Atchison, Kansas, and the Untold Story of Slavery and Abolitionism

This story about an 1870 lynching in Atchison, Kansas (about an hour northwest of Kansas City) is terribly sad, particularly on Juneteenth, the holiday commemorating the abolition of slavery. But I must say that I am grateful to Benedictine College for highlighting it. A lot of the fights going on in education are about how we tell the story of America (do you tell about the successes and leave out the failures, or the failures and leave out the successes, or is there a better way?) and I think that (largely-untold) story of Kansas, and of Atchison specifically, shows how complicated that can be.

At the outset, I should say that claiming that the Civil War was about “state’s rights” captures something true, but it’s at best incomplete. For starters, there’s the obvious rejoinder: “a state’s right to do WHAT?” (in this, it’s like the euphemism “a woman’s right to choose”). But it also ignores the fact that slavery politics were nationalized for at least thirty years before the Civil War.

Southern slaveholding states were anxious about the growth of the United States, because it quickly became clear that they were going to be outnumbered in the Senate. There simply weren’t enough parts of the country interested in (or culturally or geographically conducive to) becoming slave societies. This fear stymied the growth of the Union, and for decades, new states could only be created in pairs (one free, one slave) to preserve the delicate political balance in the Senate: Mississippi – Indiana, Alabama – Illinois, Missouri – Maine, Arkansas – Michigan, Florida – Iowa, and Texas – Wisconsin.

It was therefore important for slave states not just to preserve the “peculiar institution” of slavery, but to SPREAD IT. Slavery advocates even came up with plans to (I’m not making this up) invade Cuba and/or Central America to create more southern territory in which to spread slavery. (One of them, William Walker, even briefly conquered Nicaragua!). But for the most part, this spread wasn’t successful, and four free states in a row entered the Union without corresponding slave states.

Under the terms of the Missouri Compromise, slavery was forbidden north of the 36° 30′ parallel in the Louisiana Purchase territory. Significantly, that meant that when the Nebraska Territory was ready to become the states of Kansas and (eventually) Nebraska, this would mean TWO new free states… and there weren’t any obvious slave states to add to the Union at the same time.

Two men in particular stand out being both fanatically pro-slavery, and fighting hard to prevent Kansas from entering the Union: Senator Stephen A. Douglas from Illinois (famous for the Lincoln-Douglas debates), and Missouri Senator David Rice Atchison. Atchison was a slaveowner, and was hellbent on ensuring that Missouri wasn’t flanked on three sides by free states. He declared that he would “extend the institutions of Missouri over the [Nebraska] Territory to whatever sacrifice of blood or treasure,” and he would see Kansas “sink in hell” rather than enter the Union free.

What Atchison and other defenders of slavery did was prevented Kansas or Nebraska from entering the Union unless the truce created by the Missouri Compromise was broken. And so, in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, they changed the law. Now, an incoming state could vote to decide if it would come in free or slave. This was heralded by its advocates as a win for democracy by appealing to the principle of “popular sovereignty.”

This betrayal outraged free staters. Massachusetts Republican Charles Sumner gave an epic (five-hour!) speech called “The Crime Against Kansas,” a 112-page speech that he had memorized by heart, and in which he called out the totally unprincipled way in which slaveowners and their supporters were corrupting republican principles. At one point, he said:

“It is the rape of a virgin Territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of Slavery ; and it may be clearly traced to a depraved longing for a new slave State, the hideous offspring of such a crime, in the hope of adding to the power of Slavery in the National Government. Yes, sir, when the whole world, alike Christian and Turk, is rising up to condemn this wrong, and to make it a hissing to the nations, here in our Republic, force — ay, sir, FORCE —has been openly employed in compelling Kansas to this pollution, and all for the sake of political power.”

At the close of the speech, he correctly prophesied that “the contest, which, beginning in Kansas, has reached us, will soon be transferred to a broader stage, where every citizen will be not only spectator, but actor.” Sumner closed his five-hour speech by appealing to the American people directly, to defend Kansas from slavery:

“In just regard for free labor in that Territory, which it is sought to blast by unwelcome association with slave labor ; in Christian sympathy with the slave, whom it is proposed to task and to sell there ; in stern condemnation of the Crime which has been consummated on that beautiful soil; in rescue of fellow-citizens, now subjugated to a tyrannical Usurpation; in dutiful respect for the early Fathers, whose aspirations are now ignobly thwarted; in the name of the Constitution, which has been outraged —of the Laws trampled down —of Justice banished —of Humanity degraded—of Peace destroyed -of Freedom crushed to earth and m the name of the Heavenly Father, whose service is perfect Freedom, I make this last appeal.”

The response to Sumner’s speech was swift and violent. Three days after he delivered it, three House Representatives entered the Senate chamber, and one of them, a South Carolina named Preston Brooks, brandished a cane and beat Sumner into unconsciousness.

“Popular sovereignty” also quickly turned violent, in what became known as “Bleeding Kansas.” Yankees moved down in droves to Kansas in order to ensure it entered free. Meanwhile, Missourians and other slave staters moved (or voted illegally) to try to turn it slave. As a result, Kansas quickly became home to some of the most radical (pro- and anti-) slavery partisans in the country, and the two sides clashed violently. Quickly, the state was plunged into a civil war, remembered today as “Bleeding Kansas,” “Bloody Kansas,” or the “Border War.”

Atchison stands out in this history as a particularly-bad actor. We see for one in how he often he was mentioned by name by abolitionists. For instance, the preacher and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher (father of Harriet, who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin) was quoted as saying that he “believed that the Sharps Rifle was a truly moral agency, and that there was more moral power in one of those instruments, so far as the slaveholders of Kansas were concerned, than in a hundred Bibles. You might just as well…read the Bible to Buffaloes as to those fellows who follow Atchison and Stringfellow; but they have a supreme respect for the logic that is embodied in Sharp’s rifle.” For this reason, the Sharp’s rifle took on the ironic name of “Beecher Bible,” and a group of radical abolitionists set up the “Beecher Bible and Rifle Church” in Wabaunsee, Kansas. All of this is perhaps most remembered in the life of John Brown who (as pictured above, from his portrait in the Kansas State Capitol) murdered five of his slaveholding neighbors, and then launched an unsuccessful assault on the federal armory in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia.

But we don’t need the testimony of the abolitionists to know how bad Atchison was. His own words do the trick:

“We will have difficulty with the Negro thieves in Kansas,” Atchison wrote Jefferson Davis in September 1854, but “our people are resolved to go in and take their ‘n*****s’ with them.” I have publicly advised ‘squatters in kansas and the people of Missouri to give a horse thief, robber, or homocide a fair trial, but to hang a Negro thief or Abolitionist, without Judge or Jury.” Since “we will shoot, burn, and hang,” Atchison assured Davis, the antislavery threat “will be soon over.”

So how in the world did a guy this bad – and this openly venomous towards Kansans – end up with a county in Kansas named after him? (He’s got one in Missouri, too). Well, once he succeeding in getting Kansas opened up for popular sovereignty, he organized a huge influx of slaveholders or pro-slavery Missourians to cross over and settle on the Kansas side of the border in the town (and country) now known as Atchison. In a sense, it’s only honest to call the area “Atchison,” because he’s the raison d’etre. But there’s still something grimly ironic about naming a place in Kansas after a guy who tried to stop Kansas from becoming a state, and then openly advocated murdering Kansans.

All of this is just scratching the surface. I’m not trying to tell the full story of how we ended up in a Civil War, or even the whole story of Kansas’ role, just to give a sense of the fact that Kansas was a much bigger part of the story than many people realize. The whole story shows how the southern side in particular, unable to preserve the balance of power through principled or democratic means, increasingly turned to unprincipled and often-violent means. And of course, that complicated story didn’t end with the Civil War. Atchison’s city became the site of that 1870 lynching mentioned above. But the details show that Atchison city leaders were against the lynching, and attempted to make some reparation for it (which, sadly, wasn’t the norm elsewhere). Sumner, meanwhile, ended up with a segregated school named after him in Topeka that ended up becoming world-famous as one of the two schools at the heart of Brown v. Board of Education.

Admittedly, the villains were often more villainous than the heroes were heroic: many of the Kansas Free Staters, while against slavery, also fought to keep black freemen from living here; Sumner’s (mostly-amazing) speech includes not a few lines that reveal his own prejudices (particularly against American Indians); and John Brown was at once a galvanizing force for abolition… and a murderer and an insurrectionist. But perhaps the lesson here is simply that history is complicated, because humans are complicated. And many of these complicated, sometimes prejudiced people were willing to move across the country to the Kansas frontiers – or even give their own lives – in the fight against human enslavement. It goes almost without saying that the lives of all of us (regardless of race) are improved by living in a society that’s free, instead of a society half-free, half-slave. I think that’s something to celebrate this Juneteenth.