Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Stark Mad Abolitionists
WORK NOTES: foreword by Bob Dole
PSEUDONYM(S): Sutton, Robert Kent
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Bethesda
STATE: MD
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.nps.gov/aboutus/news/release.htm?id=757 *
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Washington State University, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author. Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, park ranger; Oregon Historical Society, museum curator; Oregon State Parks, historian; NPS Southwest Regional Office, Albuquerque, NM, architectural historian; Independence National Historic Park, historian; Arizona State University, Historical Administration and Historic Preservation Director, 1986-1990; National Capital Parks-East, historian and assistant superintendent; Manassas National Battlefield Park, Superintendent, 1995-2007; National Park Service, Chief Historian, 2007-2016; American Battle Monuments Commission, consultant. George Mason University, adjunct professor, 1991—.
AWARDS:Meritorious Service Award, Department of the Interior, 2000.
WRITINGS
Also author of foreword of Majestic in His Wrath: The Life of Frederick Douglass, and editor of Rally on the High Ground: National Park Service Symposium on the Interpretation of the Civil War.
SIDELIGHTS
Robert K. Sutton has long been involved with numerous American national parks. He got his start at the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, where he was a park ranger. From there he moved on to historian positions with such institutions as the Independence National Historic Park and National Park Service (NPS) Southwest Regional Office, teaching positions at both George Mason University and Arizona State University, and other related assignments. In 2016 Sutton ended his career with the National Park Service, where he was serving as Chief Historian. His work has not only earned him numerous prestigious titles, but also a Meritorious Service Award from the Department of the Interior. Sutton has also authored or contributed to several books, including Americans Interpret the Parthenon: Greek Revival Architecture and the Westward Movement.
Stark Mad Abolitionists: Lawrence, Kansas, and the Battle Over Slavery in the Civil War Era is another of Sutton’s books. Much like his previous works, Stark Mad Abolitionists features historical themes, dealing specifically with the effects of the abolitionist movement on the state of Kansas, which was brought about through the machinations of a man by the name of Amos Adams Lawrence. Lawrence hailed originally from Boston, Massachusetts. In 1854 Lawrence bore witness to the trial of Anthony Burns, a slave that managed to escape captivity only to be legally forced to return to the man that owned him. Lawrence grew indignant at the decision and used his anger to build an organization he named the New England Emigrant Aid Company. The purpose of the company was to assist escaped slaves in finding their freedom, as well as doing its part to further the abolitionist movement. Lawrence was able to build a flock of supporters, a group that soon earned the name “Jayhawkers” from the public. Lawrence’s influence spread to the state of Kansas, where his supporters took took up arms fighting the spread of slavery throughout the state. Because of the violence and casualties, including those sustained in the Lawrence Massacre, the territory became known as “Bleeding Kansas.”
One contributor to Publishers Weekly remarked: “Sutton’s nuanced narrative reveals the extent of the abolitionists’ fight and shows how “Bleeding Kansas” earned its nickname.” Christian Science Monitor reviewer David Hugh Smith wrote: “With ‘Stark Mad,’ he’s created not some bland historic site handout but a searing chronicle.” He added: “Sutton tears back the curtain of time to reveal vivid images of Lawrence as well as the rest of Kansas and its people during the 1850s and the Civil War.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Christian Science Monitor, August 29, 2017, David Hugh Smith, “‘Stark Mad Abolitionists’ is a dramatic and gripping account of the battle over slavery fought in Kansas,” review of Stark Mad Abolitionists: Lawrence, Kansas, and the Battle over Slavery in the Civil War Era.
Publishers Weekly, May 29, 2017, review of Stark Mad Abolitionists, p. 57.
ONLINE
National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/ (April 30, 2018), author profile.
Salon, https://www.salon.com/ (August 5, 2017), Robert K. Sutton, “‘We waked up stark mad Abolitionists,'” excerpt from Stark Mad Abolitionists.
Washington State University, https://magazine.wsu.edu/ (April 30, 2018), David Wasson, “Preserving the Story of America.”
Robert K. Sutton retired as Chief Historian of the National Park Service in 2016, after having served in the position for nearly nine years. He came to this position following his tenure as the Superintendent of Manassas National Battlefield Park for the previous 12 ½ years. From 1986 to 1990, he directed the Historic Preservation and Historical Administration public history programs at Arizona State University. He has published a number of books, articles and reviews on various public history topics. One of his primary interests as Chief Historian and as Superintendent at Manassas Battlefield was leading the emphasis on expanding the interpretation of the Civil War for the Sesquicentennial. As part of that effort, he encouraged Civil War battlefields to expand their interpretive programs to focus more attention to the social, economic, and political issues during the Civil War Era.
Dr. Sutton is currently serving as a consultant to the American Battle Monuments Commission, assisting commission staff in developing interpretive programs to commemorate the Centennial of World War I. In that program, he is editing a collection of essays by leading World War I historians that will be available in April 2017.
Dr. Sutton also has written a book on the Civil War Era in Kansas, that will be published by Skyhorse Publishing in August 2017. The book will explore the efforts of abolitionists to ensure that the Territory of Kansas would become a free state, focusing on the support of Amos Lawrence, a wealthy businessman in Boston, to the town that bore his name in Lawrence, Kansas. Dr. Sutton tells the story from the perspective of the major players. The book is titled: Stark Mad Abolitionists: Lawrence, Kansas and the Battle Over Slavery in the Civil War Era.
A blurb for the book is attached here: http://skyhorsepublishing.com/titles/12108-9781510716490-stark-mad-abolitionists.
National Park Service Press Release
For Immediate Release:August 30, 2007
Contact(s):David Barna, 202-208-6843
Robert K. Sutton selected as Chief Historian, National Park Service
WASHINGTON, DC: The National Park Service (NPS) announces the selection of Dr. Robert K. Sutton as Chief Historian of the National Park Service. The Chief Historian position in the National Park Service is one of the most prestigious historian positions in the Federal government. The Chief Historian provides guidance and direction to the national parks as well as nationwide to the American people on the importance of verifying historical events and interpreting the significance of America’s historic places. The position provides national leadership in setting and implementing NPS standards and guidelines relating to the documentation of historically significant properties. Dr. Sutton will begin his new position on October 1, 2007.
Dr. Sutton has been Superintendent of the Manassas National Battlefield Park since 1995, which has an annual visitation of 800,000. While at Manassas, he initiated a major symposium on the Civil War that attracted renowned scholars and developed an interpretive institute for Civil War park rangers on creating new ways to interpret the Civil War. He oversaw the restoration of a 100-acre area of the park through a creative partnership with the Smithsonian Institution, where the loss of wetlands at the new Air and Space Museum at Dulles Airport was mitigated through the restoration of the Manassas land. He holds a Ph.D. degree in history from Washington State University and has decades of experience in conveying to the public the importance of preserving the nation’s cultural resources.
“We are very pleased that Dr. Sutton has joined the Washington, DC office of the National Park Service as Chief Historian,” said Janet Snyder Matthews, Associate Director, Cultural Resources. “We look forward to working with him on a wide range of history projects, including those that develop from the Centennial of the National Park Service through 2016.”
Dr. Sutton began his career as a park ranger with Fort Vancouver National Historic Site. Subsequent positions include museum curator with the Oregon Historical Society; historian with the Oregon State Parks; architectural historian with the NPS Southwest Regional Office in Albuquerque, New Mexico; historian with Independence National Historic Park; Assistant Professor in the History Department and Director of the Public History Program at Arizona State University; and Assistant Superintendent and historian at National Capital Parks-East. Since 1991, he has served as adjunct professor of history at George Mason University. In 2000, Dr. Sutton received the Department of the Interior’s Meritorious Service Award.
Dr. Sutton is editor of Rally on the High Ground: National Park Service Symposium on the Interpretation of the Civil War; co-author of Majestic in His Wrath: The Life of Frederick Douglass; and author of Americans Interpret the Parthenon: Greek Revival Architecture and the Westward Movement.
Dr. Sutton will be responsible for managing the Service’s history programs, which includes coordinating historical studies at the national level, managing the administrative history program, and overseeing the quality of documentation of historic places within national parks.
Preserving the story of America
by David Wasson
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Fort Hunt was built during the Spanish-American War on a portion of George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate to help bolster the Potomac River’s coastal defenses.
It later served as a staging point for the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression, hosted an ROTC unit for African American soldiers during segregation, and now is managed by the National Park Service.
But until historians began digging, a clandestine piece of the 136-acre site’s military service was so tightly hidden away, it was at risk of being lost forever.
“This started coming together during a tour when someone raised their hand and mentioned their neighbor used to be an interrogator there,” says Robert K. Sutton, a 1984 doctoral grad who retired this year as chief historian for the U.S. National Park Service. “What they found as they started contacting and interviewing these former vets and other people who were there at the time was pretty dramatic.”
Robert K. Sutton
Robert K. Sutton. Courtesy C-SPAN
The once-abandoned military installation about 15 miles south of Washington, D.C. is where top-ranking Nazi commanders and other high-value prisoners were interrogated during World War II. The project, known only as PO Box 1142, was so secretive that many of the wartime prisoners arrived aboard submarines up the Potomac. It also was where the U.S. military coordinated escape efforts for Allied prisoners of war being held overseas and was operated by the secretive government program that would later become the Central Intelligence Agency.
The discovery, along with eventually declassified Department of Defense documents, helped illuminate a previously little-understood piece of the war effort. And it spotlights an often-overlooked role of the Park Service as a keeper and interpreter of American history.
“What I think is interesting about the Park Service is we pretty much cover the ground on every important event and historical development in our nation’s history,” says Sutton, who spent 24 years with the Park Service. “For me, it was important to get past the dates and names associated with these big events and explore why these things were happening.”
He focuses on the narratives that preserve and tell the story of America.
Sutton’s approach to historical interpretation was so compelling, many of his projects have been turned into books and classroom educational materials. His interpretive exhibits are designed to immerse visitors not just in the historical moment but in the cultural periods and the lives of those affected.
“National Park Service exhibits are a little different than museum exhibits,” Sutton says. “They are designed to help visitors understand the significance of the site and then go out and experience the site.”
A Pacific Northwest native, Sutton is an internationally recognized expert on the history of the U.S. Constitution, the American West and the U.S. Civil War. He worked for the Park Service while completing his doctorate at WSU, then left to take a teaching position at Arizona State University. A few years later, he returned to the Park Service as a historian and eventually was promoted to superintendent at the Manassas National Battlefield Park in Virginia, the site of the Civil War’s first major battle. He became the agency’s chief historian in 2007.
It was at Manassas where Sutton began digging into Civil War history and where others began noticing his knack for finding the important but sometimes less-obvious narratives.
He gathered stories about African American experiences during what essentially was their war for freedom. He chronicled the horrifying stories of civilians trapped between fighting armies, including the first civilian casualty at Manassas. He coedited a book of essays in 2013 exploring the various wartime roles of Native Americans, who fought on both sides of the conflict in what would amount to futile efforts to protect their homes, land, and autonomy.
WSU history professor Raymond Sun praises Sutton for weaving together crucial themes that traditionally haven’t been considered together, describing his work as delivering “a richer and more complete treatment of our history.”
That focus is on full display this year as the National Park Service celebrates its centennial. The agency oversees 84 million acres of preserved parks, monuments, battlefields, historic sites, lakeshores and seashores, scenic and recreation areas, and the White House.
About two-thirds of those sites have historical or cultural aspects to them.
But there’s still one major piece of American history that has yet to be memorialized: the Reconstruction Era.
It’s something Sutton still thinks about. He and the superintendent at Gettysburg National Military Park, John Latschar, had talked about it for years, promising each other they’d somehow find a way to make sure that such a critical period of post-Civil War history is properly remembered.
Sutton even has a location in mind: Beaufort, South Carolina. And to understand why, you must immerse yourself in the narrative of the time.
Beaufort, a tiny coastal town between Savannah and Charleston, was where the United States got its first glimpse of what the Reconstruction Era would require. It was captured by the North early in the war, with most of the wealthy white families hastily fleeing in advance of the military columns and leaving behind hundreds of slaves with no preparation for what it meant to be free.
The federal government, along with religious and humanitarian organizations, moved to establish schools and training programs that would help the former slaves learn to manage their own lives. African Americans who had escaped slavery earlier and had been living as free men and women in northern states were sent to Beaufort to help.
Among them was Robert Smalls, a native son who, along with a handful of other slaves forced to fight for the South, had stolen a Confederate warship in 1862 and surrendered it to a Union naval blockade. He later was elected to Congress.
“Beaufort was like a rehearsal for Reconstruction,” says Sutton. “That’s where we first began to realize what something like this was going to take.”
The details. Sutton knows that’s where history truly resides. He compares it to the way we peel back layers of an onion to get past the rough surface.
“I think what we were able to do is really broaden the scope,” he says. “We need to understand what was causing these events in our history … and the way we can do that is to look beyond the basics.”
Stark Mad Abolitionists: Lawrence, Kansas, and the Battle over Slavery in the Civil War Era
Publishers Weekly. 264.22 (May 29, 2017): p57+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Stark Mad Abolitionists: Lawrence, Kansas, and the Battle over Slavery in the Civil War Era
Robert K. Sutton. Skyhorse, $24.99 (288p) ISBN 978-1-5107-1649-0
Sutton, former chief historian of the National Park Service, chronicles the turbulent history of Lawrence, Kans., which was founded by the disciples of Amos Adams Lawrence, a Boston businessman turned abolitionist. Outraged by an 1854 court verdict that returned escaped slave Anthony Burns back to Southern bondage, Lawrence established the New England Emigrant Aid Company. His followers, dubbed "Jayhawkers," included the abolitionists John Brown and Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. Antislavery Jayhawkers moved to Kansas to fight "pro-slavery ruffians" in order to keep it from becoming a slave state. Those battles culminated in the infamous Lawrence Massacre of 1863, led by the Confederate guerrilla leader William Clarke Quantrill, and resulted in nearly 200 deaths and the destruction of 75 buildings. Sutton demythologizes the supposedly noble motives of Quantrill's forces, concluding that "their motivations were not to rob the rich to give to the poor, but rather to perpetuate the institution of slavery and gain independence for the Confederacy during the war, and rob banks and trains after the war to enrich themselves." That the outlaws Frank and Jesse James both joined Quantrill's forces confirms that point. Sutton's nuanced narrative reveals the extent of the abolitionists' fight and shows how "Bleeding Kansas" earned its nickname. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Stark Mad Abolitionists: Lawrence, Kansas, and the Battle over Slavery in the Civil War Era." Publishers Weekly, 29 May 2017, p. 57+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A494500753/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0f6e1b02. Accessed 19 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A494500753
'Stark Mad Abolitionists' is a dramatic and gripping account of the battle over slavery fought in Kansas
David Hugh Smith
The Christian Science Monitor. (Aug. 29, 2017): Arts and Entertainment:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Christian Science Publishing Society
http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference
Full Text:
Byline: David Hugh Smith
The words "Bleeding Kansas" trigger memories from high-school history. Those who paid attention in class recall the violence had something to do with the issue of slavery in America.
Robert K. Sutton brilliantly brings academic memories to life in Stark Mad Abolitionists. Furthermore, readers of this thoroughly researched and passionately recounted story will come to understand the profoundly significant history of Lawrence, Kan., and care deeply about the drama of its founding. It's a drama that involves blood, slavery, and people willing to sacrifice everything to oppose it.
The story begins in late spring 1854. "Boston was in an uproar," Mr. Sutton writes, because an escaped slave named Anthony Burns had been captured by his "owner." Two thousand federal troops escorted Burns to a boat that would take him back to Virginia.
Wealthy businessman Amos Adams Lawrence was among those who were angry. He wrote to his uncle that when he awakened one morning, he had become a "stark mad" abolitionist.
Lawrence quickly involved himself in the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company, an organization created to encourage and enable people opposed to slavery to move to the territory of Kansas. It was hoped that sufficient antislavery advocates would settle there to vote for it to become a "free state."
Far from being "stark mad," Lawrence himself was a generous man of quiet temperament. Ironically, he and his family "made their fortunes from buying, selling, and producing textiles, mostly made of cotton" picked by slaves in the South.
Sutton tells how Lawrence, as treasurer of the Emigrant Aid Company, paid a large portion of company costs, to the point where his own resources were dangerously depleted. Under his direction, a promising tract of land was found "near where the Wakarusa River entered the Kansas River, about forty miles west of the Missouri line." On Aug. 1, 1854, the first settlers camped there. In recognition of Lawrence's enormous contribution, the new town was named "Lawrence."
Early on, "[t]he Emigrant Aid Company clearly had not prepared for the settlers it was encouraging to emigrate to Kansas." Many quickly returned to home, dismayed by the rigors of a community where homes initially were made from straw.
Anti-slavery advocates also settled elsewhere in Kansas. But Lawrence was ground zero for some of the most important and dramatic events in the effort to make Kansas a free state. My biggest quibble with "Stark Mad" is the author didn't include a map; location and proximity play a big role in these events.
Nonetheless, Sutton knows how to present history. He's an experienced writer and a former chief historian of the National Park Service. With "Stark Mad," he's created not some bland historic site handout but a searing chronicle. Sutton tears back the curtain of time to reveal vivid images of Lawrence as well as the rest of Kansas and its people during the 1850s and the Civil War.
Sutton shows how the endurance of the people of Lawrence was tested. The town was dangerously close to Missouri, which was firmly and sometimes violently pro-slavery. In 1856, for example, less than two years after Lawrence's founding, hundreds of troops and pro-slavery volunteers from Missouri destroyed much of the town.
Missouri's influence went far beyond border hostilities. When the territorial legislature was to be elected, thousands of pro-slavery Missouri men crossed into Kansas to vote, threatening violence against election officials. This pro-slavery legislature was able for several years to circumvent the true wishes of Kansans. But in 1861 Kansas became the 34th American state - a free state.
The fieriest segment of Sutton's book takes place during the Civil War, a conflict during which Kansans heartily fought and died for the Union side. William Clarke Quantrill, the commander of a large force of "bushwhackers" - Confederate guerrilla fighters - brutally attacked and destroyed much of Lawrence.
Sutton's writing is orderly and thoughtful. And Sutton doesn't dramatize this grisly episode. But neither does he spare us the nightmare details of the murder of approximately 200 Lawrence men and boys.
"The devastation was horrendous, but the outpouring of generosity was remarkable," Sutton comments. With help from places like St. Louis, and people like Amos Lawrence, the community rebuilt.
Two years later, the war was over and "[p]eace also brought prosperity." Lawrence's stalwart Congregational minister, Rev. Richard Cordley, commented that "we could retire at night without fear of alarm, and work by day without fear of attack.... One hardly needs to say that we enjoyed it as few people enjoy peace and quiet."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Smith, David Hugh. "'Stark Mad Abolitionists' is a dramatic and gripping account of the battle over slavery fought in Kansas." Christian Science Monitor, 29 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502290879/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f42cbb5b. Accessed 19 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502290879
“We waked up stark mad Abolitionists”
Inside the New England big money, made off of slavery, that also funded the fight to keep slavery out of Kansas
21
ROBERT K. SUTTON
08.06.2017•2:00 AM
Excerpted with permission from “Stark Mad Abolitionists” by Robert K. Sutton. Copyright 2017, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc. Available for purchase on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and IndieBound.
From May 24 through June 2, 1854, Boston was in an uproar. On May 24, Anthony Burns, a young African American enslaved man, who had escaped from his bondage in Virginia and settled in Boston where he worked at a men’s clothing store, was captured by his owner on his way home from work. Burns’s owner, Charles Suttle, tracked his whereabouts from a letter he had intercepted from Burns to his brother. There was no question that Burns was an enslaved man and was Suttle’s property. Under the United States Constitution and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, there also was no question that Burns had no rights whatsoever.
Stark Mad Abolitionists
Although Burns had no legal claim to his freedom, to the citizens of Boston, his capture was an outrage. Antislavery lawyers representing Burns used several legal maneuvers to delay the hearing to send their client back to slavery. On May 26, a mob of some seven thousand black and white abolitionists, led by a Unitarian minister, the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, stormed the courthouse attempting to free Burns. When order was restored, one US Marshal was dead, and a dozen more individuals were injured. Abolitionists and federal troops faced off again the following day when the hearing began under heavy guard. Burns was represented by Richard Henry Dana and Charles M. Ellis, two of Boston’s finest abolitionist attorneys. Unfortunately for Anthony Burns, the Fugitive Slave Act did not allow for legal representation, so there was very little Dana or Ellis could offer as a defense. US Commissioner Edward G. Loring found for Suttle and ordered Burns returned to servitude.
President Franklin Pierce, although a Northerner, was committed to upholding the Fugitive Slave Act and was determined that Anthony Burns would be returned to servitude no matter the cost in dollars and manpower. So, on June 2, more than two thousand federal soldiers and marines cordoned off the streets of Boston. An estimated fifty thousand people watched as Anthony Burns was escorted in chains to an awaiting ship in Boston harbor. He was returned to Virginia and bondage. The government expense for the whole affair was $40,000.
The story did not end on June 2, 1854. True, no more enslaved people were returned to bondage from Boston, so that part of the story was over. The Burns affair had a profound impact on Amos Adams Lawrence, who was a patriarch of one of Boston’s wealthiest and most powerful families. On June 1, the day before Burns was returned to slavery, Lawrence wrote to his uncle that “we went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”
We know very little of Amos Adams Lawrence’s physical attributes. From the best image we have, he appears to be diminutive in stature, but that is based on conjecture, since no description of him survives. We know more about his persona. He was a deeply religious man, who was also absolutely devoted to his family. He was a very private man. He kept his innermost thoughts to himself, but fortunately for us, he shared his personal musings with his diary, which has survived. He shunned public attention whenever possible; he preferred communicating in writing rather than by the spoken word.
Lawrence fulfilled the adage of being born with a silver spoon in his mouth, with all of the benefits his noble birth implied. He was sent to a boarding school, Franklin Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, but was so unhappy there, he ran away for several days. He entered Harvard at age seventeen, but he left a year later when the college president suggested to his father that he needed private tutoring before he continued with his studies. Lawrence was sent to Bedford, Massachusetts, where he received private tutoring from J. Stearns; he then returned to Harvard, from which he graduated in 1835.
Amos Adams Lawrence was able to enjoy all of these advantages because his father, also Amos Lawrence, along with his uncle, Abbott Lawrence, built one of the largest and most successful wholesale mercantile businesses in the country. They also developed cotton and woolen milling enterprises in Massachusetts. When Amos senior retired from his business interests in 1831 at age forty-five, he devoted the remainder of his life to philanthropy, reportedly giving over $1 million to charitable causes, organizations, and projects.
So the younger Amos Lawrence grew up in a wealthy but generous household. He acquired both his father’s business skills and passion for philanthropy. Shortly after he graduated from Harvard, Lawrence created a business niche as a commission merchant selling manufactured textiles produced in New England mills. Then in 1843, when he and his partner, Robert Mason, consolidated their interests into Mason and Lawrence, Lawrence was a successful textile merchant. From the very beginning of his business successes, the younger Lawrence was generous with his money; so much so, in his personal diary entry from earlier in 1854, he wrote that he needed to continue with his business enterprises so he would be able to meet the demands of the charities he supported.
It didn’t take long for Amos A. Lawrence to connect his money with his “stark mad” abolitionism. On May 30, during the nine days of turmoil in Boston over Anthony Burns, President Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act into law. For Lawrence and other New England abolitionists, the Burns episode and the Kansas-Nebraska Act must have seemed like a perfect storm.
After extensive debate, divided along sectional lines, and with shepherding from Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, Congress adopted the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The law changed the paradigm in place since the Missouri Compromise of 1820, in which new territories above the 36°30’ parallel would be free, and those below would be slave. Citizens in both territories could decide whether they wanted slavery or not under the concept of popular sovereignty.
Amos Lawrence had followed the progression of the Kansas-Nebraska legislation for several months. He visited Washington, DC, to dine with his half-cousin, President Franklin Pierce, and his wife. While there, on April 13, 1854, he met Senator Stephen A. Douglas for the first time. In his diary, he wrote that Douglas was “apparently desirous to make me his friend.” The feeling was not mutual, however, for Lawrence went on to say that the senator from Illinois was “a very bright man and an ambitious and unscrupulous one,” and noted that Douglas likely would have had a good shot at being elected president, except that his sponsorship of the Kansas-Nebraska bill likely killed those chances. When the law passed in May, Lawrence observed that while President Pierce believed that the new law would “forever allay agitation about slavery,” he and many others saw the Kansas-Nebraska Act as “a fool-hardy scheme.”
Lawrence was unhappy with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, but with this new law and the capture and return of Anthony Burns, he moved from the sidelines of the slavery issue to firmly within the antislavery camp. He wrote that the Burns incident “made one resolve in his mind the value of our union when such a scene [Burns’s return to servitude] must be enacted here in order to support slavery and the laws.” From that moment on, Lawrence put his efforts and his considerable fortune toward keeping slavery out of the new territories.
Since Missouri, a slave state, was adjacent to Kansas, the conventional wisdom in the spring of 1854 was that Missourians would flood the new territory with settlers and slaves and make Kansas a slave state. For that reason, many antislavery advocates wrung their hands in despair. Some, like Lawrence, on the other hand, saw an opportunity to match wits and strength with the pro-slavery forces by beating them at their own game — to encourage such a high number of antislavery people to settle in Kansas, that when it came for citizens to decide whether Kansas would be slave or free, the antislavery side would win.
Shortly after Anthony Burns was returned to slavery, Lawrence wrote that he had “been made a trustee . . . [in an organization] to settle Kansas [with free residents] in advance of the introduction of slavery there.” The organization was the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company, established by Eli Thayer, who was a member of the Massachusetts Legislature. Thayer had pushed through the incorporation of this company a month before the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act for the primary purpose of encouraging the settlement of Kansas by New England antislavery advocates. The company charter established a ceiling of up to $5 million in capital, which was used to make the journey from New England to Kansas as painless as possible. Company agents would find the easiest transportation routes and negotiate the lowest fares. Company scouts would find and survey the most desirable land and provide temporary housing until settlers could build permanent dwellings. The company also would invest in schools, mills, and other economic infrastructure, such that the community would be self-sufficient as quickly as possible. Thayer envisioned that investors would invest in the company and reap profits from their investments.
Just when enthusiasm for Thayer’s plan was building, however, it looked as if the company might fold for lack of capital. Under the Massachusetts charter, board members were required to personally assume financial liabilities if the company failed. At this point, Amos Lawrence came to the rescue. Lawrence’s friend and fellow Boston merchant, Patrick T. Jackson, recognized that Thayer had a great idea but not a good sense of business, so Jackson cajoled Lawrence into bringing his considerable business skills as well as his deep pockets to the company. Lawrence was delighted to join forces with Thayer and put his “stark mad” abolitionism to work, yet he had no idea how much hard work the project would entail or how much money he would contribute. Lawrence’s son would later say that his father “had undertaken a piece of work which was as arduous as it was expensive.”
Thayer and Lawrence would work together for the next several years to make Kansas a free state. Thayer came from a prominent but not prosperous New England family. He worked his way through Worchester County Manual Labor High School and Brown University, became a teacher in Worcester, and founded the Oread Institute—a school for young women. Regarding his passion to end slavery, Thayer later wrote that “during the winter of 1854, I began to have the conviction . . . that something had to be done to end the domination of slavery.”
With Lawrence on board, the organization was reorganized into a private company, which did not have the onerous requirements of liability for the board members. The new entity, the New England Emigrant Aid Company, was managed with three board members, with a new target capitalization of $200,000, which would be raised by selling $20 shares. The charter stated that the organization would “promote the emigration to Kansas Territory of persons opposed to slavery there, and to prevent, by all legal and constitutional means, its establishment there as well as in the Territory of Nebraska.”
Thayer continued to hold to the notion that investors could expect returns on their investments. Lawrence did not share his optimism and privately cautioned his friends that they should only contribute funds if they could spare them, rather than invest with the expectation of a return. “I am willing to contribute to the cause,” he wrote to a clergyman seeking his advice, “and I have already given a part of this away, and I intend to do the same with the balance,” without expecting anything in return. Writing to another friend, he said that he believed his financial backing would contribute to the “impulse to emigration into Kansas which cannot easily be stopped.”
Before long, Lawrence grew increasingly worried that the demands for funds were becoming more than even his deep pockets could tolerate. In his diary, he wrote that the Emigrant Aid Company appeared as “a vigorous and rich company in the public prints, when in fact it is only an embodiment of the feeling of the people without material [or financial] strength.” And a few weeks later, he wrote that “all expenditures thus far have been by myself, but I cannot go further without funds in hand.”
From his diary entries, it was clear that Amos Lawrence was committed financially and economically to the cause of keeping slavery out of Kansas Territory, even though that effort put a tremendous strain on his personal and business finances. Yet in none of his diary entries of other correspondence did Lawrence ever suggest that the source of his wealth was in any way incompatible with his antislavery passion. He, his father, and his uncle made their fortunes from buying, selling, and producing textiles—mostly made of cotton. Where did they get the raw cotton? Or, more to the point, who planted, picked, ginned, baled, and transported this cotton? The answer, of course, was the enslaved population in the American South—the same population for whom he was seeking freedom. Whether he had difficulty juxtaposing his antislavery views with his business dealings or not was and is a mystery. But if there was a conflict of conscience, it certainly did not dampen his commitment to the cause, nor did it stop him from recruiting other wealthy, like-minded friends to join the company.
One of Lawrence’s first recruits was a friend, John Carter Brown, whom he tapped as the president of the company. The title of president was, by design, mostly honorary. But Lawrence was strategic in drafting Brown as president. First, he was from a prominent New England family, and second, he was a moderate Whig, with no radical political baggage. Brown attended most board meetings and allowed his name to appear on many of the company’s circulars. Like Lawrence, much of the money Brown donated to the Emigrant Aid Company came from the backs of slaves and the institution of slavery he was trying to eradicate. His father and uncles made their fortunes from the “triangle trade.” Slaves were shipped to the Americas from Africa in exchange for sugar, which was transported from the Caribbean to New England, where it was distilled into rum. Rum and other goods were then shipped to Africa, where the process started all over again. The Browns donated a large portion of their profits to the College of Rhode Island, and for their generosity, they were honored when the school changed its name to Brown University.
John Carter Brown, however, followed in the footsteps of one of his uncles, Moses Brown, who made an about-face from his brothers, separated himself from their slave-trading business, and became an early leader in the antislavery movement in Rhode Island. In addition to his antislavery passions, John Carter Brown amassed one of the largest collections of rare books at the time. His son donated the collection to Brown University, creating the John Carter Brown Library, one of the finest research libraries in the country today.
Joining Brown, Thayer, and Lawrence on the board was Dr. Thomas H. Webb as the secretary. Like many who would join the cause, Dr. Webb was well educated, having attended Brown University and graduated from Harvard Medical School. Whether he was an unsuccessful businessman or lost interest—or both—his medical practice failed. His interest shifted to history and science, and he was one of the founding members and the first librarian of the Providence Athenaeum. Webb signed on early with Thayer and served as secretary until his death in 1866.
Webb was concerned that the wonderful idea of the Emigrant Aid Company would be stillborn. On May 24, 1854, he wrote to Thayer that the whole scheme would be “perfectly Quixotic” since at that point the company was “endorsed by nobody” and that “not one of the [in]corporators has subscribed for a shilling’s worth of Stock.” But Webb also showed his determination to do his part to achieve success, writing: “I am ready and willing to put on the harness and work to the best of my ability and power.” He did just that.21
Several months later, when the emigration to Kansas began, Webb negotiated reduced fares on the conveyances and assisted prospective travelers in their plans to relocate. Perhaps his greatest contribution, however, was to write, revise, and publish a circular each year, beginning in 1855, to “answer the numerous inquiries respecting Kanzas [sic; sometimes it was spelled with a z], daily addressed to the Secretary both by letter and in person.” Amos Lawrence recognized how hard Webb worked for the success of the company, and later wrote that he was “the truest man of all.”
In addition to Thayer, Lawrence, Brown, and Webb, many others contributed to the success of the venture. Few were as important as the Reverend Edward Everett Hale, a Unitarian minister from Worchester. Hale entered Harvard as a prodigy at age thirteen and graduated second in his class. His passion for liberating slaves was much like the passion for liberty of his great-uncle, Nathan Hale, who, when faced with his execution by the British in the Revolutionary War, regretted that he “only had one life to give for his country.” Hale signed on as the company’s chief publicist. Nine years earlier, Edward Hale had written a pamphlet—"How to Conquer Texas Before Texas Conquers Us"—advocating for abolitionists to settle in Texas to check the advancement of slavery there, which may or may not have planted the seed for the Emigrant Aid Company with Thayer. Hale threw his considerable energy into promoting the Emigrant Aid Company by making numerous speeches, writing articles, enlisting the help of clergymen around New England, and by publishing the book, Kanzas and Nebraska in September 1854, in which he described the territory, although he had never been there.
The Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson—the same Higginson who led the mob trying to free Anthony Burns—passionately supported the Emigrant Aid Company, corresponded with the company’s settlers in Kansas, and later led a group of antislavery emigrants to Kansas. As the Kansas antislavery movement became more militant, Higginson worked behind the scenes to provide guns to the settlers. He came from one of the bluest of blue-blooded Boston families. His ancestor, Francis Higginson, was a member of the first Puritan settlement to New England and the first minister of the Salem, Massachusetts, church. Thomas graduated from Harvard and entered Harvard Divinity School but left after a year, drawn to Transcendentalist Unitarian minister Theodore Parker. He returned to Harvard, finished his theology studies, and, in 1847, accepted a call as minister of the First Religious Society of Newburyport, Massachusetts, a Unitarian church known for its liberal religious views. He invited speakers such as Theodore Parker and Ralph Waldo Emerson to address his congregation. He railed against the poor treatment of white workers in northern mills and condemned the institution of slavery. But when he implied that his own congregation was not doing enough to end the institution, he was asked and agreed to resign.
In 1852, Higginson accepted the appointment as minister of the Free Church in Worchester, Massachusetts, a nondenominational congregation, which was more in tune with his radical social views. After the failed attempt to free Anthony Burns, and after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, he joined Eli Thayer and the others as a key member of the Emigrant Aid Company.
Religious leaders in New England often held a great deal of influence over their congregations. Some were held in such high esteem that their names and stature were universally recognized and revered. Such was the case with the Reverend Dr. Lyman Beecher. If his name was associated with any program or cause, other clergymen paid attention. So to take advantage of his prestige, and to hopefully bring some money into the company’s coffers, Amos Lawrence drafted two circulars and obtained Lyman Beecher’s permission to attach his name at the top of the list to “the Clergymen of New England,” urging them and their parishioners to buy shares of $20 in the New England Emigrant Aid Company.
Lyman Beecher was nearing eighty when he agreed to attach his name to the Emigrant Aid Company appeal. He was a patriarch among clergy, but he was also the head of one of the most famous families in America. His daughter Harriet married a professor of biblical literature named Calvin E. Stowe. The couple lived in Brunswick, Maine, where Calvin was a professor at Bowdoin College. There, in 1852, Harriet wrote one of the most influential books in American history, and one of the best selling books in the United States next to the Bible in the nineteenth century—Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Uncle Tom and the other characters in the story drew sympathy to the plight of enslaved African Americans more than any other book in the 1850s.
Harriet’s younger brother, Henry Ward Beecher, followed his father’s footsteps into the ministry, and became one of the most dynamic and influential ministers in the 1800s. Following his graduation from Lane Theological Seminary in 1837, the younger Beecher ministered in two churches in Indiana, and then in 1847 he was called to establish a new church in Brooklyn, New York. Beecher achieved success overnight. His Plymouth Church grew in membership to over two thousand members—an early mega-church—in a building that seated three thousand and was frequently full. His style was the opposite of his father and nearly all other clergymen of the day. He was informal, often telling funny stories from the pulpit. He encouraged congregational singing, which is taken for granted today, but was nearly unheard of then.
Following the Compromise of 1850 and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, Henry Ward Beecher began to preach against the evils of slavery from his pulpit, and allowed his church to become a station on the Underground Railroad for escaped slaves. He even brought attractive young slave girls into church and conducted a mock auction, working the congregation into a frenzy to donate enough money to buy their freedom. His church in Brooklyn became one of the bastions of the American antislavery movement. Henry Ward Beecher would play an interesting role in the Kansas struggle that would involve his name and an important symbol of his profession. But before he could take the stage, the antislavery pioneers for which his father’s circular was trying to raise money had to settle in Kansas.