When the Destination Really Was Kansas

When I speak to Kansans of Millennial age, I am continually impressed by how little they know about the history of their state (about the history of anything, for that matter). When I tell them that Kansas has a more noble history than any state in the union, they grin in anticipation, awaiting the punch line. “No, I’m serious,” I tell them. Sure, Jack, whatever.

I am serious. So were the original New England settlers who moved here. In 1854, Democratic President Franklin Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act into law. Northern political operatives wanted the proposed transcontinental railroad to follow the Platte River Valley through Nebraska. Southerners wanted to maintain the political balance by opening Kansas up to slavery.

As part of the compromise, residents of each of the newly delineated territories were empowered to decide for themselves whether to permit slavery in their domain or to prohibit it. Democrats figured that undocumented voters from Missouri, then a slave state, could flood the ballot boxes come Election Day and open Kansas up to the “peculiar institution.” 

To counteract this inevitability, entrepreneurs in New England incorporated what came to be known as the New England Emigrant Aid Society (NEEAC). Their goal was to move as many antislavery settlers to Kansas as possible.

In the 1850s, getting to Kansas was not “half the fun.” It was no fun at all. We often hear about the death rate on the infamous “Trail of Tears,” but we overlook the fact that all cross-country travel back then was absurdly dangerous by today’s standards. 

The penultimate stage of the journey usually took the emigrants up the Missouri River. In that brief period before the railroad made steamboat travel obsolete, more than 300 boats sank in the lower Missouri alone. One of them, the Steamboat Arabia, memorably sank near Parkville in 1856.

A few years earlier, just beyond Lexington, Mo., the steamboat Saluda exploded, killing more than 100 people, including a few people on land hit by flying debris. These weren’t pleasure cruises. 

Travel was treacherous enough, but as the emigrants soon learned, life was about to get rougher still. The first group of NEEAC emigrants reached Kansas City in July 1854.

From Kansas City, the settlers headed overland on the Oregon Trail and staked their future, as they wrote, on the “first desirable location where emigrant Indians had ceded their land rights.” In this part of the world, even the Native Americans weren’t native. The settlers named the inchoate town after the wealthy abolitionist who served as NEEAC treasurer, Amos Lawrence. 

My Lawrence friends might be dismayed to learn that most of these new settlers belonged to the new political party formed in opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. But without Facebook and Twitter telling Kansans how to think back then, even people in Lawrence voted Republican.

The settlers’ thinking was that if they named the town after Lawrence, he would pony up some much-needed dough. He did just that. Given that Lawrence was himself a Republican, today’s City Commissioners might take a cue from their Founding Fathers, find someone close to their ideological cloth, and sell him or her the naming rights. If you can rename an arena, why not a town? How does Bezos, Kansas, sound? Or Zuckerberg?

Unimpressed by the new name, Missourians just called it “Yankee Town.” In the first election on Kansas’ future in 1855, a total of 6,307 votes were cast. The problem was that there were only 2,905 legal voters. Back then, they had this thing called “voter fraud.” Thank goodness we solved that problem.

In this state of near anarchy, tensions ran high as the opposing forces jockeyed for power. A year after that first election, the pro-slavery forces pioneered what would become a college town tradition—cancel culture. 

They attacked the offices of the antislavery newspapers, destroyed the presses, and scattered the newspapers. For good measure, they ransacked Yankee Town and burned much of it to the ground. In the next few years, the state more than earned its new nickname, “Bleeding Kansas.” 

That sanguinary title might not seem to be good for marketing, but despite the dangers—or perhaps because of them—Kansas remained a destination for the good souls of New England.

By 1859, the Free-Staters, as they were called, had established too real a majority to be overrun by illegal voters at the ballot box. 

In that year, citizens voted by a 2-to-1 margin for what was known as the Wyandotte Constitution. When Congress approved the Constitution in January 1861, Kansas was admitted to the union as a free state.

No doubt, the darkest day in Kansas history was August 21, 1863. Early that morning, William Quantrill, then just 26 years old, led hundreds of Missouri “irregulars” on horseback into Lawrence on what they thought was a suicide raid. It proved to be just the opposite. Quantrill caught Lawrence sleeping and killed as many as 200 men and boys.

In a grace note not uncommon during the Civil War, Quantrill threatened to hang anyone who so much as touched a woman. The men did as told and left behind a town full of widows. But even this rather epic macro-aggression did not deter those whose destination was Kansas. They promptly rebuilt the town and kept Kansas free.

The American Civil War was said to have started in April 1861. On the Kansas-Missouri border, it had started at least five years earlier and did not end until Missouri finally surrendered to the Jayhawks 10 years ago this June.

Wary of ever having to return to Allen Field House, then-University of Missouri Chancellor Brady Deaton handed over his sword, saying, ”We are pleased to have these issues resolved, and we wish the Big 12 and its continuing member institutions the best in the future.”

And so ended the border wars—not with a bang, but a whimper.