is they found already hundreds of settlers in Kansas, mostly from tlie West-Northern States. The latter differed from their East-Northern nei^hbors in a number of points, but both resolutely agreed on one point: Kansas must be a Free- State. Moreover these Westerners were fighters, no doubt about it; they came rather expecting a fight; they were chosen, by a kind of Natural Selection, to migrate to Kansas, every man with his trusty rifle in hand. At the same time they were farmers, and tradesmen, and artisans, devoted to the works of peace, but ready for war if the time called for it. A strong courageous individuality thej^ possessed, otherwise they would not have ventured into this troubled borderland. They remained the large majority of the Free- State people of Kansas and fought her battles during the whole Ten Years' War.

PABT I — THE FIB ST INVASION. 25

In such fashion we must conceive the two great migrations, the unorganized and organized, the one from the West the other from the East. Both of them continued their activity for years and were united in the one great purpose of making Kansas a Free-State, which purpose was uppermost in eacli. But outside of this supreme point of unity there were many differences. The ^Yesterners as a whole were hardly anti-slavery, they disliked the negro, believed his presence to be a curse to the white man, and were determined to keep not only the slave but the free African out of the new State. In fact many non-slaveholders from the South who came to Kansas changed to Free-State men when they heard this view; Eli Thayer says a majority of them did so. However strange the expression may seem to us now, it is probable that the hirger number of these early emigrants were pro-slavery Free-State men. They were inclined to believe that the natural condition of the negro was that of a slave, but he must stay in the old Slave States, and not come either as freeman or slave into this our white man's territory. This consciousness we uuist understand, as it alone explains nuich of 'the political conduct (^f these early settlers. Their first constitution allowed no black man, bond or free, to al)idc within the State.

The New England emigrants, thouuh fewer in number, had the udvantago in education, iu organizing power and in the ability to use all the modern implements of civilization. Hence they were the leaders from the start. In one of the earliest lot of colonists came Charles Eobinson, whom Thayer first saw in one of his New England meetings, and engaged as agent of the Emigrant Aid Company. Of all the men who won distinction in this Kansas epic, Eobinson would have our vote to be pedestaled as hero. Not Lane, not John Brown, but Robinson was the savior of Kansas. He was the born leader, gauging aright the people whom he was to lead, what they would and would not do. He saw clearly that he could concentrate the most diverse followers, from North and South, from East and West, upon one thing and one thing onl}' : Kansas must be a Free-State. Moreover Robinson was an institutional man, he had untold trouble not merely with the pro-slavery enemy, but with the anti-slavery revolutionists and anarchists. The Garrisouians denounced him and sought to nullify his work. But he, though an abolitionist in conviction, knew that his prime duty was to pluck the fruit within his reach. This he did with a determination and success which we nniy fairly call heroic.