Busy in the Cause: Iowa, the Free-State Struggle in the West, and the Prelude to the Civil War

4. “Do Come and Help Us. Come On through Iowa”

4 “Do Come and Help Us. Come On through Iowa” I The growing dread among proslavery Missourians that northern arrivals might soon outnumber southern emigrants in the Kansas Territory reached a tipping point in the spring of 1856. Facing these doubts about the months ahead, the moment—for slavery’s sake—seemed to call for greater force. Proslavery leaders grimly turned the screws tighter. The arrival of southern help had buoyed their spirits. To the joy of the Atchison Squatter Sovereign and Leavenworth Kansas Weekly Herald, southern recruits began arriving in the Kansas Territory during 1856.1 A New York Tribune correspondent in Tennessee wrote, “There is not a train of cars that passes between Nashville and Augusta, Georgia, that does not have quite a number of men outward bound for Kansas; and they are forming companies all through South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee.” The men were reportedly well armed and traveling without having to pay fares on the southern railroads.2 Proslavery’s most celebrated arrival was the expedition estimated to number three hundred to four hundred men recruited and provisioned by Maj. Jefferson Buford and financed partly by his sale of several slaves. The forty-eight-year-old lawyer and plantation slave owner on Alabama’s Chatahoochee River had earned the rank of major during the Creek Indian War of 1836 and now 46 . . “Do Come and Help Us” enlisted men from Alabama, South Carolina, and Georgia to help Kansas become a slave state. He offered recruits free transportation and a guaranteed one year of support. Buford’s expedition arrived by steamboat on May 2, 1856. Dubbed “Buford’s regiment ” by the northern press, his command was decried as being not bona fide settlers but adventurers interested only in making Kansas a slave state and then returning home. The Iowa editor of the Keokuk Daily Gate City pointed to the two boatloads coming with “each man having a rifle, and a belt stuck with revolvers and knives. Arms were stacked about the decks, and sentinels were on duty, day and night, in military style.” After the arrival of these southern reinforcements, Buford’s men were quartered in Missouri at various places close to the territory. The men lived on the largesse of proslavery townsfolk supplemented by foraging in the surrounding countryside, but before long their welcome degenerated into public dislike of their presence. “Some of the men brought out by Buford are acting rascally,” wrote a proslavery visitor from South Carolina to his sister. “They are robbing and plundering and don’t always confine themselves to Abolitionists. They came for nothing else.”3 Since March Free-State forebodings of bad times ahead were alive, fed by rumors of border men gathering military stores and organizing into companies to launch a spring assault. Proslavery adherents hoped for but thus far had failed to incite a clash that would prompt a U.S. military intervention against Free Staters. Their opportunity for such a collision came after the first week in May. Chief Justice Samuel Lecompte of the U.S. District Court, a proslavery sympathizer, had formed a grand jury at Lecompton to ferret out those who were resisting the territorial legislature’s proslavery legitimacy and charge them with high treason. On May 5, the grand jury issued its report recommending that the Free-State Lawrence newspapers, Herald of Freedom and Kansas Free State, be shut down and removed as nuisances, as well as the “Do Come and Help Us” . . 47 Free State Hotel—charged with being built as a military stronghold to resist laws—and that some forty Lawrence men involved in organizing a separate Free-State government be indicted for high treason. Judge Lecompte issued the warrants on May 6, and via Territorial Governor Wilson Shannon’s request, a few troops were assigned to aid the Douglas County sheriff and a U.S. marshal in executing the warrants.4 Enforcement actions were delayed, however, until an adequate posse of Missourians and Major Buford’s forces could be placed around Lawrence, in fulfillment of U.S. Marshal I. B. Donaldson ’s orders in a “Proclamation to the People of Kansas Territory” issued on May 11. His proclamation called upon law-abiding citizens of the territory to gather at Lecompton “in numbers sufficient for the execution of the law,” by which he meant the sheriff’s posse and Atchison’s Missourians. Copies of the proclamation went out to proslavery...