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

3. Prairie, Dust, and Wind

3 Prairie, Dust, and Wind I If proslavery leaders worried about controlling Kansas in the early months of 1856, Free-State settlers constantly worried that border raiders might appear any day. Moreover, until their numbers grew, Free-State leaders counseled that they keep a defensive posture and avoid any aggressive contact with U.S. troops that would give President Franklin Pierce’s slavery-friendly national government an excuse to send troops against them. After all, on January 24 the president’s special message to Congress on the Kansas Territory’s troubles had warned that “organized resistance by force” to federal law and general government authority would be considered “treasonable insurrection,” and it would be his “duty to exert the whole power of the Federal Executive to support public order in the Territory.”1 The Free Staters seemed no better off than described in an eastern newspaper the previous November: “Thus far, the warfare has been pretty much all on one side, the settlers from the North adopting a passive course, except when they were forced in defense of their individual lives to depart from it. The active, belligerent movements have been carried on exclusively by the pro-slavery party . . . to enforce the rule of a set of sanguinary invaders and ruffians from a border State, by virtue of the revolver and the Bowie knife.”2 Prairie, Dust, and Wind . . 27 The deep snows and bone-chilling winter of 1855–56, coupled with rumors and reports of border intimidation, violence, and election fraud, encouraged sympathetic coverage from Iowa newspapers . Because Iowa was the closest Free State to the Nebraska and Kansas Territories, the state grew increasingly alarmed about the Free-State situation. Several Iowa towns, including Keokuk, Muscatine, Burlington, and Davenport, held meetings to learn the state of affairs that Kansas settlers faced, both the hardships of emigration and political troubles. Speakers included Mr. Mallory, the territory’s quarter master general of the Free State Army of Kansas, and James S. Emery, a thirty-year-old lawyer from New York who in 1854 had come to Lawrence with the second group of Free-State emigrants and, with recognized public speaking skills, was on a tour of Free States to gather resolutions of aid.3 Proslavery intimidation doubtless discouraged some from going to Kansas, frightened others into heading back home, and forced others to find ways besides the river route to reach Kansas unmolested. Already in mid-April 1856 the Iowa editor of the Clinton Mirror, wrote of how the “border ruffian” outrages in Missouri were “having the effect to turn all the northern travel from that route through Iowa” for “although the distance is somewhat longer, the great security afforded more than compensates for it.”4 Persons going overland across Iowa in 1855 had found it a rough and unpleasant way to avoid the hostility lurking along the Missouri River’s muddy banks and shoreline cottonwoods. The land, replete with unfamiliar and unmarked trails, greatly slowed their progress. As one traveler described his journey to the Kansas Territory, when he pulled his team onto a new wagon track, “at length, all traces of a road vanished except stakes stuck up in the naked unbroken prairie. On we went, through sloughs, round ridges and over millions of gopher hills, and in the afternoon through a wood, and toward nightfall with jaded horses and almost broken bones, we reached the old road.”5 28 . . Prairie, Dust, and Wind Such pitiable and hardly inviting overland conditions made many emigrants willing to risk the river route until proslavery Missourians made river travel impossible, leaving Free-State emigrants no choice but the Iowa route. As late as early May 1856, Kansan men were still trying to negotiate safer and better steamboat travel arrangements with people in Alton, Illinois. The town was only three miles from the mouth of the Missouri River compared to St. Louis, which was twenty miles downriver and served as the terminus of two railroads from the East. Kansans still thought an overland emigration route through Iowa to be “wholly impracticable for the vast amount of emigration now setting Kansasward,” at least until Chicago interests built their railroad lines farther through the state.6 II Most Iowa residents who moved to the Nebraska and Kansas Territories had lived in the populated eastern counties of the state.7 Those folks with Free-State sympathies who packed their belongings and hitched up teams...