Kansas’s War: The Civil War in Documents

Introduction

IN JANUARY 1861, Kansans were less concerned with the secession crisis than with finally having attained their long cherished goal of statehood. Indeed, while Republican Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency was glorious, it was not, the Leavenworth Conservative asserted, as important and decisive as Kansas’s admission. As for the departure of so many states from the Union, it was felt that the thirty-fourth state went far to fill the gap. These sentiments derived from Kansas’s singular experience before the American Civil War, for while many Americans were shocked by the aggressiveness of the so-called Slave Power or Slaveocracy, Kansans were not. They were intimately acquainted with civil strife, both ideological and actual. It was this territorial experience that allowed many Kansans to be sanguine about the possibility of war, for they had already survived once, having stood the test of desertion, and even oppression during the territorial period.¹ During this critical winter after the election of 1860, Kansas was truly in its infancy, a state few believed had the wherewithal to survive on its own. In the 1850s, Kansas had distinguished itself as a violent, ideologically divided, drought-stricken, underpopulated, indebted territory. Now, with a civil war at hand, the ability of the state to sustain both itself and the nation was uncertain. Yet with few men, fewer resources, and mere weeks into statehood, Kansas responded ably to the crisis of the Union.

When President Lincoln issued his April 1861 militia call in the aftermath of the Confederacy’s attack on federal forces at Fort Sumter in South Carolina, Kansas was not asked to provide volunteers. Nonetheless, 650 men stepped forward. When Kansas was asked for 3,235 men in May and July 1861, the state provided more than twice the number of men requested. This pattern served Kansas well, to the degree that a draft would not be ordered in the state until the last conscription call was issued in December 1864. But Kansas had not been properly credited for its volunteers and so Secretary of War Edwin Stanton rescinded the call three months later. By the end of the conflict, Kansas had exceeded its quota by almost 3,500 men, supplying the Union with 20,097 soldiers. This contribution to the war effort is especially impressive, given that the 1860 census revealed only 58,806 men in the territory. Ultimately, 8,498 of these men died in service to their country, a higher mortality rate than any other state in the Union.²

In addition to providing more than twenty thousand soldiers, Kansas provided a diversity of troops to the country. The state raised two regiments of American Indians, bringing together loyal members of the Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole nations as the Indian Home Guard (and organizing a third regiment in Indian Territory). In addition, the state was at the forefront of enlisting African Americans. Although the Lincoln administration resisted the efforts of the state to enroll African Americans, activists in Kansas were eager to include them in what many in the state saw as a war against slavery. In fact, the First Kansas Colored Infantry became the first African American regiment to engage the enemy at Island Mound, Missouri, in 1862; in doing so, they suffered the first African American combat deaths of the war. Finally, while Union general Benjamin Butler formed three African American regiments in New Orleans in 1862, Kansas was the first state to formally muster black troops into the Union army when the First Kansas Colored Infantry was finally accepted into federal service on January 13, 1863.³

Populated by settlers from all over the country (but disproportionately from the Midwest and the border states), Civil War Kansas was a microcosm of the nation, but one that, as this leadership on the recruitment of diverse soldiers reveals, had been radicalized by the struggles of the previous decade. Yet Kansas’s history reveals a complex attitude toward race. Whereas many of the state’s leading politicians had previously advocated freedom for African Americans, their actions had often fallen short of their rhetoric. In 1855, for instance, a convention of free-state men had voted to exclude African Americans from the future state. Less than a decade later, Kansans would be debating whether the word white ought to be stricken from the state constitution. Like other Americans, Kansans were divided by emancipation and the extension of civil rights to African Americans. The Emporia News admitted that they possessed more or less of that prejudice so common against the blacks, and do yet; still, we are in favor of doing everything in our power to elevate them. Doing so, the editors argued, was freedom and if we, as a race, can’t swim we deserve to sink.⁴ Indeed, although prewar Kansas was closely associated with antislavery activity, ideas often outstripped even their experiences and, during the war, Kansans were faced with people, not abstractions. In 1860 only 816 African Americans lived in the territory; by 1865, thirteen thousand had migrated to the state. And these individuals were merely part of a larger migration as refugees—black, white, and Indian—from Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, and Indian Territory poured into Kansas.

For the state’s citizens, the war brought both challenges and opportunities. For the first time, money was plentiful in the state as citizens took advantage of the business of war. Indeed, after a few lean years of drought, some Kansans fared better during wartime than they had in the territorial period. But for some prosperity prompted suspicion and those less able to profit from the war occasionally levied charges that such success stemmed from disloyalty. Similarly, while tensions among partisans of different political persuasions did exist, Kansas itself saw little antiwar, copperhead activity.⁵ Yet early in the war, Democrats expressed concerns about the nature and goals of the Republican party. As the Leavenworth Weekly Inquirer noted, "We hear much talk about a Government; the nigger-worshippers are very solicitous about a Government; . . . Now be it understood that we are not in favor of a Government; Russia has a Government; Turkey has a Government; China has a Government; . . . But we, and the Democracy of this Nation, want the Government. We want the Government which our Fathers gave us; the Government which Abolitionism and Black Republicanism combined, have well nigh ruined, and which will soon be quite ruined, unless the Democracy rescue it from final overthrow and destruction."⁶ Although this 1862 editorial urged action, Democrats had little sway in the state. In fact, only one of Kansas’s thirty-five counties went for the Democratic candidate in the 1864 presidential election.

Instead, it was far more common for Kansans to express disappointment with the pace of change under Lincoln’s leadership rather than with the ideological orientation of the party in office. In advocating a harder war in 1862, the Marysville Big Blue Union expressed relief that the people and the Government are awakening to the fact that it is folly for them to undertake to treat rebels with bullets and sugar-plums at one and the same time.⁷ Another newspaper admitted that they thought Lincoln was too slow, often.⁸ Overall, however, Kansas’s support for Lincoln was strong and consistent if occasionally impatient. Indeed, the political struggles within the state took a different form than in other Union states with a stronger opposition. In Kansas, the conflict was not between Democrats and Republicans. Instead, Republicans argued among themselves as they vied for influence within the new state. Of their many intraparty debates, one of the most significant was how to best defend the state once the war began.

Even though Kansas was far from the Virginia front, basic geography meant the security of its borders was critical. Indian Territory was directly to the state’s south. While fears of an Indian-Confederate invasion proved unwarranted, Unionist Indians did flee into Kansas in late 1861. The following year, the state’s soldiers contributed to pacification of Indian Territory and the repatriation of its residents. To Kansas’s east was an uncertain, wavering Missouri. Given that Kansas lacked the manpower and means to defend itself, a Confederate Missouri was a grave threat to the state. Should Missouri secede, Kansas would be isolated from the rest of the Union. But despite the risks involved in antagonizing Missourians, their slaves proved to be a tremendous temptation to men like James H. Lane, James Montgomery, and Charles R. Jennison, who placed their radical agendas ahead of their state’s and their country’s needs. Such aggressive, antislavery jayhawking was so detrimental that while Union and Confederate generals agreed on little else, both sides recognized that Kansans’ guerrilla activity might very well push Missouri into the waiting arms of the Confederacy. This tension between the two states was heightened by skirmishes fought along the Kansas-Missouri border throughout the war and worsened by the serious depredations committed by residents of both states.

Even for those fascinated by the American Civil War, interest in Kansas’s war experience often ends with how the territory inculcated John Brown, its most infamous export, but Kansas’s wartime history transcends the story of one abolitionist. A young state, struggling on the frontier, at the edge of the trans-Mississippi theater of war, this volume of the Civil War in the Great Interior series situates Kansas in this nation’s most defining conflict while illuminating the uniqueness of its war experience. Kansas’s War focuses on the state’s struggle to meet internal needs at a time when the federal government required an extraordinary commitment of men and resources to preserve the Union. These documents address the new state’s main preoccupations: the internal struggle for control of policy and patronage; border security; and issues of race, especially Kansas’s efforts to come to terms with its burgeoning African American population and Indians’ claims to nearly one-fifth of the state’s land.

The documents included highlight Kansans’ understanding of the issues at stake in the Civil War—issues that residents understood through the prism of their territorial struggles—while acknowledging that their state’s transition from peace to war was not as abrupt as that of their countrymen. From patronage to the raising of regiments, events in Kansas were colored by political competition that spilled over from its territorial days. Bleeding Kansas had contributed directly to the political realignment of the 1850s and to the rise of the Republican Party. Kansas Territory had wrestled with issues of slavery and liberty, the place of African Americans within civil life, and the responsibilities of federal government. Since 1854, Kansans had directly struggled with questions that the entire nation would be forced to confront once the Cofnfederate States of America was formed and war commenced. Yet, despite having engaged such issues beforehand, the Civil War transformed Kansas. These primary source documents illuminate how contemporary Kansans understood their state’s transformation in the fires of war.

ONE

Settlement and Strife

THE SECTIONAL CONFLICT that flared into war in 1861 shaped Kansas more than any other state in the Union. The last state admitted to the United States before the war, it was the first to experience the sectional conflict as more than a philosophical or constitutional disagreement. It was in Kansas that the country first realized that the political conflict between the sections could have a martial aspect, that it could lead to terror, violence, warfare, and even death. Initially, Kansas was like many other new territories, drawing settlers who sought a material improvement in their lives. But while many territorial residents arrived in Kansas to pursue economic opportunity, it is undeniable that the most prominent Kansans were ideologues. Because of this, the territory became a battlefront where Americans died for their beliefs.

Yet the violence that broke out in the 1850s was an unintended consequence of the territory’s organization. Kansas had been carved from that part of the original Louisiana Purchase lands north of latitude 36°30', which marked the southern border of Missouri. By the terms of that state’s admission, in 1820, future states located north of this Missouri Compromise line would be free while states to its south would be open to slavery. However, when President Franklin Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, in May 1854, Kansas was opened to settlement under the doctrine of popular sovereignty, allowing residents to determine their state institutions (notably slavery) for themselves. Although two previous territories, Utah and New Mexico, had been organized through popular sovereignty in 1850, that decision was an outgrowth of the Mexican-American War and a nod to the antislavery tradition in those lands. Pierce’s signature jettisoned a congressional compromise in effect for more than three decades. While its geography should have meant a free Kansas, residents now had the option to implant slavery. Within months of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, the territory became notorious for partisan strife that ranged from voter intimidation to electoral fraud to outright warfare, all in the effort to determine the future state’s eventual relationship to slavery.

Although sectional tensions might have led to territorial conflict anyhow, from the start Kansas’s condition rendered it unfit for settlement. The territory had not been surveyed, not one acre of land was legally available for sale, and the area bordering Missouri, where most settlers would enter, was closed to settlement.¹ When Kansas Territory was organized, in 1854, there were approximately fourteen hundred Americans living in the area: half were missionaries or traders while the other half were employed by the federal government, many in a military capacity. However these numbers do not capture the full reality, for while there may have been few white settlers in Kansas, thousands of American Indians lived within its borders. Approximately seventeen thousand Indians made Kansas their home, with the Osages (4,951), Pottawatomies (4,300), and Delawares (1,132) among the most numerous.² The Kaws (also known as the Kansa Indians, after whom the state takes it name), the Osages, and the Pawnees had settled in the area by the eighteenth century. Over the next century and a half, many more tribes had been pushed out of the Old Northwest (what is now Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and northeastern Minnesota) and into the region by an Indian removal as effective in the North as it more famously had been in the South. By 1850 a number of tribes had exchanged their old lands for new ones in Kansas.³ As such, although it was home to few whites, Kansas was not the empty plain that a faraway Congress perhaps thought it was.

Even before passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act was assured, and despite numerous outstanding Indian claims, outsiders set events in motion. On the East Coast, Eli Thayer of the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company had begun to organize emigrants to Kansas, and approximately seven hundred settlers made the journey in 1854 alone.⁴ Closer to Kansas, proslavery Missourians were eager to stake their claims. With their homes nearby, many preferred to sleep mere miles away in Missouri while making improvements on their Kansas homesteads during the day. By choosing comfort and not immediately abandoning their homes across the border, were these Missourians settlers? Not according to many antislavery advocates who claimed that such men were ineligible to vote. Similarly, Missourians charged that ideologically driven abolitionists were neither legitimate residents nor eligible voters.

The first two elections held in Kansas Territory—in November 1854, to select the territorial delegate to the House of Representatives; and in March 1855, to fill the territorial legislature—were marked by extensive fraud and voter intimidation. As a result, although censuses showed Missouri settlers to be in the majority, their methods to ensure their victory tainted the results and rendered the outcome unpalatable to free-state activists, who were further alienated by the new legislature. These legislators voted to unseat free-state men selected in a special election ordered by the territorial governor to address voter irregularities. In their place, the legislature seated those proslavery men elected in the original election. The territorial legislature next moved the legislative seat from Pawnee to Shawnee Mission, which, located near the Missouri border, had known slavery from at least the 1830s.⁵ Finally, the territorial legislature passed a law protecting slavery such that anyone not favoring the institution was prevented from serving on a jury for certain cases. In addition, antislavery proponents could not freely speak, write, or publish their views, for doing so would render them guilty of a felony.

As a result, by mid-1855 the free-state movement was organizing in Kansas Territory. By September, this Topeka movement had established plans to draft a state constitution, arguing that their disenfranchisement and persecution was so egregious that admission to the Union as a free state was the only appropriate remedy. By November, the Topeka Constitution had been drafted; by December, free-state voters had approved it; by January, they had elected Charles Robinson as governor and Mark Delahay as representative to Congress. By March 1856, the Topeka government had set itself up as a shadow government to the territorial government it decried as illegitimate. The free-state, extralegal Topeka legislature then met in a ten-day session, selected senators, and sent the Topeka Constitution to Congress with a request for immediate admission.

The rest of 1856 proved to be pivotal for the territory. In May, violence broke out soon after territorial chief justice Samuel Lecompte, presiding over the U.S. District Court in Lecompton, impaneled a grand jury to consider the actions of the Topeka government. On May 10 the grand jury issued treason indictments (for usurpation of office, among other charges) for Charles Robinson, James Lane, Andrew Reeder, George W. Brown, Gaius Jenkins, George W. Deitzler, G. W. Smith, and S. N. Wood. In addition, the grand jury ordered the Free State Hotel in Lawrence as well as the town’s two newspapers, the Herald of Freedom and the Kansas Free State, be abated as nuisances.⁶ A few of those named by the grand jury were arrested without incident, while Charles Robinson escaped into Missouri and would later be extradited back to Kansas. Finally, U.S. Marshal Israel Donelson called together a posse to aid in delivering the remaining warrants in the free-state town of Lawrence, and his call was answered by large numbers of eager, and later inebriated, proslavery Missouri volunteers. On May 21, U.S. Deputy Marshal W. P. Fain entered Lawrence, served the warrants, and withdrew from town, and Donelson disbanded the posse.

However, Douglas Country sheriff Samuel Jones, a proslavery adherent who had been shot in Lawrence the week before, then took charge of the posse and, falsely claiming federal duty, led what had become a mob into town. They smashed the newspaper presses, burned the Free State Hotel and other buildings, and terrified Lawrence residents. Because of confusion as to whether Jones was executing a federal order, these actions seemed to have the patina of federal approval. For antislavery proponents who believed Pierce’s Democratic administration favored a slave Kansas, the connection between the federal government and the sack of Lawrence seemed obvious.

Three days after the sack of Lawrence, abolitionist John Brown led a small party to Pottawatomie Creek, forty miles south of Lawrence, and they killed five proslavery settlers in revenge. These settlers had not participated in Lawrence events nor did they own slaves. After these back-to-back events, a cycle of action and retaliation had begun and violence erupted throughout the territory. Numerous skirmishes were fought that summer resulting in approximately thirty-eight political deaths and earning the territory its Bleeding Kansas sobriquet.⁷

The presidential campaign of 1856 served as the backdrop for these events. Earlier in the year, Republican Nathaniel Banks (formerly a Know Nothing) was elected Speaker of the House of Representatives. Republicans were thus able to parlay their interest in Kansas into action, the most significant act being the House’s decision to send a fact-finding committee to the territory on March 19. The Committee to Investigate the Troubles in Kansas was better known as the Howard Committee, after its chair, and included two Republicans, William A. Howard of Michigan and John Sherman of Ohio, and one Democrat, Mordecai Oliver of Missouri. The committee opened public sessions in Lawrence on April 18 and heard testimony for the next two months. Thus, the committee was in the territory during the sack of Lawrence, the Pottawatomie massacre, and the arrest and imprisonment of the Topeka leadership that summer. Ultimately, the committee traveled to several towns in Kansas as well as to Detroit, New York, and Washington. The depositions they took were dominated by impassioned descriptions of the difficulties free-state residents faced. After four months the committee published a majority report running to 1,206 pages that gave the Republican Party ample evidence of Democratic and proslavery misdeeds, which they used to great effect throughout the presidential contest. The campaign of Republican candidate John C. Frémont centered on the failure of Pierce’s Kansas policy. Indeed, his party very nearly rode Bleeding Kansas to victory in the first presidential campaign the Republicans contested.

The presidential campaign of 1856 demonstrated the power of Kansas as a symbol. However, the interpretation of Kansas events varied tremendously, depending on one’s ideological perspective. Antislavery advocates believed that the so-called Slaveocracy was so intent on obtaining another slave state that the wishes of Kansas residents would be ignored. For proslavery advocates, the admission of Kansas as a slave state represented the willingness of the North to recognize Southerners’ equality in the Union.

PROTECTING SLAVERY IN KANSAS TERRITORY

Passed by the Kansas territorial legislative assembly in 1855, this act was designed to protect slavery. Free-state advocates condemned the assembly as unrepresentative and illegitimate; with the passage of laws such as this one, they questioned whether protections other Americans enjoyed existed in Kansas Territory.

AN ACT TO PUNISH OFFENCES AGAINST SLAVE PROPERTY.

SECTION 1. Be it enacted by the Governor and Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Kansas, That every person, bond or free, who shall be convicted of actually raising a rebellion or insurrection of slaves, free negroes, or mulattoes, in this Territory, shall suffer death.

SEC. 2. Every free person who shall aid or assist in any rebellion or insurrection of slaves, free negroes, or mulattoes, or shall furnish arms, or do any overt act in furtherance of such rebellion or insurrection, shall suffer death.

SEC. 3. If any free person shall, by speaking, writing, or printing, advise, persuade or induce any slaves to rebel, conspire against or murder any citizen of this Territory, or shall bring into, print, write, publish or circulate, or cause to be brought into, printed written, published or circulated, or shall knowingly aid or assist in the bringing into, printing, writing, publishing or circulating, in this Territory, any book, paper, magazine, pamphlet or circular, for the purpose of exciting insurrection, rebellion, revolt or conspiracy on the part of slaves, free negroes or mulattoes, against the citizens of the Territory or any part of them, such person shall be guilty of felony and suffer death.

SEC. 4. If any person shall entice, decoy, or carry away out of this Territory, any slave belonging to another, with intent to deprive the owner thereof of the services of such slave, or with intent to effect or procure the freedom of such slave, he shall be adjudged guilty of Grand Larceny, and, on conviction thereof, shall suffer death, or be imprisoned at hard labor for not less than ten years.

SEC. 5. If any person shall aid or assist in enticing, decoying, or persuading, or carrying away or sending out of this Territory, any slave belonging to another, with intent to procure or effect the freedom of such slave, or with intent to deprive the owner thereof of the services of such slave, he shall be adjudged guilty of Grand Larceny, and on conviction thereof, shall suffer death, or be imprisoned at hard labor for not less than ten years.

SEC. 6. If any person shall entice, decoy, or carry away out of any State or other Territory of the United States, any slave belonging to another, with intent to procure or effect the freedom of such slave, or to deprive the owner thereof of the services of such slave, and shall bring such slave into this Territory, he shall be adjudged guilty of Grand Larceny, in the same manner as if such slave had been enticed, decoyed, or carried away out of this Territory, and in such case the Larceny may be charged to have been committed in any county of this Territory, into or through which such slave shall have been brought by such person, and on conviction thereof, the person offending shall suffer death, or be imprisoned at hard labor for not less than ten years.

SEC. 7. If any person shall entice, persuade or induce any slave to escape from the service of his master or owner, in this Territory, or shall aid or assist any slave in escaping from the service of his master or owner, or shall aid, assist, harbor or conceal any slave who may have escaped from the service of his master or owner, shall be deemed guilty of felony, and punished by imprisonment at hard labor for a term of not less than five years.

SEC. 8. If any person in this Territory, shall aid or assist, harbor or conceal any slave who has escaped from the service of his master or owner, in another State or Territory, such person shall be punished in like manner as if such slave had escaped from the service of his master or owner in this Territory.

SEC. 9. If any person shall resist any officer while attempting to arrest any slave that may have escaped from the service of his master or owner, or shall rescue such slave when in custody of any officer or other person, or shall entice, persuade, aid or assist such slave to escape from the custody of any officer or other person who may have such slave in custody, whether such slave have escaped from the service of his master or owner in this Territory or in any other State or Territory, the person so offending shall be guilty of felony and punished by imprisonment at hard labor for a term of not less than two years.

SEC. 10. If any Marshal, Sheriff or Constable, or the deputy of any such officer, shall, when required by any person, refuse to aid or assist in the arrest and capture of any that may have escaped from the service of his master or owner . . . , such officer shall be fined in a sum of not less than one hundred nor more than five hundred dollars.

SEC. 11. If any person print, write, introduce into, publish or circulate, or cause to be brought into, printed, written, published or circulated, or shall knowingly aid or assist in bringing into, printing, publishing or circulating within this Territory, any book, paper, pamphlet, magazine, handbill or circular, containing any statements, arguments, opinions, sentiment, doctrine, advice or innuendo, calculated to produce a disorderly, dangerous or rebellious disaffection among the slaves in this Territory, or to induce such slaves to escape from the service of their masters, or to resist their authority, he shall be guilty of felony, and be punished by imprisonment at hard labor for a term not less than five years.

SEC. 12. If any free person, by speaking or by writing, assert or maintain that persons have not the right to hold slaves in this Territory, or shall introduce into this Territory, print, publish, write, circulate, or cause to be introduced into this Territory, written, printed, published or circulated in this Territory, any book, paper, magazine, pamphlet or circular, containing any denial of the right of persons to hold slaves in this Territory, such person shall be deemed guilty of felony, and punished by imprisonment at hard labor for a term of not less than two years.

SEC. 13. No person who is conscientiously opposed to holding slaves, or who does not admit the right to hold slaves in this Territory, shall sit as a juror on the trial of any prosecution for any violation of any of the sections of this act.

This act to take effect and be in force from and after the fifteenth day of September, A. D. 1855

J. H. STRINGFELLOW, Speaker of the House.

Attest, J. M. LYLE, Clerk.

THOMAS JOHNSON, President of the Council.

Attest, J. A. HALDERMAN, Clerk.

Kansas, An Act to Punish Offences against Slave Property, Passed by the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Kansas, August 14, 1855 (Shawnee M. L. S.: John T. Brady, Public Printer, 1855).

THOMAS WELLS DESCRIBES KANSAS

Thomas C. Wells left Rhode Island for Kansas Territory when he was twenty-three, and his arrival coincided with the March 1855 territorial elections. In a letter to his mother, Wells described the Missourians he encountered. A year later, after returning from a winter spent in the East, he speculated on the fate of Southerners who had relocated to Kansas.

Topeka K. T. Apr 1, /55.

My Dear Mother,

Here I am in the far famed Kanzas Territory, we left Kanzas City on Monday last at about noon, and passing through Westport, a large Missourian town, we soon came upon the Indian reserve (belonging to the Shawnee’s) which extends for thirty miles up the Kanzas or Kaw river. . . . The next morning we started for Lawrence City about thirty miles further up the river. . . . We traveled nearly all day among a large party of Missourians, number about 200, who were going to Lawrence to vote and a pretty rough looking sett they were, some on horseback, some in covered wagons, and others on foot, all hardy, sunburnt, frontier men, and all well armed with guns, revolvers, and bowie knifes. We were often asked what county (in Missouri) we came from, and when they learned that we were from the East we had the pleasure of being called "damned yankee’s" &c but they did not succeed in frightening us or in driving us back, though they assured us that they could fire some twenty shots each, and that they had a six pounder with them. . . . Yours affectionately in haste

T. C. Wells

Apr. 3, 1856

Steamer Jas H Lucas

Missouri River,

My dear Mother . . .

We went on board the Steamer J. H Lucas on Monday Morning and engaged passage for Kansas City. . . .

Quite a number of people are on board from South Carolina and Georgia going to Kansas. What think you of that? I will tell you what I think. Nine tenths of them will return home, or at least leave Kansas, before they have been there three months.

They have left their old homes in beautiful springtime, all nature looking green and luxuriated—their warm and sunny homes in the south, for the windy plains of Kansas, as yet brown with the frosts of winter. They have taken the wrong time to emigrate and the new country will not suit them.

And of those who do remain, nine out of ten will ere long turn free state men. They will find it for their interest to do so, and when their interest decides against slavery they will both see and acknowledge that the whole system is entirely wrong. We anticipate no trouble from them. And indeed we expect that the worst trouble is over and that we shall be left comparatively to ourselves, at least we hope so.

The free state people must eventually conquor—the south cannot compete with the North in sending emigrants, and very few of the small number who came from the south dare to bring slaves with them . . .

Yours affect’ly

Juniata Kansas Terr

Apr 13th. . . . We landed at Leavenworth City, instead of Lexington or Kansas. Leavenworth is 50 miles further up the river than Kansas City, and is 15 or 20 miles nearer the Blue than K. The road is also much better, it being the government road from Fort L. to Fort Reiley. . . .

I have got to go down to L again in a few days and get the rest of our things. There has been more trouble in Kansas this winter than I had supposed; the wrongs of the free state people have not been exagerated in the papers. The Lawrence people especially have suffered immensely. For a long time no one could go to or from Kansas City without having his baggage searched, and even now the Missourians frequently break open heavy trunks or boxes to search for sharps rifles of which they stand in great fear. . . .

When we arrived at Juniata we found the government bridge across the Blue had been carried away by the ice. We have to cross on a ferry boat now which is rather expensive and not very pleasant business. Mr Dyer has turned strong pro slavery and they have got a pro slavery minister there of the Methodist Church South, who says he would as leave sell a nigger as an ox. They have organized a church under pro slavery influence and intend to do all they can to bring slaves into Kansas and drive out the yankees, for, they say, they do not want eastern men to rule the territory.

They may do their best however, and they will not succeed, they have a class of people to deal with that are not frightened at trifles and not withstanding their threats and their struggles Kansas will be a free state and and the territory will be ruled by eastern men. . . .

Yours truly T. C. Wells

Thomas Wells Collection 537, Kansas State Historical Society.

A SOUTH CAROLINIAN ENTERS KANSAS TERRITORY

Born in Darlington, South Carolina, Axalla Hoole was a teacher and a captain in a local militia company. He arrived in Kansas in 1856 and remained for almost two years. After his return in December 1857, Hoole rejoined the Darlington Riflemen, which later was mustered into the Confederacy’s service as Company A, Eighth South Carolina Volunteers. In 1862 the regiment was reorganized and joined General Braxton Bragg’s forces in 1863. Hoole was killed in the battle of Chickamauga on September 20, 1863.

Kansas City, Missouri, Apl. 3d., 1856

My Dear Brother

HERE I am after two weeks travelling, and not in Kansas Territory yet, but it is only 1 1/2 miles off, and I can see into