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44 Chap ter five Ross, the Record, and the Railroads The construction of a railroad from the Missouri River to this point, would secure to Topeka this entire commerce sufficient of itself to build up a city on these plains, surpassing in wealth and greatness the aggregate of all the towns and cities now in existence west of the Missouri River. —Ross, editorial, Kansas State Record, November 5, 1859| The return to Topeka in the fall of 1859 was a new beginning for the Edmund G. Ross family. For a time they lived in a rented house until Ross purchased half a block of property on Sixth Avenue, where he built a stone cottage with the interior finished in black walnut. This may sound like an imposing house on a huge lot, but it was more likely a fairly modest residence . It would be the family home until 1864, although Ross himself would live in it only a couple of those years.1 Assuming he could produce enough income to provide for his family, he was right where he wanted to be in life. He could ask for nothing more and was willing to tolerate the lean years that he expected were inevitable. With the defeat of the Lecompton constitution, the Free-State Party could be assured that slavery in Kansas was no longer an issue, so the party dissolved and the Kansas Republican Party was established to replace it. Likewise the Kansas State Record became the voice of Republicanism. Whilethe Tribune hadbeenasharedprojectbetweenWilliamandEdmund, the Record was Edmund’s. With farming now ruled out as a career, making a go of the newspaper business was about the only option left to Edmund— not that he would have wanted anything else. Newspaper publishing and job printing was always Edmund’s first choice. Making it pay was another Ross, the Record and the Railroads = 45 matter. Edmund would be a soldier, a senator, and a governor for relatively short periods during the forty-eight years that lay ahead of him, but newspaper publishing and printing were the skills he would always return to. The same was not true for William, who was more like a key employee at the Record. Early in 1861 William moved on to become an Indian agent for the Pottawatomie tribe and never returned to the newspaper business. The fact was, it may have been very difficult for a newspaper in a town the size of Topeka to produce a living wage for more than one man with a family. William’s name would disappear from the Record on April 13, 1861. The Kansas State Record had a simple declaration under the banner: We render equal and exact justice to all, and submit to wrong from none. In the first issue of the Record, dated October 1, 1859, Ross stated the intention of the paper was “to make the State Record a reflex of the aims and principles of the Republican party.” The most pressing of these aims was approval of the Wyandotte constitution—which, of course, Ross favored, having been a delegate to the convention—in a referendum scheduled for October 4. Wyandotte, as we have seen, made slavery illegal in Kansas, gave women the right to vote in school elections, and made black immigration into Kansas legal.2 Some voters, particularly Democrats, feared that a lack of restrictions on black immigration would cause Kansas to be overrun with blacks fleeing the South. Nevertheless, Wyandotte was approved by a vote of 10,421 to 5,530.3 Statehood was another matter. It took until January of 1861 for Congress to accept Wyandotte and officially declare Kansas a state. The Kansas State Record relentlessly continued to seek an end to slavery. Seemingly every issue of the paper contained either articles or commentary on various aspects of the slavery question. It is remarkable how Ross could repeat his outrage at slavery and slaveholders in issue after issue of both the Tribune and the Record and find a new way of doing it each time. He often did this by reporting events that related to slavery, and then adding his own commentary. When reporting on John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, for example, Ross, who did not approve of Brown’s tactics, nevertheless found a way to be critical of slaveholders. “The raid at Harper’s Ferry is, of course, a reprehensible affair, not to be justified on any grounds. . . . We are no apologists for treason or servile insurrections...

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