Kansas Territory Bibliography
Compiled by Virgil W. Dean, Craig Miner, and Homer E. Socolofsky
Originally compiled as a project of the Kansas Territorial Sesquicentennial Commission by Dr. Virgil W. Dean, Kansas State Historical Society; Dr. Craig Miner, Wichita State University; and Dr. Homer E. Socolofsky, Kansas State University. Not all entries are held by KSHS.
- The Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Kansas Question
- The Territorial Government
- Constitution Making
- General or Miscellaneous
"Bleeding Kansas"--Border Disputes and Warfare
Biographies and Autobiographies
- Brown, John (1800-1859)
- Holliday, Cyrus K. (1826-1900)
- Lane, James H. (1814-1866)
- Robinson, Charles (1818-1894)
- Other Biographies/Autobiographies
General and Historiographical Works
Government
The Kansas-Nebraska Act and the “Kansas Question”
On the National Stage
Ayres, Carol Dark, Lincoln and Kansas: Partnership for Freedom. Manhattan, Kans.: Sunflower University Press, 2001. Abraham Lincoln's brief 1859 trip from Elwood to Leavenworth, K.T., received relatively slight press coverage at the time, but Ayres marshaled the available primary and secondary sources to chronicle that story in detail in two of her six chapters; the others serve as historical context.
Fehrenbacher, Don E. The South and Three Sectional Crises. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. The author's three crises are the Missouri Compromise, the Wilmot Proviso, and “Kansas, Republicanism and the Crisis of Union.”
Gara, Larry. The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1961. In this important study for the famed UGRR, Gara questioned the railroads actual importance, with respect to real numbers and impact.
Gienapp, William E. "The Crime against Sumner: The Caning of Charles Sumner and the Rise of the Republican Party." Civil War History 25 (September 1979): 218-45. The success of this fledgling party was by no means certain in 1855 and early 1856; but Congressman Preston Brooks’ May 22, 1856, "assault was of critical importance in transforming the struggling Republican party into a major political force."
Gladstone, Thomas H. The Englishman in Kansas; or, Squatter Life and Border Warfare . . . With Intro. by Fred. Law Olmstead. 1857. Reprint. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971. This edition includes and introduction by historian James A. Rawley.
Hart, Charles. “The Natural Limits of Slavery Expansion: Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 34 (Spring 1968): 32-50. Hart examined the “survivability” issue with respect to these western territories in light of the contemporary evidence (i.e., 1854 congressional debates), rather than through “historical hindsight,” and concluded “many people living in the 1850s were convinced that Kansas and Nebraska were well within the natural limits of slavery expansion.”
Hodder, Frank Heywood. “The Genesis of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.” Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin for 1912. Madison: State Historical Society, 1913. Hodder, a professor of history at the University of Kansas, focused on Senator Stephen Douglas, a typical American politician of the 1850s who “was controlled by devotion to the development of the West.”
Hodder, Frank Heywood. “The Railroad Background of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill.” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 12 (June 1925): 3-22. The author began by calling attention to the railroad as “the most important factor controlling” the settlement of the West and the “principal means of its development”; thus, Senator Douglas’s interest in them should not be surprising.
Hodder, Frank Heywood. “Some Aspects of the English Bill for the Admission of Kansas.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1907-1908 10 (1908): 224-232. In essence, provided for resubmission of the controversial Lecompton Constitution; Kansas voters overwhelmingly rejected the pro-slave document at the August 2, 1858, referendum.
Holliday, Cyrus K. “The Presidential Campaign of 1856—The Fremont Campaign.” Kansas Historical Collections, 1891-1896 5 (1896): 48-68. For his KSHS presidential address, delivered January 20, 1891, focused on the Republican Party’s first presidential campaign in which the Kansas Question was the central issue.
Johannsen, Robert W. Stephen A. Douglas. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. An important biography of the "Little Giant" who played a pivotal role in the sectional debate throughout the 1850s.
Johannsen, Robert W. “Stephen A. Douglas, `Harper's Magazine,' and Popular Sovereignty.” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 45 (March 1959): 606-631. Holds that popular sovereignty (the principle of letting people of the territories vote slavery up or down) was Douglas’ main motivation for the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
Lowell, James H. “The Romantic Growth of a Law Court.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1919-1922 15 (1922): 590-597. Some early (1850s) legal history with special attention to Holton, Jackson County.
Malin, James C. “Aspects of the Nebraska Question, 1852-1854.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 20 (May 1953): 385-391. While reflecting Malin’s “needless war” revisionism, this article focuses on issues and individuals involved in the pre-Douglas (Kansas-Nebraska) bill efforts to covertly make all of Nebraska Territory a slave state.
Malin, James C. “The Motives of Stephen A. Douglas in the Organization of Nebraska Territory: A Letter Dated December 17, 1853.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 19 (November 1951): 321-353. The article examines the Illinois senator's commitment to the north-central route for Pacific railroad as motivation for the Kansas-Nebraska bill, quoting extensively from the accounts of Douglas contemporaries James W. Sheahan and James M. Cutts, and concludes with a reprint of the Douglas letter.
Malin, James C. “The Nebraska Question: A Ten Year Record, 1844-1854.” Nebraska History 35 (March 1954): 1-15. That portion of the “Indian County” destined to become the territories of Nebraska and Kansas on May 30, 1854, was first call just “Nebraska,” and, according to Professor Malin, “the original focus on Nebraska, the Platte Valley, and the Pacific railroad, was lost in the controversy over slavery.”
Malin, James C. The Nebraska Question, 1852-1854. Lawrence, Kans.: James C. Malin, 1953. Malin began the work that resulted in this volume as a student of Frank Hodder’s at the University of Kansas; it consists of a detailed examination of the evolution of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
Meerse, David E. “Presidential Leadership, Suffrage Qualifications, and Kansas: 1857.” Civil War History 24 (December 1978): 293-313. Meerse discussed the traditional view of a failed and inept Buchanan administration and its confrontation with Governor Robert Walker; after reexamining the affair, the author concludes that Buchanan deserves more credit for decisive action.
Pierson, Michael D., "‘All Southern Society Is Assailed by the Foulest Charges’: Charles Sumner’s ‘The Crime against Kansas’ and the Escalation of Republican Anti-slavery Rhetoric." New England Quarterly 68 (December 1995): 531-557. Pierson provides a detailed analysis of the famous May 1856 speech, that provoked a vicious physical assault on the senator, as well as some political context for Sumner and the nation in the early 1850s.
Rawley, James. Race and Politics: "Bleeding Kansas" and the Coming of the Civil War. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1969. Concentrating on the years 1854-1858 when “Kansas was the keynote of United States politics,” Rawley argues that America was a land of “racialists” and thus race, not slavery, was the fundamental issue to be settled in Kansas Territory.
Rhodes, Charles Harker. “The Significance of Kansas History.” Kansas Historical Collections 11 (1909-1910): 1-4. Its political struggles of 1850s, Harker argued, made Kansas history unique.
Siebert, Wilbur H. The Underground Railroad: From Slavery to Freedom. New York: Macmillan Co., 1898. A classic, traditional account of the railroad's activities and its central place in the abolitionist movement.
Smith, Elbert B. The Presidency of James Buchanan. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1976. Kansas issues were central during Buchanan administration (1857-1861); this is a volume in the press’s “American Presidency Series.”
U. S. Congress, House of Representatives. Report of the Special Committee Appointed to Investigate the Troubles in Kansas; With the Views of the Minority of Said Committee. Report No. 200, 34th Congress, 1st Session, 1856. An elaborate report, giving majority and minority views. Congressional publications, including the Globe, are replete with items pertaining to the Kansas question during the 1850s.
Weisberger, Bernard A. “The Newspaper Reporter and the Kansas Imbroglio.” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 36 (March 1950): 633-656. Making reference to several specific territorial Kansas journalists, the author argues that with their “turbulent and thunderous name-calling” these writers helped make the Kansas Question “one of absolute rights and wrongs.”
Within the Territory
Adams, Franklin G. “The Capitals of Kansas.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1903-1904 8 (1904): 331-351. The late journalist, freestater, and first really permanent director/secretary of the KSHS discussed the capitals of Fort Leavenworth, Shawnee Mission, Pawnee, Lecompton, Minneola, and finally Topeka, with information on the construction of state capitol.
Baltimore, Lester B. “Benjamin F. Stringfellow: Fight for Slavery on the Missouri Border.” Missouri Historical Review 62 (October 1967): 14-29. The Virginian-born (1816) Stringfellow, who moved to Missouri in 1838, took the extremist position in the defense of slavery in western Missouri and was highly critical of Leavenworth “abolitionists” as early as July 1854.
Brewerton, George Douglas. The War in Kansas. A Rough Trip to the Border, Among New Homes and a Strange People. New York: Derby & Jackson, 1856. The author of this 400-page book claimed to be reporting the truth of the important events of the day in Kansas and to be on “neither side of this unhappy quarrel.”
Gihon, John H. Geary and Kansas. Governor Geary's Administration in Kansas. With a Complete History of the Territory. Until 1857. Embracing a Full Account of its Discovery, Geography, Soil, Rivers, Climate, Products; Its Organization as a Territory . . . Philadelphia: J. H. C. Whiting, 1857. Dr. Gihon was Geary's private secretary.
Johnson, David W. “Freesoilers for God: Kansas Newspaper Editors and the Antislavery Crusade.” Kansas History 2 (Summer 1979): 74-85. The author highlights more than half a dozen free state advocates in territorial Kansas, including George W. Brown, Josiah Miller, John Speer and T. Dwight Thacher.
Joy, Mark S. “Caleb May: Kansas Territorial Pioneer and Politician.” The Prairie Scout 5 (1985): 94-117. May, a freestater from Atchison County, was one of two men to serve as a delegate in three Kansas constitutional conventions.
Learnard, O. E. “Organization of the Republican Party.” Kansas Historical Collection 6 (1897-1900): 312-316. Lawrence’s Oscar E. Learnard’s account of the meeting at Osawatomie in May 1859 that birthed the Kansas Republican Party.
Lewis, Lloyd. “Propaganda and the Kansas-Missouri War.” Missouri Historical Review 34 (October 1939): 9-17. After the Civil War, Missouri was identified in the North as “a semi-hostile community,” according to Lewis, in part because antebellum Northerners held “superior propoganda skills” and won that “war” too.
Martin, George W. The First Two Years of Kansas; or, Where, when and how the Missouri bushwhacker, the Missouri train and bank robber, and those who stole themselves rich in the name of liberty, were sired and reared . . . Topeka, Kans.: State Printing Office, 1907. A speech delivered several times in 1906 and 1907 based on early newspapers and Martin’s interviews with early settlers.
McClure, James R. “Taking the Census and Other Incidents in 1855.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1903-1904 8 (1904): 227-250. The recollections of an Indiana lawyer and “Douglas Democrat” who removed to Kansas in October 1854.
Mullis, Tony R. “John Geary, Kansas, and the 1856 National Election.” Heritage of the Great Plains 25 (Winter 1992): 13-24. Governor Geary's timely “quelling of violence in `Bleeding Kansas',” although only a temporary pacification, “virtually assured James Buchanan and the Democratic Party success in November.”
Robinson, Sara T. D. Kansas: Its Exterior and Interior Life: Including a full view of its Settlement, Political History, Social life, Climate, Soil, Production, Scenery, etc. 1856. Reprint. Lawrence: Kansas Heritage Press, 1990. Although its biases are obvious, this is an interesting and useful account by the wife of Dr. Charles Robinson, free-state leader and first state governor.
Shenton, James P. Robert John Walker: A Politician from Jackson to Lincoln. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961. Walker, a prominent Pennsylvania Democrat, accepted appointed as territorial governor of Kansas in 1857.
Smith, Robert Emmett. “Indian Agent William Gay: A Victim of Bleeding Kansas.” Westport Historical Quarterly 10 (December 1974): 74-85. A native of New York and a 51-year-old father of two, Gay accepted a position in Kansas Territory in early 1856 and was murdered by some of Buford’s South Carolina Company in western Missouri in June 1856.
Tinkcom, Harry M. John White Geary: Soldier-Statesman, 1819-1873. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1940. Territorial governor (1856-1857) who, despite his Democratic background, developed close ties with many free-state leaders.
Tomlinson, William P. Kansas in Eighteen Fifty-eight. Being Chiefly a History of the Recent Troubles in the Territory. New York: H. Dayton, Publisher, 1859. Dedicated to “Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, the unwavering friend of Kansas,” Tomlinson’s was an “unwavering” defense of the Free-State cause in the wake of the “Fort Scott Difficulties” of 1858; he also provided interesting descriptions of settlements and developments from Lawrence south to Fort Scott.
Wolff, Gerald W. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill: Party, Section, and the Coming of the Civil War. New York: Revisionist Press, 1977. Based on his 1969 University of Iowa doctoral dissertation, Wolff’s Kansas-Nebraska Bill examined voting records of the Thirty-third Congress on Homestead and tariff issues and concluded that party spirit or loyalty survived the divisive Kansas-Nebraska debate.
Wolff, Gerald W. “Party and Section: The Senate and the Kansas-Nebraska Bill.” Civil War History 18 (December 1972): 293-311. Wolff’s scalogram analysis of seven senatorial votes demonstrated a “partial triumph of party allegiances over sectional considerations.
The Territorial Government
Andrews, Horace, Jr. “Kansas Crusade: Eli Thayer and the New England Emigrant Aid Company.” New England Quarterly 35 (December 1962): 497-514. Andrews argued that “without Eli Thayer”—who refused to view Kansas as a lost cause and incorporated the Aid Company a month before the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act—“there might never have been a Kansas crusade.”
Beezley, William H. “Land-Office Spoilsmen in `Bleeding Kansas'.” Great Plains Journal 9 (Spring 1970): 67-78. The article’s focus is mostly directed at John Calhoun, the pro-slave, surveyor general for Kansas and Nebraska.
"Biographies of Members of the Free State Territorial Legislature of 1857.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1907-1908 10 (1908): 204-216. Brief biographical sketches of most members of Council and House of Representatives.
Caldwell, Martha B. “The Eldridge House.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 9 (November 1940): 347-370. From its beginnings as the free-state headquarters in 1854-55, Caldwell offers a history of this Lawrence, Kansas, icon through the construction of the fourth and final hotel building in the 1920s, but her focus is the first decade.
Cecil-Fronsman, Bill. “`Advocate the Freedom of White Men, As Well As That of the Negroes': The Kansas Free State and Antislavery Westerns in Territorial Kansas.” Kansas History 20 (Summer 1997): 102-115. The focus is on editors Robert G. Elliott and Josiah Miller, who substantially contributed to “the successful establishment of the Kansas free-state movement.”
Cecil-Fronsman, Bill. “`Death to all Yankees and Traitors in Kansas': The Squatter Sovereign and the Defense of Slavery in Kansas.” Kansas History 16 (Spring 1993): 22-33. Subsidized by the town company and edited by Kelley and Stringfellow, Atchison's pro-slave newspaper, moderated its tone once the political battle was lost and became Freedom's Champion when John A. Martin took it over in 1858.
Cheatham, Gary L. “‘Kansas Shall Not Have the Right to Legislate Slavery Out’: The Failure of the 1860 Antislavery Law.” Kansas History 23 (Autumn 2000): 154-171. The Republican legislature of 1860 failed in its effort to eradicate the “peculiar institution” in the territory, despite its passage of an antislavery law, as the statute was declared unconstitutional by the territorial District Court at Leavenworth in late December 1860 and unceremoniously became moot with Kansas admission to the Union, January 29, 1861.
Collins, Bruce W. “The Democrats' Electoral Fortunes During the Lecompton Crisis.” Civil War History 24 (December 1978): 314-331. Based on his analysis of election results, Collins argued that historians of the late 1850s had “underestimated the popular support enjoyed by the Democrats in the North even when a Democratic President pursued a pro-Southern policy.”
Connelley, William E. “The East Boundary Line of Kansas.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1909-1910 11 (1910): 75-80. A map of the Kansas City area companies this discussion of a long-standing dispute between Kansas and Missouri.
Connelley, William E. Kansas Territorial Governors. Topeka, Kans.: Crane & Co., 1900. Brief biographical sketches of the ten men who served the territory as governor and/or acting governor.
Cory, C. E. “Slavery in Kansas.” Kansas Historical Collections 7 (1901-1902): 229-242. The legal status of slavery is examined; some individual slave accounts also are provided.
Craik, Elmer LeRoy. “Southern Interest in Territorial Kansas, 1854-1858.” Kansas Historical Collections 15 (1919-1922): 334-450. Craik’s 1922 University of Kansas doctoral dissertation remains an important and useful study of the central issues that made Kansas a battle ground; it reflects a great deal of newspaper research in particular.
Crafton, Allen. Free State Fortress: The First Ten Years of the History of Lawrence, Kansas. Lawrence, Kans.: World Co., 1954. A centennial history by a Lawrence resident, Free State Fortress offers a detailed examination of events in and around Lawrence from September 1854 through September 1864; the absence of citations is unfortunate.
Denver, James W. "Address of Ex-Governor James W. Denver. Delivered at the Old Settlers’ Meeting, Bismarck Grove, Lawrence, September 3, 1884." Kansas Historical Collections, 1883-1885 3 (1886): 359-366. Denver, who was territorial governor from December 1857, to October 1858, here offered a personal account of events of twenty-five years earlier.
"Documentary History of Kansas.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1891-1896 5 (1896): 156-633. Beginning with biographical sketch of some of the principals, “the papers which here follow . . . are intended to complete the documentary history of Kansas Territory.” Papers from the Reeder, Shannon, and Geary administrations are included, as are “the executive minutes and official papers” of governors Robert J. Walker, James W. Denver, and Samuel Medary.
Doy, John. The Narrative of John Doy, of Lawrence, Kansas. New York: T. Holman, printer, 1860. Dr. Doy, a member of the first Emigrant Aid party to reach Lawrence in August 1854, devoted most of his 130-plus pages to the story of his efforts to help kidnapped or “fugitive” African Americans, his capture and trial and conviction for “negro stealing,” and his subsequent “rescue” from the St. Joseph jail.
Eldridge, Shalor Winchell. Recollections of Early Days in Kansas. Topeka: Publications of the Kansas State Historical Society, Kansas State Printing Plant, 1920. Colonel Eldridge’s “eye-witness” history of the settlement of Lawrence and the territorial struggle for freedom, through the Civil War and Quantrill’s raid.
Elliott, R. G. “The Grasshopper Falls Convention and the Legislature of 1857.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1907-1908 10 (1908): 182-196. Includes an address delivered in December 1907 and his autobiography.
"First Appearance of Kansas at a National Convention.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1909-1910 11 (1910): 12-18. Founded in 1854, the Republican Party held its first national convention in 1956 and its second, the first to include Kansas delegates, at Chicago, 1860.
Fleming, Walter L. “The Buford Expedition to Kansas.” American Historical Review 6 (October 1900): 38-48. One of a very few colonizing efforts made by Southerners; about 400 men, mostly from Alabama and South Carolina, arrived in Kansas on May 2, 1856.
Gardner, Theodore. “Andrew H. Reeder, First Territorial Governor.” Kansas Historical Collections 16 (1923-1925): 582-585. A sketch of Reeder’s brief tenure (1854-1855) and subsequent flight from territory disguised as “wood chopper.”
Geary, John W. “Governor Geary's Administration." Kansas Historical Collection, 1886-1888 4 (1890): 373-745. A biographical sketch of John White Geary is followed by a variety of documents including “President Pierce's Message, 1856,” the “Correspondence of Governor Wilson Shannon,” the “Correspondence of Governor Geary,” the “Executive Minutes of Governor John W. Geary,” and the “Executive Minutes of Daniel Woodson, Acting Governor from March 11, 1857, to March 31, 1857, Inclusive.”
"Governor Andrew H. Reeder.” Kansas Historical Collections, 1875-1878 1-2 (1881): 145-156. Biographical sketch of first territorial governor from Kansas Weekly Herald, September 15, 1854, followed by comments on his years in Kansas by prominent contemporaries.
"Governor George M. Beebe.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1926-1928 17 (1928): 618-623. A biographical sketch of Kansas’ last territorial governor who was just twenty-four years old when he took office.
Greene, Albert R. “United States Land-Offices in Kansas.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1903-1904 8 (1904): 1-13. Includes a list of officials and a map, “Kansas Territory in 1856.”
Harlow, Ralph Volney. “The Rise and Fall of the Kansas Aid Movement.” American Historical Review 41 (October 1935): 1-25. Harlow dealt with Eli Thayer’s Emigrant Aid Company, as well as the bigger “Kansas Aid Movement,” and concluded that, although they stirred up much bitterness and hate in the North and the South, “the emigrant aid companies and committees had practically nothing to do with making Kansas a free state”—western pioneers did that.
Hickman, Russell K. “The Reeder Administration Inaugurated: Part I, “The Delegate Election of November, 1854." Kansas Historical Quarterly 36 (Autumn 1970): 305-340; Part II, “The Census of Early 1855,” 36 (Winter 1970):424-455. A proslave candidate, John W. Whitfield, was elected first territorial delegate to Congress; part two contains census data preliminary to the first legislative election, March 1855.
Hoole, William Stanley, editor. “A Southerner's Viewpoint of the Kansas Situation, 1856-1857: The Letters of Lieut. Col. A. J. Hoole, C. S. A.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 3 (February 1934): 43-68; concluded 3 (May 1934): 145-171. Letters written to family members in South Carolina; Hoole was politically active during his stay in K.T., serving briefly as probate judge of Douglas County.
Johnson, C. W. “Survey of the Northern Boundary Line of Kansas.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1901-1902 7 (1902): 318-322. Carried out per instructions of the surveyor-general in 1854 and 1855.
Johnson, Samuel A. The Battle Cry of Freedom: The New England Emigrant Aid Company in the Kansas Crusade. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1954. Johnson’s is a thoroughly documented account of the Company’s “relationship . . . to the Kansas Conflict” and other major and related events of the 1850s.
Johnson, Samuel A. “The Emigrant Aid Company in Kansas.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 1 (November 1932): 429-441. Kansas “historians” had debated the relative significance of the New England Emigrant Aid Company in making Kansas free for years; Johnson concludes that it was of great importance, if not a deciding factor, in the struggle.
Johnson, Samuel A. “The Emigrant Aid Company in the Kansas Conflict.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 6 (February 1937): 21-33. Rumors about the nature and objectives of the New England Emigrant Aid Company “furnished the excuse, and in some measure the provocation, for the Missouri invasion.”
Johnson, Samuel A. “The Genesis of the New England Emigrant Aid Company.” New England Quarterly 3 (January 1930): 95-122. Johnson included a list of directors and stockholders in this examination of the company’s Kansas troubles and controversies.
Kansas State Historical Society. The Old Pawnee Capitol, an account of the first capitol building of Kansas, the town of Pawnee, initial sessions of the first territorial legislature, destruction of the town of Pawnee . . . Topeka, Kans.: B. P. Walker, State Printer, 1928.
"Kansas Territorial Publications.” Kansas Historical Collections, 1897-1900 6 (1900): 394-418. An extensive list of sources produced during the period with name indexes to claims made in the Strickler and Hoogland reports.
Lecompte, Samuel D. “A Defense By Samuel D. Lecompte.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1903-1904 8 (1904): 389-405. First published in Sol Miller's Troy Chief, February 4, 1875; concerning Lecompte’s controversial tenure as chief justice of Kansas territorial court, 1854-1859.
Lowrey, Grosvenoir P. “Biography of Governor Andrew H. Reeder.” Kansas Historical Collections, 1883-1885 3 (1886): 197-205; 205-223. The biographical sketch was based on information provided by Lowrey, the governor’s private secretary; it is followed by an account of “Governor Reeder's Escape from Kansas,” taken from Reeder's diary.
Malin, James C. “The Pro-Slavery Background of the Kansas Struggle.” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 10 (December 1923): 285-305. Most of the published “materials” about this most controversial of incidents, insisted Malin, was “propaganda, pure and simple, even when disguised under the designation of true and impartial history.”
Martin, George W. “Early Days in Kansas.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1905-1906 9 (1906): 126-143. Although territorial settlers were “overwhelmingly Middle states and Western people,” New Englanders were the early “bosses.”
Meerse, David E. “The 1857 Territorial Delegate Election Contest.” Kansas History 4 (Summer 1981): 96-113. Meerse examines the highly significant October 1857 balloting, which resulted in the election of a free-state legislature and delegate to Congress, Marcus J. Parrott.
Miller, Nyle H., editor. “Surveying the Southern Boundary Line of Kansas: From the Private Journal of Col. Joseph E. Johnston.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 1 (February 1932): 104-139. Official survey to set dividing line between Kansas and Indian Territory conducted in 1857.
Moore, Ely, Jr. “The Story of Lecompton.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1909-1910 11 (1910): 463-480. the author's father (Ely, Sr.) was the first register at Lecompton's federal land office.
Morrall, Albert. “Dr. Albert Morrall: Proslavery Soldier in Kansas in 1856.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1915-1918 13 (1918): 123-142. Morrall came to Kansas in 1856 with a military company from South Carolina.
O'Connor, Thomas H. “Cotton Whigs in Kansas.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 26 (Spring 1960): 34-58. “Cotton Whigs” were New Englanders who backed the movement to make Kansas a free state, in part because they were outraged by the Kansas-Nebraska Act’s repeal of the venerated Missouri Compromise, but did not hold to abolitionist principles.
Phillips, William A. The Conquest of Kansas by Missouri and Her Allies: A History of the Troubles in Kansas, from the Passage of the Organic Act Until the Close of July, 1856. 1856. Reprint. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1971. Written in 1856, Phillips, a Scottish immigrant who was affiliated with the New York Tribune when he first came to Kansas in 1855, recounted an “early and unhappy history of Kansas.”
Reeder, Andrew H. “Executive Minutes. Minutes Recorded in the Governor’s Office During the Administration of Governor Andrew H. Reeder.” Kansas Historical Collections, 1883-1885 3 (1886): 226-278. The official records begin with Reeder’s commission, issued June 29, 1854, and continue through the end of his administration, August 16, 1855.
Richmond, Robert W. “The First Capitol of Kansas.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 21 (Spring 1955): 321-325. This “capitol” was located at Pawnee, near Fort Riley, and was the site of the initial session of the first territorial legislature, July 1855.
Robinson, Charles. “Address of Governor Robinson.” Kansas Historical Collections 1875-1878 1-2 (1881):115-130. The “free-state governor” and state of Kansas’s first chief executive, here offers his “recollections and impressions” of six of ten territorial governors of Kansas.
Rutherford, Phillip R. “The Arabia Incident.” Kansas History, 1(Spring 1978): 39-47. Pro-slavery sympathizers confiscated a cache of Sharps rifles on board this now famous (i.e., Steamboat Arabia museum in Kansas City, Missouri) river steamer in May 1856.
Sanborn, Franklin B. “Some Notes on the Territorial History of Kansas.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1913-1914 13 (1914): 249-265. Comments on papers of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a free-state leader, followed by letters of T. J. Marsh, pertaining to territorial election of 1857, and Colonel James Montgomery, the Linn County “Jayhawker.”
Shannon, Wilson. “Executive Minutes. Minutes Recorded in the Governor’s Office During the Administration of Governor Wilson Shannon, Including also those Recorded in the Intervals in which Secretary Daniel Woodson was Acting Governor.” Kansas Historical Collections, 1883-1885 3 (1886): 283-337. The minutes cover the period August 31, 1855, to September 20, 1856; they are preceded by short “Biography of Governor Wilson Shannon” by B. F. Simpson, pages 279-283.
Shindler, Henry. “The First Capital of Kansas.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1911-1912 12 (1912): 331-337. Despite designation of Pawnee as first territorial capital, Fort Leavenworth was first seat of government established when Andrew Reeder arrived there in October 1854.
Shoemaker, Floyd C. “Missouri's Proslavery Fight for Kansas.” [Part I] Missouri Historical Review 48 (April 1954): 221-236; [Part II] 48 (July 1954): 325-340; and [Part III] 49 (October 1954): 41-54. Opening his three-part essay on the seminal struggle for Kansas, the author observed that to date “the dearth” of published material by Missouri historians was “almost unbelievable”; a version of this work was first published in the author’s Missouri and Missourians: Land of Contrasts and People of Achievements (1943).
Stanton, Frederick P. “Address at Ex-Governor Frederick P. Stanton. Delivered at the Old Settler's Meeting, Bismarck Grove, Lawrence, September 2, 1884." Kansas Historical Collections 3 (1883-1885): 338-358. Stanton offered an account of his role as secretary and acting governor of the territory, April 1857-December 1857.
Thayer, Eli. A History of the Kansas Crusade, Its Friends and Its Foes. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1889. The author was the principal organizer of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, which he held was the savior of Kansas.
"The Topeka Movement.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1913-1914 13 (1914): 125-249. Reprints many documents, speeches, and official records of this free-state movement, 1855-1857.
Ware, Abby Huntington. “Dispersion of the Territorial Legislature of 1856.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1905-1906 9 (1906): 540-545. U.S. army dispersed “illegal” free-state legislature meeting at Topeka; includes an article written by James Redpath for the Chicago Tribune, July 4, 1856.
Constitution Making
Cheatham, Gary L. “‘Slavery All the Time or Not At All’: The Wyandotte Constitution Debate, 1859-1861.” Kansas History 21 (Autumn 1998): 168-187. The overwhelming electoral success of the Wyandotte Constitution in October 1859 changed the nature of the political debate in Kansas Territory but did not, as Cheatham demonstrates, mean an end to the “opposition,” which continued until the eve of the Civil War to oppose key provisions of the constitution and espouse a pro-Southern ideology.
Connelley, William E. “The First Provisional Constitution of Kansas.” Kansas Historical Collections, 1897-1900 6 (1900): 97-113. Connelly offers some background on the constitution of “Nebraska” prepared by Wyandot Indians in 1853.
Crawford, George A. “The Candle-box Under the Woodpile.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1907-1908 10 (1908): 196-204. The discovery of fraudulent ballots and revelations regarding John Calhoun’s role in the January 1858 affair caused Governor Robert J. Walker to oppose pro-slave efforts to gain Kansas’s admission under the Lecompton Constitution.
Elbert, E. Duane. “The English Bill: An Attempt to Compromise the Lecompton Dilemma.” Kansas History 1 (Winter 1978): 219-234. Introduced by Illinois congressman William H. English, this bill provided for the August 1858 referendum on the constitution and, according to Elbert, managed to “soft pedal Kansas as a national issue, and thus it helped delay the national holocaust for a few more years.”
Elliott, R. G. “The Big Springs Convention.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1903-1904 8 (1904): 362-377. First significant free-state assembly, September 1855, called to counter actions of “bogus” legislature and led to the founding of the Topeka Movement.
Gaeddert, G. Raymond. The Birth of Kansas. Lawrence: University of Kansas Publications, 1940. This detailed and reliable account of political events leading to Kansas statehood emphasizes the Wyandotte convention and constitution of 1859.
Gower, Calvin W. “Kansas Territory and Its Boundary Question: `Big Kansas' or `Little Kansas'.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 33 (Spring 1967): 1-12. Gower examines the pros and cons of this issue; the former would have retained the Continental Divide as the state’s western border and extend its northern boundary line to the Platte River.
Johannsen, Robert W. “The Lecompton Constitutional Convention: An Analysis of its Membership.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 23 (Autumn 1957): 225-243. Delegates to this 1857 pro-slave gathering, that sparked a major national debate and split the national Democratic Party, were denounced by free-staters at the time and “have been generally condemned by subsequent generations of historians,” but the author’s analysis here reveals a very different convention, far removed from its “Border Ruffian” image.
Kansas Constitutional Convention: A Reprint of the Proceedings and Debates of the Convention which Framed the Constitution of Kansas at Wyandotte in July, 1859. Topeka: Kansas State Printing Plant, 1920. This version of the 1859 proceedings, provides convenient access to most of the documents along with a variety of historical sketches.
Martin, George W. “The Boundary Lines of Kansas.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1909-1910 11 (1910): 53-74. Martin examines the background and delegate discussions that led to the establishment of the state’s present borders at the Wyandotte Constitutional Convention of 1859.
"Papers Relating to the Constitutions of Kansas, 1855-1861.” Kansas Historical Collections, 1897-1900 6 (1900): 384-393. An elaborate, useful name index of sources for all four conventions and their constitution: Topeka, Lecompton, Leavenworth, and Wyandotte.
Perdue, Rose M. “The Sources of the Constitutions of Kansas.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1901-1902 7 (1902): 130-151. Perdue’s remains an important work, evaluating as it does the role of various delegates at the Wyandotte Convention and their ties to earlier states of residence and comparing earlier constitutions with the one adopted for Kansas, July 1859.
Price, David H. “Sectionalism in Nebraska: When Kansas Considered Annexing Southern Nebraska, 1856-1860.” Nebraska History 53 (Winter 1972): 446-462. The movement to make Nebraska south of the Platte River a part of Kansas Territory began as early as 1856 under the leadership of Sterling Morton, and was championed by the twelve-member honorary delegation from the region that attended the Wyandotte Convention in July 1859.
Robinson, Charles. “Topeka and her Constitution.” Kansas Historical Collections, 1897-1900 6 (1900): 291-305. Personal remembrance of a principal reflecting on Kansas’s first free-state constitution, drafted by a Topeka convention in October 1855.
Simpson, Benjamin F. “The Wyandotte Constitution.” Kansas Historical Collections 1875-1878 1-2 (1881): 236-247. At age 23 years, Simpson was the youngest delegate to the 1859 convention; these are his reflections on some of his fellow constitution makers. An address by Simpson, “The Wyandotte Convention,” can be found in the Kansas Historical Collections 3 (1883-1885): 385-389.
Stampp, Kenneth M. America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Giving considerable attention given to the Lecompton movement and its nationwide influence, Stampp illuminated President Buchanan’s belief if the Kansas question could be resolved “harmony between the sections” would be restored.
Thacher, T. Dwight. “The Leavenworth Constitutional Convention.” Kansas Historical Collections, 1883-1885 3 (1886): 5-15. Thacher, a convention delegate from Lawrence, explains the rationale for this 1858 convention, Kansas' third; see also his “The Rejected Constitutions,” 436-448.
Waters, Joseph G. “Fifty Years of the Wyandotte Constitution.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1909-1910 11 (1910): 47-52. Waters holds that “conservatism of other states” was reflected in this document despite Kansas’s extraordinary beginnings and, although generally a good instrument, “It was a mistake not to include woman suffrage.”
"What Might Have Happened had Lecompton Prevailed.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1907-1908 10 (1908): 216-223. Includes reprints of Thomas Ewing, Jr., and Charles Robinson letters from December 1857 -May 1858.
General or Miscellaneous
Abel, Anna Heloise. “Indian Reservations in Kansas and the Extinguishment of Their Title.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1903-1904 8 (1904): 72-109. A significant study completed as master's thesis at Kansas University, 1902; includes a map of Indian reservations in Kansas, 1846.
Barry, Louise, editor. “With the First U. S. Cavalry in Indian Country, 1859-1861: Letters to The Daily Times, Leavenworth.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 24 (Autumn 1958): 257-284; second installment, 24 (Winter 1958): 399-425. Published almost monthly, beginning February 8, 1859, in the Daily Times, these anonymous letters cover the movement and activity of cavalry troops from Fort Leavenworth in the “Indian regions” of Kansas, Nebraska, and Indian territories.
Brinkerhoff, Fred W. “The Kansas Tour of Lincoln the Candidate.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 13 (February 1945): 294-307. The Republican presidential candidate visited northeast Kansas in December 1859; this was Brinkerhoff’s 1944 KSHS presidential address.
Caldwell, Martha B., editor. “The Southern Kansas Boundary Survey: From the Journal of Hugh Campbell, Astronomical Computer.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 6 (November 1937): 339-377. Covers party's journey and work from St. Louis (April 1857) to Fort Leavenworth (November 1857).
Carr, E. T. “Reminiscences Concerning Fort Leavenworth in 1855-'56.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1911-1912 12 (1912): 375-383. The author removed to Kansas from New York in 1855 to work as carpenter at fort.
Chalfant, William Y. Cheyennes and Horse Soldiers: The 1857 Expedition and the Battle of Solomon’s Fork. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989. In Kansas Territory during the 1850s, the U.S. Army was occupied on two fronts: the border disputes in the east and increasing hostilities with the Plains Indians in the west. Here Chalfant focuses on the July 1857 clash between Colonel E. V. Sumner’s cavalry regiment and a relatively large force of Cheyennes.
Chapman, Berlin B. "Removal of the Osages from Kansas." Kansas Historical Quarterly 7 (August 1938): 287-305; concluded, 7 (November 1938): 399-410. By the early 1870s Osage lands in southern Kansas had been ceded and Osages relocated on Cherokee land in Indian Territory.
Coakley, Robert W. The Role of Federal Military Forces in Domestic Disorders, 1789-1878. Army Historical Series. Washington, D.C.: Center of Military Studies, United States Army, 1988. Two chapters, "Trouble in Kansas: First Phase" and "The Last Phase in Kansas and Its Sequel," deal specifically and in some depth with the federal response to the Kansas troubles of 1854-1859 and with John Brown at Harpers Ferry.
Fisher, Glenn W. “Property Taxation in the Kansas Territory.” Kansas History 11 (Autumn 1988): 185-200. Despite the peculiar problems facing the first Kansas lawmakers (e.g., slavery and land titles), territorial legislators “followed the established practice of copying the laws from areas which had already achieved statehood” and “no effort was made to design a tax system” suited for the territory’s unique circumstances.
Ferguson, Samuel W. “With Albert Sidney Johnston's Expedition to Utah, 1857.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1911-1912 12 (1912): 303-312. Ferguson, a recent West Point graduate, spent some time in Kansas before moving with Johnston's dragoons against the Mormons.
Haskell, John G. “The Passing of Slavery in Western Missouri.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1901-1902 7 (1902): 28-39. Haskell, an important Kansas architect among other accomplishments, here offers an interpretation of national events and their impact on western Missouri and territorial Kansas.
"Indian Treaties and Councils Affecting Kansas.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1923-1925 16 (1925): 746-772. Originally compiled by Charles J. Kappler, these materials include dates, places, and participants, 1541-1873.
Lillard, T. M. “Beginnings of the Kansas Judiciary.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 10 (February 1941): 91-99. Lillard's KSHS presidential address covered the judicial branch from the first three federally appointed territorial district judges of 1855 to Thomas Ewing, Jr., the first chief justice of state supreme court.
"Lincoln in Kansas.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1901-1902 7 (1902): 536-552. Accounts of the future president’s December 1859 visit as printed in Elwood Free Press, Leavenworth Times, and elsewhere; included is a “synopsis of Lincoln's speech at Leavenworth.”
Madden, John L. “The Financing of a New Territory: The Kansas Territorial Tax Structure, 1854-1861.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 35 (Summer 1969): 155-164. Not surprisingly, the first territorial legislature created a tax system for Kansas that relied on the property tax and “was modeled generally after the Missouri tax code.”
Martin, George W. “The Territorial and Military Combine at Fort Riley.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1901-1902 7 (1902): 361-390. Fort Riley (established, 1853) and environs played a significant role in Kansas territorial and early statehood history.
Mattes, Merrill J., editor. “Patrolling the Sante Fe Trail: Reminiscences of John S. Kirwin.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 21 (Winter 1955): 569-587. Kirwin, a private in the Fourth U. S. Cavalry, was stationed at Fort Riley, 1859-1861.
Peck, Robert Morris. “Recollections of Early Times in Kansas Territory: From the Standpoint of a Regular Cavalryman.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1903-1904 8 (1904): 484-507. Peck was private in the First U.S. Cavalry assigned to Fort Leavenworth in 1857.
Potts, James B. “North of `Bleeding Kansas': The 1850s Political Crisis in Nebraska Territory.” Nebraska History 73 (Fall 1992): 110-118. Frequent mention of the Kansas struggle--a sharp contrast to Nebraska scene--and discussion of issues such as the annexation of the “South Platte” region to Kansas.
Seabrook, S. L. “Expedition of Col. E. V. Sumner Against the Cheyenne Indians, 1857.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1923-1925 16 (1925): 306-315. Based on recollections of S. Gunther, a soldier in Sumner's command.
Socolofsky, Homer E. Kansas Governors. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990. Biographical sketches of each of the six territorial governors and four acting governors, along with portraits and autographs.
Taylor, Morris F. “The Mail Station and the Military Camp on Pawnee Fork, 1859-1860.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 36 (Spring 1970): 27-39. Deals with the activities of the military at the Arkansas River post—later called Fort Larned—during these first years of the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush.
Thoburn, Joseph B. “Indian Fight in Ford County in 1859.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1911-1912 12 (1912): 312-329. Thoburn discusses Major Earl Van Dorn's expedition from Camp Radziminski (Indian Territory) and engagements with some Comanches in western Kansas.
Wilson, Paul E. “How the Law Came to Kansas.” Kansas History 15 (Spring 1992): 18-35. The focus is the pre-territorial years, before the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of May 1854, and the territorial period, 1854-1861.
"Bleeding Kansas"--Border Disputes and Warfare
Abbott, James B. “The Rescue of Dr. John W. Doy.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1886-1888 4 (1890): 312-323. In a paper delivered to the annual meeting of the State Historical Society in January 1889, Abbott detailed Doy's capture, along with thirteen fugitive slaves, in January 1859, and Doy's rescue from a St. Joseph, Missouri, jail the following July.
Botkin, Theodosius. “Among the Sovereign Squats.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1901-1902 7 (1902): 418-441. These recollections focus primarily on events in early Linn County, Kansas Territory.
Caldwell, Martha B. “The Stubbs.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 6 (May 1937): 124-131. “The Stubbs” was a free-state militia company organized at Lawrence in April 1855 as the Kansas Rifles; includes constitution and by-laws.
Cobb, Ronald Lee. “Guthrie Mound and the Hanging of John Guthrie.” Kansas History 5 (Autumn 1982): 177-183. “[Y]et another example of territorial justice,” according to the author, John Guthrie was lynched in northwest Bourbon County on February 5, 1860, perhaps because of his proslave views.
Connelley, William E. “Col. Richard J. Hinton.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1901-1902 7 (1902): 488-493. Hinton (1830-1901), an English journalist and supporter of John Brown, spent much time in Kansas from 1856 to 1862.
Connelley, William E. “The Lane-Jenkins Claim Contest.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1923-1925 16 (1925): 21-176. Famous territorial land dispute between James H. Lane and Gaius Jenkins led to the death of Jenkins at the hands of Lane; mostly reprints of letters and legal documents.
Connelley, William E. “The Lane Trail.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1913-1914 13 (1914): 268-279. The route to Kansas through Iowa and Nebraska established by James Henry Lane in 1856 for free-state settlers, with detailed maps.
Dickson, Charles Howard. “The True Story of the Branson Rescue.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1913-1914 13 (1914): 280-298. The story of a free-state settler of Douglas County who was arrested by Sheriff Jones and men in November 1855 allegedly because he had witnessed a proslave murder; rescuers included S. N. Wood and J. B. Abbott.
Elliott, R. G. “The Events of 1856. The Twenty-first of May.” Kansas Historical Collection 7 (1901-1902): 521-536. One of Lawrence’s first newspaper editors here analyzes the “slave extensionists” plot to control Kansas Territory and “the [sheriff] Jones invasion” of Lawrence (i.e., “sack of Lawrence”) that occurred on May 21, 1856.
Etcheson, Nicole. “Black Slavery, White Liberty.” North & South 3 (September 2000): 42-58. A fine, relatively brief look at the causes of strife and violence in “Bleeding Kansas.”
Etcheson, Nicole. “‘Labouring for the Freedom of This Territory’: Free-State Kansas Women in the 1850s.” Kansas History 21 (Summer 1998): 68-87. Using Ellen and Harriet Goodnow as two of her prime examples, Etcheson examines “the interplay of politics, domesticity, and western settlement in the lives of nineteenth-century women.”
Ewy, Marvin. “The United States Army in the Kansas Border Troubles, 1855-1856.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 32 (Winter 1966): 385-400. The author concludes that the army was relatively neutral in its efforts to maintain peace in “Bleeding Kansas.”
Fellman, Michael. “Rehearsal for the Civil War: Antislavery and Proslavery at the Fighting Point in Kansas, 1854-1856.” In Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists. Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman, eds. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 287-307.
Gardner, Theodore. “An Episode in Kansas History: The Doy Rescue.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1926-1928 17 (1928): 851-855. In 1858 Dr. John Doy of Lawrence was charged by a Missouri court with “abducting” slaves.
Gibbens, V. E., ed. “Letters on the War in Kansas in 1856.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 10 (November 1941): 369-379. The 1857 letters of John Lowrie, a free-state participant, reflect on his experiences in and around Lawrence after his return to Indiana.
Green, L. F. “James B. Abbott.” Kansas Historical Collections, 1897-1900 6 (1900): 225-231. Abbott (1818-1897) was a member of the group that freed Dr. John Doy from proslave captivity at St. Joseph, Missouri, July 23, 1859.
Griffith, G. W. E. “The Battle of Black Jack.” Kansas Historical Collections 16 (1923-1925): 524-528. Recollections of John Brown's 1856 victory over Captain Henry Clay Pate and his proslave company, near Baldwin City in southern Douglas County.
Herklotz, Hildegarde Rose. “Jayhawkers in Missouri, 1858-1863.” Missouri Historical Review 17 (April 1923): 266-284. This first in a series of three articles on Jayhawers in Missouri is subtitled “Conditions on the Kansas-Missouri Border, 1854-1858.”
Herklotz, Hildegarde Rose. “Jayhawkers in Missouri, 1858-1863.” Missouri Historical Review 17 (July 1923): 505-513. The subtitle of this second of three articles on Kansas Jayhawkers is “Missouri Prepares to Resist the Jayhawkers, 1860.”
Herklotz, Hildegarde Rose. “Jayhawkers in Missouri, 1858-1863.” Missouri Historical Review 18 (October 1923): 64-101. The activities of James H. Lane, “the greatest Jayhawking leader,” during the first two years of the war, 1861-1862, and in the wake of Quantrill's 1863 raid, are the author's focus here; she found the “Grim Chieftain” to be “an unscrupulous soldier of fortune, and a base and mischievous politician.”
Hougen, Harvey R. “The Marais des Cygnes Massacre and the Execution of William Griffith.” Kansas History 8 (Summer 1985): 74-94. Provides details of the pro-slave “massacre” of five freestaters on May 19, 1858, William Griffith's subsequent arrest, murder trial, conviction, and execution on October 30, 1863.
Hutchinson, William. “Claims for Losses of Kansas Settlers During the Troubles of 1855 and 1856.” Kansas Historical Collections, 1897-1900 6 (1900): 360-365. As with most such claims, satisfaction was slow and awards represented only about 30 percent of claims.
Isely, William H. “The Sharps Rifle Episode in Kansas History.” American Historical Review 12 (April 1907): 546-566. Isely focused here on “one phase of the dramatic” Kansas struggle: “the out put, source, and distribution of Sharps rifles, ‘Beecher Bibles,’ and other arms furnished to Kansas emigrants.”
Jackson, W. Turrentine. “The Army Engineers as Road Surveyors and Builders in Kansas and Nebraska, 1854-1858.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 17 (February 1949): 37-59. Often overlooked in the histories of western settlement and development is the role of the federal government, especially perhaps the military, as facilitator.
Johannsen, Robert W., editor. “A Footnote to the Pottawatomie Massacre, 1856.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 22 (Autumn 1956): 236-241. Reprinted here are two letters—written in 1856 and 1858 by Henry James, a brother in law--pertaining to the family and murder of Allen Wilkinson, “the most prominent” of John Brown's five victims.
Kellow, Margaret M.R. "‘For the Sake of Suffering Kansas’: Lydia Maria Child, Gender, and the Politics of the 1850s." Journal of Women’s History 5 (Fall 1993): 32-49. Child, who was a well-established New York author by the mid-1850s, came to see "the saving of Kansas for Free Soil as crucial to the fight against slavery" and "articulated her ‘zeal for Kansas’ in a story entitled ‘The Kansas Emigrant,’" first published in the fall of 1856.
Kiene, L. L. “The Battle of the Spurs and John Brown's Exit From Kansas.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1903-1904 8 (1904): 443-449. The “battle” of December 20, 1858, occurring during Brown’s flight to Canada just months before the Harpers Ferry raid.
Langsdorf, Edgar. “Thaddeus Hyatt in Washington Jail.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 9 (August 1940): 227-239. Hyatt, a New York capitalist who supported “free” Kansas both physically and financially, was jailed in March 1860 for contempt of Congress after he refused to testify in the John Brown/Harpers Ferry investigation.
Lowell, James H. “The Battle of the Spurs.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1919-1922 15 (1922): 598-599. An “Underground Railroad” incident involving John Brown, north of Horton, January 1859.
Lutz, Rev. John J. “Quantrill and the Morgan Walker Tragedy.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1903-1904 8 (1904): 324-331. Reportedly the first documented incident of William Clarke Quantrill’s treachery occurred in Jackson County, Missouri, December 1860.
Malin, James C. "The Hoogland Examination: The United States v. John Brown, Jr., et al." Kansas Historical Quarterly 7 (May 1938): 133-153. Reflects on events surrounding the Pottawatomie massacre and border conflict in southeast Kansas in 1856.
Malin, James C. “Identification of the Stranger at the Pottawatomie Massacre.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 9 (February 1940): 3-12. The Brown raid on pro-slave settlers in southern Franklin County, May 24-25, 1856, occurred while the Howard Committee (special congressional committee to investigate the Kansas troubles), and the first mention of the “stranger” appeared in the minority report affidavit of James Harris.
Malin, James C. “Judge Lecompte and the ‘Sack of Lawrence,’ May 21, 1856. Part One: The Contemporary Phase.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 20 (August 1953): 465-494; “Part Two: The Historical Phase.” 20 (November 1953): 553-597. For their own partisan reasons, both pro- and anti-slave factions unjustly, according to Malin, blamed the excesses of Sheriff Jones’ pose on U.S. District Court Judge Samuel Lecompte; Malin uses this incident as an opportunity to comment on numerous territorial issues and incidents.
McKivigan, John R., and Stanley Harrold, editors. Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999. Among other items of special interest to Kansans will be the essay by Kristen A. Tegtmeier, “The Ladies of Lawrence Are Arming!: The Gendered Nature of Sectional Violence in Early Kansas.”
Meerse, David E. “‘No Propriety in the Late Course of the Governor’: The Geary-Sherrard Affair Reexamined.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 42 (Autumn 1976): 237-262. Famous and controversial incident stemming from the fatal shooting (by associates of governor) of Douglas County Sheriff William Sherrard at Lecompton in February 1857 and subsequent resignation of territorial Governor John Geary.
Moody, Joel. “The Marais Des Cygnes Massacre.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1915-1918 13 (1918): 208-223. Includes a map showing the route Charles Hamilton took as he gathered the free-state victims of the Linn County atrocity, May 19, 1858.
"Notes on the Proslavery March Against Lawrence.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 11 (February 1942): 45-64. The Siege and sack of the Free-state stronghold in May 1856, as described in diary of proslave participant.
Oertell, Kristen Tegtmeier. “‘The free sons of the North’ vs. ‘The myridons of Border-Ruffianism’: What Makes a Man in Bleeding Kansas?” Kansas History 25 (Autumn 2002): 174-189. Oertell applies the interpretative lens of gender to the study of men and competing versions of manliness in territorial Kansas; free-state men, she concludes, “began to find the utility in cultivating an ideal of manliness that stood ready and willing to strike the first blow.”
Parker, Martha J., edited by Christine Reinhard. Angels of Freedom. Topeka, Kans.: Chapman Publishers, 1999. Angels of Freedom contains numerous biographical essays about people with some connection to the Underground Railroad in western Douglas County—people such as Joseph Gardner, Augustus Wattles, and Henry and Francis Hiatt—and a preface by the late Richard B. Sheridan.
Phillips, Christopher, “ ‘The Crime against Missouri’: Slavery, Kansas, and the Cant of Southernness in the Border West.” Civil War History 48 (March 2002): 60-81. Phillips examines the complex nature Misourians’ attitude toward slavery and its future in Kansas—a melding of Southern and Middle Western values—and the implications this had for “the social and ideological evolution of the very border region they occupied.”
Pierson, Michael D., editor. “‘A War of Extermination': A Newly Uncovered Letter by Julia Louisa Lovejoy, 1856.” Kansas History 16 (Summer 1993): 120-123. This letter is addressed from Lawrence, K.T., August 25, 1856, and appeared in the Concord, N.H., Independent Democrat.
Richmond, Robert W., editor. “A Free-Stater's `Letters to the Editor': Samuel N. Wood's Letters to Eastern Newspapers, 1854.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 23 (Summer 1957): 181-190. One of Kansas’ more colorful late-nineteenth-century characters, S. N. Wood (1825-1891) was, among other things, a journalist who settled first in Lawrence; the four letters were written during the summer of 1854.
Robinson, Sara T. D. “The Wakarusa War.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1907-1908 10 (1908): 457-471. Wife of Free-state leader and first state governor, Dr. Charles Robinson, recounts events of November and December 1855.
Robinson, W. Stitt, editor. “The Kiowa and Comanche Campaign of 1860 as Recorded in the Personal Diary of Lt. J. E. B. Stuart.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 23 (Winter 1957): 382-400. The campaign, as described here by the soon to be famous Confederate general, began at Ft. Riley, on May 15, 1860, under command of Maj. John Sedgwick.
Root, George A., editor. “Extracts from Diary of Captain Lambert Bowman Wolf.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 1 (May 1932): 195-210. Captain Wolf’s account of his pre-Civil War frontier experience on the Plains, 1856-1861, with Company K, First U.S. Cavalry.
Root, George A., editor. “The First Day's Battle at Hickory Point: From the Diary and Reminiscences of Samuel James Reader.” Kansas Historical Quarterly (November 1931): 28-49. Free-staters under James Lane confronted pro-slavery men under H. A. Lowe on September 13-14, 1856, near present Oskaloosa.
Schmeller, Erik S. “Propagandists for a Free-State Kansas: New York Times' Correspondents and Bleeding Kansas, 1856.” Heritage of the Great Plains 23 (Summer 1990): 7-14. Describes the activities and writings of men like William Hutchinson and Richard Hinton, special Times correspondents.
Schoonover, Thomas. “Foreign Relations and Kansas in 1858.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 42 (Winter 1976): 345-352. Bleeding Kansas’ impact on U.S.-Latin American relations; perceived threat caused by frustrated Southern expansionism.
SenGupta, Gunja. “‘A Model New England State’: Northeastern Antislavery in Territorial Kansas, 1854-1860.” Civil War History 39 (March 1993): 31-46. New England abolitionists sought more than the defeat of slavery; they wished to place their “uniquely northeastern tapestry of `Americanism' over the morally and economically vulnerable West.”
Sheridan, Richard B., editor. Freedom’s Crucible: The Underground Railroad in Lawrence and
Douglas County, Kansas, 1854-1865: A Reader. Lawrence: Division of Continuing Education, University of Kansas, 1998. This volume contains articles by UGRR participants such as John Bowles and Theodore Gardner and historical pieces by Sheridan, journalist Nancy Smith, and others.
Shively, S. J. “The Pottawatomie Massacre.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1903-1904 8 (1904): 175-187. Right or wrong, the author considers Brown’s May 24-25, 1856, massacre near Dutch Henry crossing a pivotal event.
Smith, Ed. R. “Marais des Cygnes Tragedy.” Kansas Historical Collections, 1897-1900 6 (1900): 365-370. Smith retells the story of the Linn County “massacre” of May 19, 1858, in which five free staters were murdered.
Smith, Nathan, editor. “Letters of a Free-State Man in Kansas, 1856.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 21 (Autumn 1954): 166-172. Henry H. Williams was a Pottawatomie Creek settler who disapproved of John Brown's activity.
Tannar, A. H. “Early Days in Kansas: The Marais Des Cygnes Massacre and the Rescue of Ben Rice.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1915-1918 13 (1918): 224-234. The author of this reminiscence settled in Linn County in 1857.
Watts, Dale. “How Bloody was Bleeding Kansas? Political Killings in Kansas Territory, 1854-1861.” Kansas History 18 (Summer 1995): 116-129. After carefully analyzing the evidence, the author concludes that political killings number about fifty, far less than many have indicated, and that the violence was perpetrated about equally by both sides—free state and proslave.
Watts, Dale E. “Plows and Bibles, Rifles and Revolvers: Guns in Kansas Territory.” Kansas History 21 (Spring 1998): 30-45. Although settlers were not nearly as well armed as popular mythology would have us believe and most did not shoulder their “muskets” in battle, firearms were among the “important tools” used by white Americans to settle the western frontier, and in Kansas “guns also carried a special symbolic meaning in the turmoil of Bleeding Kansas.”
Welch, G. Murlin, edited by Dan L. Smith. Border Warfare in Southeastern Kansas, 1856-1859. Pleasanton, Kans.: Linn County Publishers, 1977. This version of Welch’s study of the violent conflict in Linn and Bourbon counties, originally completed in 1938 as a master's thesis at the University of Kansas, contains additional notes and benefits from ongoing scholarship.
Wilder, Daniel W. “The Story of Kansas.” Kansas Historical Collections, 1897-1900 6 (1900): 336-342. Leavenworth journalist and free-state partisan D. W. Wilder here concentrates on the territorial period.
Woodward, Brinton W. “Reminiscences of September 14, 1856; Invasion of the 2700.” Kansas Historical Collections, 1897-1900 6 (1900): 77-83.Incidents at Lawrence and Governor John Geary's intervention.
Settlement and Development
Abbott, Francis A. “Some Reminiscences of Early Days on Deep Creek, Riley County.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1911-1912 12 (1912): 392-396. The author removed from cotton mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1855.
Barry, Louise. "The Emigrant Aid Company Parties of 1854." Kansas Historical Quarterly 12 (May 1943): 115-155. Information on six groups of settlers backed by New England company; parties that came under company auspices in 1855 covered in August issue (12:227-268).
Barry, Louise, editor. “Scenes in (And En Route To) Kansas Territory, Autumn, 1854: Five Letter by Wm. H. Hutter.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 35 (Autumn 1969): 312-336. Hutter, the editor of Easton, Pennsylvania, Argus, traveled as far west as Fort Riley.
Bay, J. Christian. A Heroine of the Frontier: Miriam Davis Colt in Kansas, 1856. Cedar Rapids, Iowa: Torch Press, 1941. Bay relied mostly on extracts from Miriam Colt's diaries to retell the story of her family’s tragic involvement with the Vegetarian Colony settlement.
Bremer, Jeff R. “‘A Species of Town-Building Madness’: Quindaro and Kansas Territory, 1856-1862.” Kansas History 26 (Autumn 2003): 156-171. Founded on the banks of the Missouri a few miles north of confluence of the Kansas River, Quindaro was to be a free-state portal, but, as illustrated here, it also was a “boom” town founded by speculators looking for a good financial investment that failed to really survive the “bust” that came just months after the town’s birth.
Brodhead, Michael J., and John D. Unruh, Jr., eds. “Isaiah Harris' `Minutes of a Trip to Kansas Territory' in 1855.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 35 (Winter 1969): 373-385. Like many territorial settlers, Harris removed to Kansas from Ohio for land, not as crusader for the free-state cause.
Brown, Robert L. The Great Pike's Peak Gold Rush. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Press, 1985. The “Rush to the Rockies” in 1859 came while that area was still part of Kansas territory.
Carey, James C. “Juniata: Gateway to Mid-Kansas.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 21 (Summer 1954): 87-94. Often called Dyer’s town for its founder, Juniata was a settlement and crossing on the Blue River in Pottawatomie County and an important point on the Ft. Leavenworth-Ft. Riley Military Road.
Carruth, William H. “The New England Emigrant Aid Company as an Investment Society.” Kansas Historical Collections, 1897-1900 6 (1900): 90-96. Shows financial role of the aid company.
Carruth, William H. “New England in Kansas.” New England Magazine 16 (March 1897): 3-21. Both financial investment in the Emigrant Aid Company and the Santa Fe Railroad proved to be were economic lemons for New Englanders.
Chappell, Phil E. “A History of the Missouri River.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1905-1906 9 (1906): 237-316. Focuses on river navigation and includes extensive list of “Missouri River Steamboats” with brief descriptions of many.
Clapsaddle, David K. “The Wet and Dry Routes of the Santa Fe Trail.” Kansas History 15 (Summer 1992): 98-115. Trail historian David Clapsaddle here focuses on the use of these alternate routes, crossing present Pawnee and Ford counties, in the late 1850s and 1860s.
Cobb, David Glenn, editor. “Letters of David R. Cobb, 1858-1864; Pioneer of Bourbon County.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 11 (February 1942): 65-71. The 1858 letter of a farmer, local office holder, and legislator, which describes his arrival and impression of Kansas Territory; three additional letters from Topeka in 1864 when he served in legislature.
Cole, Fannie E. “Pioneer Life in Kansas.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1911-1912 12 (1912): 353-358. The author settled on farm north of Topeka with her parents in 1855.
Colt, Miriam. Went to Kansas: Being a Thrilling Account of an Ill-fated Expedition to that Fairy Land, and Its Sad Results; Together with a Sketch of the Life of the Author. Watertown, N.Y.: L. Ingalls, 1862. Mrs. Colt's unsettling experiences in the Neosho Valley were disastrous for her family.
Connelley, William E. “Kansas City, Kansas: Its Place in the History of the State.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1919-1922 15 (1922): 181-191. Focuses on William Walker and Wyandot Nation.
Cordley, Richard, D.D. A History of Lawrence, Kansas from the First Settlement to the Close of the Rebellion. Lawrence: Lawrence Journal Press, 1895. The Rev. Cordley (1829-1904), pastor of Lawrence’s Plymouth Congregational Church, moved to Kansas Territory in 1857 and witnessed the events about which he wrote quite vividly, including Quantrill’s 1863 raid.
Denison, William W. “Early Days in Osage County.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1926-1928 17 (1928): 375-383. Denison's father moved his family to a claim near Burlingame in 1855; comments on Civil War service and Kansas GAR.
Farley, Alan W. “Annals of Quindaro: A Kansas Ghost Town.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 22 (Winter 1956): 305-320. Established in Wyandotte County, early in 1856, Quindaro was to be “a friendly portal for antislavery partisans to enter and leave Kansas.”
Gable, Frank M. “Memoirs of a Pioneer of Kansas.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1923-1925 16 (1925): 576-581. About the experiences of settlers in Leavenworth County, 1850s.
Gambone, Joseph G. “Economic Relief in Kansas, 1860-1861.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 36 (Summer 1970): 149-174. The severe drought of 1859 and 1860 caused wide-spread suffering, a short-term population decline, and was the focus of a major relief effort, organized and financed by many of the same individuals who had been supporting the free-state cause in the territory.
Gambone, Joseph G., editor. “Kansas--A Vegetarian Utopia: The Letters of John Milton Hadley, 1855-1856.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 38 (Spring 1972): 65-87. Hadley, an Indiana Quaker, participated in establishment of this colony on Neosho River in southeastern Kansas.
Gates, Paul Wallace. “A Fragment of Kansas Land History: The Disposal of the Christian Indian Tract.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 6 (August 1937): 227-240. Gates examines “the struggle for possession of the Christian [or Munsee] Indian tract” in northeastern Kansas, complicated by the fact that none of land was part of the public domain or legally available for settlement when white “squatter” onslaught began in 1854.
Gilbert, Benjamin Franklin. “Pike's Peak or Bust: A Summary of the Colorado Mining Rushes.” Journal of the West 4 (January 1965): 21-26. The early gold strikes were in the western part of the territory of Kansas.
Gill, Helen G. “The Establishment of Counties in Kansas.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1903-1904 8 (1904): 449-472. Includes numerous maps depicting dates of organization, 1855-1904.
Glick, George W. “The Drought of 1860.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1905-1906 9 (1906): 480-485. Includes a “Statement of General Relief Distributed” by county; Glick was the state’s first Democratic governor, 1883-1885, and a wealth Atchison businessman.
Glick, George W. “The Railroad Convention of 1860.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1905-1906 9 (1906): 467-480. C.K. Holliday and others called this convention “to plan and devise a scheme for securing a practical railroad system”; the article includes some convention minutes and a map showing suggested routes.
Godsey, Flora Rosenquist. “The Early Settlement and Raid on the `Upper Neosho'.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1923-1925 16 (1925): 451-463. Focuses on 1855 settlement in Lyon County, Kansas Territory, and the “free-state” raid on Neosho Rapids in 1856; a related document is “Letter of John C. Van Gundy to William E. Connelley.” Kansas Historical Collections, 1926-1928 17 (1928): 593-601.
Goodnow, Isaac T. “Personal Reminiscences and Kansas Emigration, 1855.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1886-1888 4 (1890): 244-253. In a “paper read before the meeting of the State Historical Society,” Professor Goodnow detailed the experiences of the group he came to K.T. with and the happenings around his claim near Manhattan.
Goodrich, DeWitt C. “The Exodus to Kansas in 1855.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1911-1912 12 (1912): 388-396. As a boy of ten, the author was part of the migration from the Eastern and Middle Western states.
Gower, Calvin W. “Aids to Prospective Prospectors: Guidebooks and Letters From Kansas Territory, 1858-1860.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 43 (Spring 1977): 67-77. The author reviews many of the more important of these interesting promotional publications, including The New Gold Mines of Western Kansas and Emigrants’ Guide to Pike’s Peak.
Gower, Calvin W. “Gold Fever in Kansas Territory: Migration to the Pike's Peak Gold Fields, 1858-1860.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 39 (Spring 1973): 58-74. Discusses impact of gold rush on the population of eastern Kansas at a time when much of Colorado was still part of Kansas Territory.
Gower, Calvin W. “Kansas Territory and the Pike's Peak Gold Rush: Governing the Gold Region.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 32 (Autumn 1966): 289-313. The focus here is on the difficulties of governing a region far removed from the centers of population and government.
Greene, Albert R. “The Kansas River--Its Navigation.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1905-1906 9 (1906): 317-358. Closely linked to and an important means of transportation through the territorial period; includes numerous excerpts from contemporary newspapers referencing steamboats.
Greene, Max. The Kansas Region: forests, prairie, desert, mountains, vale, and river. Descriptions of scenery, climate, wild productions, capabilities of soil, and commercial resources; interspersed with incidents of travel . . . to which are added directions as to routes, outfit for the pioneer, and sketches of desirable localities for present settlement. New York: Fowler and Wells, 1856.
Gunn, Otis Berthoude. New Map and hand-book of Kansas & the gold mines. Containing descriptions and statistics of the Indian tribes, settlement, soil productions, climate, roads, rail roads, telegraphs, mail routes, land districts, legislatures, etc. . . . Pittsburgh, Pa.: W. S. Haven, 1859.
Hale, Edward E. Kanzas and Nebraska: The history, geographical and physical characteristics, and political position of those territories; an account of the emigrant aid companies, and directions to emigrants. Boston: Phillips, Sampson & Co., 1854. Facsimile of 1854 edition, Black Heritage Library Collection, Freeport, N.Y., Books for Libraries Press, 1972.
Herring, Joseph B. “The Chippewa and Munsee Indians: Acculturation and Survival in Kansas, 1850s-1870.” Kansas History 6 (Winter 1983/84): 212-220. These two tribes settled in Franklin County, where small bands from each resisted removal, retained their lands, and merged into white society.
Hickman, Russell K. “Speculative Activities of the Emigrant Aid Company.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 4 (August 1935): 235-267. One element of the struggle for Kansas was, as Hickman pointed out, the “conflict between two economic systems,” and here he focused on Eli Thayer's company, incorporated in 1854, as capitalist venture that actually survived until 1897.
Hickman, Russell K. “The Vegetarian and Octagon Settlement Companies.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 2 (November 1933): 377-385. “Experimental” colonies established on Neosho River during the 1850s by the Vegetarian Kansas Emigration Company, which “was the first to adopt the Octagon plan of settlement.”
Lindquist, Emory. “The Swedes in Kansas Before the Civil War.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 19 (August 1951): 254-268. Although their numbers were quite small during this period of sectional strife, Swedes were familiar with Kansas and the beginnings of a sizable Swedish migration started as early as 1855.
Mackey, William H., Sr. “Looking Backward.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1907-1908 10 (1908): 642-654. Mackey removed to Kansas with a company of Ohio and Kentucky settlers in April 1855 and settled in the Fort Riley area.
Malin, James C. “Kansas: Some Reflections on Culture Inheritance and Originality [1854-1905].” Journal of the Central Mississippi Valley American Studies Association 2 (Fall 1961): 3-19. New Englanders were relatively few in number but had considerable influence on events of territorial Kansas.
McFarland, Gerald W. A Scattered People: An American Family Moves West. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. The family in question is the author's, which just happened to include John Brown and Rev. Samuel Adair of the Osawatomie area.
Mead, James R. “The Saline River Country in 1859.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1905-1906 9 (1906): 8-19. Mead, an active participant in the area’s settlement and development, recorded here some personal observations on the land and its inhabitants (especially Indians and buffalo).
Moffette, Joseph F. The Territories of Kansas and Nebraska. Being an Account of their Geography, Resources and Settlements, etc. New York: J. H. Colton and Company, 1855. An eighty-four-page guidebook with maps.
Moore, Ely. “The Lecompton Party Which Located Denver.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1901-1902 7 (1902): 446-452. Account of organizational meetings and individual participants who located, founded, and named the town-site that became Colorado's capital city (1857-1858).
Morrow, Robert. “Emigration to Kansas In 1856.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1903-1904 8 (1904): 302-315. The recollections of an early Lawrence resident.
Morse, Mrs. O. E. “Sketch of the Life and Work of Augustus Wattles.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1926-1928 17 (1928): 290-299. Wattles, a New Englander, settled in Linn County and became an active freestater.
Mudge, Melville R., ed. “Benjamin Franklin Mudge: A Letter From Quindaro.” Kansas History 13 (Winter 1990/1991): 218-222. Mudge's letter to his brother dated February 22, 1862, gives considerable attention to the movement of contrabands across the border.
Murphy, Lawrence R. Frontier Crusader—William F. M. Arny. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1972. Arny promoted territorial Kansas as a leader of a colony that settled in Anderson County and subsequently was an Organizer of the Kansas National Relief Committee to provide relief for victims of drought; Arny left Kansas for New Mexico in 1862.
Napier, Rita. “Economic Democracy in Kansas: Speculation and Townsite Preemption in Kickapoo.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 40 (Autumn 1974): 349-369. Established by Weston, Missouri, developers on the Kansas side of river in 1854, Kickapoo was one of many towns to vie for role as commercial center.
Pantle, Alberta, compiler and editor. “The Connecticut Kansas Colony: Letters of Charles B. Lines to the New Haven (Conn.) Daily Palladium.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 22 (Spring 1956): 1-50; concluded, 22 (Summer 1956):138-188. Lines was an organizer and leader of the Connecticut Kansas Colony, better known as the “Beecher Bible and Rifle Company, and his letters cover the period of their journey west in April through August 23, 1856.
Parker, Nathan H. The Kansas and Nebraska Hand-Book, For 1857-8. With a New and Accurate Map. Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1857. The author of similar handbooks for Iowa and Minnesota, Parker aimed to provide “practical information” to “serve as a Guide to the immigrant and traveller, giving full and reliable statements as to the past history, present condition, and future prospects of the ‘Garden of the West.’”
Quastler, I. E. “Charting a Course: Lawrence, Kansas, and Its Railroad Strategy, 1854-1872.” Kansas History 18 (Spring 1995): 18-33. For a time, civic and business leaders sought to make Lawrence the regional rail center with an aggressive promotion's plan, but they ultimately, and perhaps inevitably, lost the prize to Kansas City; this piece is largely drawn from the author's 1979 book-length study, The Railroads of Lawrence.
Redpath, James, and Richard J. Hinton. Hand-book to Kansas Territory and the Rocky Mountains' Gold Region; Accompanied by Reliable Maps and a Preliminary Treatise on the Pre-emption Laws of the U. S. New York: J. H. Colton, Publisher, 1859. Written and compiled by two principal journalist/actors in the early Kansas drama, “this Guide-Book” sought “to present a concise and impartial view of all important particulars” of interest to the emigrant.
Ropes, Hannah Anderson. Six Months in Kansas. By a Lady. Boston: J. P. Jewett, 1856. The author traveled from Massachusetts to Kansas Territory in September 1855, and pulished here the letters she wrote home during her trip to and stay in Lawrence.
"Selections from the Hyatt Manuscripts.” Kansas Historical Collections 1875-1878 1-2 (1881): 203-221. Thaddeus Hyatt was president of National Kansas Committee in 1856, and these “selections” are from collected statements by early settlers—only a few of which are reproduced here—regarding their experiences.
Sheridan, Richard B. “From Slavery in Missouri to Freedom in Kansas: The Influx of Black Fugitives and Contrabands Into Kansas, 1854-1865.” Kansas History 12 (Spring 1989): 28-47. In this critical look at the black experience in Civil War era Kansas, Sheridan discusses the emergence of a black community in Leavenworth, the Underground Railroad and that “small group of ardent abolitionist” who operated its stations, the “overpowering Negrophobic white majority” in Kansas before and after the war, the African American military experience, and much more.
Shields, Clara M. Fengel. “The Lyon Creek Settlement.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1915-1918 13 (1918): 143-170. Focuses on a German colony in Marion, Dickinson, and Geary counties located first in 1857; later settlers came from Wisconsin and directly from Germany.
Shortridge, James R. “People of the New Frontier: Kansas Population Origins, 1865.” Kansas History 14 (Autumn 1991): 186-205. With numerous maps, charts, and tables Shortridge analyzes the cultural differences among the territory’s population and its impact on the Kansas conflict.
Smith, Alice Strieby. “Through the Eyes of My Father: Fragments of Council Grove Frontier History.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1926-1928 17 (1928): 708-718. C. H. Strieby had come first to Council Grove in 1857 where he worked as a blacksmith.
Socolofsky, Homer E. “Wyandot Floats.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 36 (Autumn 1970): 241-304. Unassigned lands granted to thirty-five Wyandot chiefs and leading men to assure approval of the treaty of removal in 1842; these “floating grants” were not usable until 1855 and thereafter most were used on Kansas town sites of choice agricultural lands.
"Some Letters.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1915-1918 14 (1918): 94-122. Reprinted here are twenty wonderful letters from the collections of the KSHS written by a young John J. Ingalls to his father; the first is date Sumner, K.T., October 5,1858, and the last Topeka, May 15, 1861.
Spear, Stephen Jackson. “Reminiscences of the Early Settlement of Dragoon Creek, Wabaunsee County.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1913-1914 13 (1914): 345-363. Removed from Iowa to establish Kansas farm in September 1857.
Staudenraus, P. J. “Immigrants or Invaders? A Document.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 24 (Winter 1958): 394-398. The document is a letter dated September 26, 1856, and is related to Free-state colonization efforts and activities of Edward Daniels of Ripon, Wisconsin.
Stewart, Donald W. “Memoirs of Watson Stewart: 1855-1860.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 18 (November 1950): 376-404. Settled first in ill-fated vegetarian colony in Allen County.
Turk, Eleanor L. “The Germans of Atchison, 1854-1859: Development of an Ethnic Community.” Kansas History 2 (Autumn 1979): 146-156. An early sizeable ethnic community.
Veale, George W. “Coming In and Going Out.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1909-1910 11 (1910): 5-12. The author's KSHS presidential address was a reminiscence of his early experiences, especially in 1850s Quindaro.
White, Mrs. S. B. “My First Days in Kansas.” Kansas Historical Collections 11 (1909-1910): 550-560. With her lawyer husband, Mrs. White settled at Junction City in 1855.
Whiting, Albe B. “Some Western Border Conditions in the 50's and 60's.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1911-1912 12 (1912): 1-10. The KSHS presidential address of an early settler in the area northwest of Fort Riley commenting primarily on Indian raids.
Religion
Abing, Kevin J. “Before Bleeding Kansas: Christian Missionaries, Slavery, and the Shawnee Indians in Pre-Territorial Kansas, 1844-1854.” Kansas History 24 (Spring 2001): 54-70. Abing argues that “men of God,” such as Thomas Johnson, who labored to “civilize” the Shawnees, unleashed and perpetuated sectional turmoil among the Indians in their charge; they inadvertently laid the groundwork for Bleeding Kansas.
Coffin, William H. “Settlement of the Friends in Kansas.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1901-1902 7 (1902): 322-361. Quaker settlement during the territorial period is the focus here.
Currey, Cecil. “Quakers in `Bleeding Kansas'.” Friends History Association Bulletin 50 (Autumn 1961): 96. This article was based on Currey’s 1946 University of Kansas master's thesis.
Harrell, David Edwin, Jr. “Pardee Butler: Kansas Crusader.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 34 (Winter 1968): 386-408. Born in New York and raised in Ohio, Butler (1816-1888) was a Disciples of Christ minister who moved to Kansas Territory in the spring of 1855 to work for the free-state cause, as well as to acquire some cheap land.
Haupt, William Henry. “History of the American Church, Known in Law as the Protestant Episcopal Church, in the State of Kansas.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1923-1925 16 (1925): 353-402. A history of the diocese from 1837-1869.
Hickman, Russell K. “Lewis Bodwell, Frontier Preacher: The Early Years.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 12 (August 1943): 269-299; concluded, 12 (November 1943): 349-365. Religion and the Congregational church were a vital element in the territorial struggle from its founding at Lawrence in 1854; Bodwell (1827-1894) was commissioned by the denomination in 1856 to establish an independent Topeka congregation, where served until 1860.
Howard, Victor B. “Presbyterians, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the Election of 1856.” Journal of Presbyterian History 49 (Summer 1971): 133-156. Whether New School and Old School, most churchmen sought to steer clear of sectional issues, but many believed “the peculiar institution suppressed freedom of speech, press, and religious expression wherever it existed”; thus, New School Presbyterians tended to support “the Republican Party’s position of opposing any expansion of slavery in the territories.
"Letters of New England Clergymen.” Kansas Historical Collections 2 (1879-1880): 193-202. Includes a listing of the letters in Kansas State Historical Society holdings donated by Emigrant Aid Company.
Lindquist, Emory, editor. “The Letters of the Rev. Samuel Young Lum, Pioneer Kansas Missionary, 1854-1858.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 25 (Spring 1959): 39-67; Part II, 25 (Summer 1959): 172-196. A Congregational minister commissioned by American Home Missionary Society (recipient of these letters), Lum had close ties to New England Emigrant Aid Company and helped start Lawrence and Topeka churches.
Lindquist, Emory. “Religion in Kansas During the Era of the Civil War.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 25 (Autumn 1959): 313-333; concluded, 25 (Winter 1959): 407-437. As Lindquist reminds us, “religion played a vital role in a time of uncertainty, insecurity, and strife,” so not surprisingly, as he demonstrates for the years 1854-1865, it was a major force in early Kansas.
McLoughlin, Virginia, editor. “Establishing a Church on the Kansas Frontier: The Letters of the Rev. O. L. Woodford and His Sister Henrietta, 1857-1859.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 37 (Summer 1971): 153-191. Letters to American Home Missionary Society, family and friends, and eastern newspapers; mostly from Grasshopper Falls (later Valley Falls).
Rice, Cyrus R. “Experiences of a Pioneer Missionary.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1913-1914 13 (1914): 298-318. The author recounts his work and acquaintances in Kansas Territory while serving as Methodist Episcopal missionary to Pottawatomies, 1855-1860.
Ross, Edith Connelley. The Old Shawnee Mission: The Pioneer Institution of Christian Civilization in the West. Topeka, Kans.: State Printing Plant, 1928.
SenGupta, Gunja. “Servants for Freedom: Christian Abolitionists in Territorial Kansas, 1854-1858.” Kansas History 16 (Summer 1993): 200-213. Focuses on the beliefs and work of a handful of “radical” abolitionist missionaries affiliated with the American Missionary Association.
Speer, John. “Patriotism and Education in the Methodist Church.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1901-1902 7 (1902): 494-500. Accounts of early Methodist contacts in the Kansas area by an early Lawrence journalist and free-state activist.
Spencer, Rev. Joab. “The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in Kansas--1854 to 1906.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1911-1912 12 (1912): 135-182. An early minister examines the origins of “Church South” organized in 1845 and its subsequent work in Kansas with a brief references to many of its ministers in the territory and state.
Stone, Rev. Hiram. “Memoirs of a Pioneer Missionary and Chaplain in the United States Army.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1913-1914 13 (1914): 319-344. A Protestant Episcopal missionary in and around Leavenworth, 1856-1868.
Woods, Fred E., and Melvin L. Bashore. “On the Outskirts of Atchison: The Imprint of Latter-day Saint Transmigration at Mormon Grove.” Kansas History 25 (Spring 2002): 38-51. The authors recount an interesting story of several thousand Mormon emigrants who, en route to Utah in the mid-1850s, “found a hospitable home on the Kansas side of the Missouri River. In the main, it is the story of indulgence, of giving and receiving between two very different communities of frontier people.”
Social Life and Customs
Berneking, Carolyn, editor. “A Look at Early Lawrence: Letters From Robert Gaston Elliott.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 43 (Autumn 1977): 282-296. A founder, along with Josiah Miller, of Kansas Free State newspaper (1854), Elliott wrote these letters to his sister and fiancé, both back in Indiana, between May 8, 1857, and February 28, 1866.
Bisbey, J. M., et al. “Pioneering in Wabaunsee County.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1909-1910 11 (1910): 594-613. A collection of papers focusing on transportation, the Santa Fe Trail, the land office, militia service, and many routine activities of 1850s and 1860s settlers.
Butler, Pardee. Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler, with Reminiscences by His Daughter, Mrs. Rosetta B. Hastings, and Additional Chapters by Eld. John Boggs and Eld. J. B. McCleery. Cincinnati, Ohio: Standard Publishing Co., 1889. A frontier minister, Butler first came to Kansas Territory in 1855 and here, via his daughter, provides his own story and the remembered history of other major territorial events.
Caldwell, Martha B. “When Horace Greeley Visited Kansas in 1859.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 9 (May 1940): 115-140. The article includes long passages from Greeley's letters to his New York Tribune describing the territory in May 1859; among other things, Greeley attended the Kansas Republican Party’s organizational convention in Osawatomie.
Dolbee, Cora. “The First Book on Kansas: The Story of Edward Everett Hale's Kanzas and Nebraska.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 2 (May 1933): 139-181. A 256-page volume published in Boston (September 1854) less than six months after opening of territory.
Dolbee, Cora. “The Second Book on Kansas: An Account of C. B. Boynton and T. B. Mason's A Journey Through Kansas; With Sketches of Nebraska.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 4 (May 1935): 115-148. Published in Cincinnati, 1855; like the first, essentially propaganda for free-state settlement.
Dolbee, Cora. “The Third Book on Kansas: An Interpretation of J. Butler Chapman's History of Kansas and Emigrant's Guide.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 8 (August 1939): 238-278. Published in Akron, Ohio (January 1855), this slim, 116-page volume is unusual in its presentation of both sides in Kansas controversy; story of author's observations as participant in settlement process.
"Letters of John and Sarah Everett, 1854-1864: Miami County Pioneers.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 8 (February 1939): 3-34; and three addional parts: 8:143-174, 279-310, and 350-383. The correspondence reflects on frontier life and the tumultuous political events involving two reform minded New Yorkers who settled near Osawatomie.
Francis, Clara. “The Coming of Prohibition to Kansas.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1919-1922 15 (1922): 192-227. The examination starts with developments from the first territorial prohibitory laws to constitutional prohibition of 1880.
Gambone, Joseph G. “Starving Kansas: The Great Drought and Famine of 1859-60.” American West 8 (July 1971): 30-35. Although most historians had focused on Kansas’s political turmoil, it was the other “scourge”—severe drought and famine of 1859-1860—that “nearly depopulated the region”—“Starving Kansas” replaced “Bleeding Kansas.” Much attention given to the personal efforts of Thaddeus Hyatt, William F. M. Arny, and Samuel C. Pomeroy.
Greeley, Horace. An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. The celebrated editor of the New York Tribune took his own advice in 1859 and traveled, mostly by stagecoach, across the western United States; the reports he made of this experience became An Overland Journey, first published in New York in 1860, which contains several lengthy letters written from and about Kansas Territory.
Griffin, C. S. “The University of Kansas and the Years of Frustration, 1854-1864.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 32 (Spring 1966): 1-32. From his book length history of K.U., this article covers the decade before the university became a state school and its New England/Free-state origins.
Hickman, Russell K. “A Little Satire on Emigrant Aid: Amasa Soule and the Descandum Kansas Improvement Company.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 8 (November 1939): 342-349. Founded in November 1854, the “Descandum” Kansas Improvement Company was “a burlesque upon the Kansas mania then prevalent” throughout New England; its only activity was “the sending of Soule to Kansas; the article includes the company’s constitution and the “Kansas Letter of Amasa Soule.”
Hinton, Richard J. “Pens that Made Kansas Free.” Kansas Historical Collections, 1897-1900 6 (1900): 371-382. Himself an early journalist and participant in the territorial struggles, Hinton discussed national as well as Kansas editors who vigorously worked for a free state.
Hutchinson, William. “Sketches of Kansas Pioneer Experience.” Kansas Historical Collection 7 (1901-1902): 390-410. Hutchinson, an early Lawrence settler and free state activist, concentrates on his territorial experiences.
"Letters of Hugh M. Moore, 1856-1860.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 10 (May 1941): 115-123. With his brother J. Frank Moore, Hugh Moore, as real estate salesman and speculator, removed from Pennsylvania to Topeka in 1857.
Lovejoy, Julia Louisa. “ ‘Letters From Kanzas.’ ” Kansas Historical Quarterly 11 (February 1942): 29-44. The four letters reprinted here describe the Lovejoys’—Julia Louisa (1812-1882) and Rev. Charles H.—journey west to their initial settlement at Manhattan; originally published in Independent Democrat, Concord, New Hampshire, they are dated March 13 to August 1, 1855.
Lovejoy, Julia Louisa. “Letters of Julia Louisa Lovejoy, 1856-1864: Part One, 1856.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 15 (May 1947): 127-142; four additional parts: “Part Two, 1857,” 15 (August 1947): 277-319; “Part Three, 1858,” 15 (November 1947): 368-403; “Part Four, 1859,” 16 (February 1948): 40-75; and “Part Five, 1860-1864,”16 (May 1948): 175-211. After a relatively short stay in the Manhattan area, the Lovejoys moved to Douglas County in 1856 from where Lovejoy continued her regular correspondence with the Independent Democrat, Concord, New Hampshire, and several other newspapers back east.
Malin, James C. “Emergency Housing at Lawrence, 1854.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 21 (Spring 1954): 34-49. Includes an early sketch of Lawrence (“J. E. Rice’s “Lawrence, Kansas, A.D. 1854-55”) and its built environment, along with some lengthy, contemporary quotations about housing types and materials.
Malin, James C. “Housing Experiments in the Lawrence Community, 1855.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 21 (Summer 1954):95-121. In this essay, Malin goes beyond the “emergency” stage to examine the “next phase” of house building in Lawrence, focusing on the cultural differences of the settlers, their architectural traditions, and the limitations and opportunities of the geographical setting.
Meredith, William John. “The Old Plum Grove Colony: In Jefferson County, 1854-1855.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 7 (November 1938): 339-375. This community of settlers, originally from the upper South, moved from Clay County, Missouri, to “a new Promised Land” in Kansas Territory that offered “room enough for generations to come.”
Moffatt, Isaac. “The Kansas Prairie: Or, Eight Days on the Plains.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 6 (May 1937): 147-174. The author’s account of an 1859 trip to Kansas from Philadelphia.
Peterson, John M., editor. “From Border War to Civil War: More Letters of Edward and Sarah Fitch, 1855-1863, Part I.” Kansas History 20 (Spring 1997): 2-21; “. . . Part II,” 20 (Summer 1997): 68-85. Kansas History first published the “Letters of Edward and Sarah Fitch” in the spring and summer of 1989; an additional cache of letters, shedding light on “many of the ordinary trials and successes of settlers in a strange and newly-settled land” and revealing much about political machinations in the troubled Kansas Territory, are presented here.
Simons, W. C. “Lawrence Newspapers in Territorial Days.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1926-1928 17 (1928): 325-339. The first papers were Herald of Freedom and Kansas Free State, October 1854.
Snow, F. H. “The Beginnings of the University of Kansas.” Kansas Historical Collections, 1897-1900 6 (1900): 70-75. One of the college’s first educational leaders discusses its background from 1855 to "opening of the university, September 12, 1866."
Speer, John. “Incidents of the Pioneer Days.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1891-1896 5 (1896): 131-141. Speer, an important free-state leader and editor in Lawrence, Kansas Territory, himself, Speer concentrates on events of the territorial era, including a statement on the Leavenworth Constitution.
Stern, A. Kenneth, and Janelle L. Wagner. “The First Decade of Educational Governance in Kansas, 1855-1865.” Kansas History 24 (Spring 2001): 36-53. Common or public school education has long been important to Americans, but they know little about its; here this issue is explored for the territory and state of Kansas.
Whitfield, Steven. Kansas: Obsolete Notes and Scripts. N.p.: Krause Publications, 1980. Details currency issued by banks within the territory.
Biographies and Autobiographies
John Brown (1800-1859)
Bondi, August. “With John Brown in Kansas.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1903-1904 8 (1904): 275-289. An Austrian, Jewish immigrant who came to the territory in 1855, road with "Captain" Brown, and thus offers a first-hand account of “his heroic deeds.”
Gridley, Karl L., “John Brown and Lawrence, Kansas Territory, 1855-1859: A Militant Abolitionist’s Relationship with the Free State Fortress.” Embattled Lawrence: Conflict &Community, ed.by Dennis Domer & Barbara Watkins.
Hinton, Richard J. John Brown and His Men: With Some Account of the Roads They Traveled to Reach Harper's Ferry. New York: Funk, 1894. This was an admiring biography by an early journalist and participant with Brown and others in the territorial Kansas struggles.
Malin, James C. John Brown and the Legend of Fifty-Six. Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1942. This classic tome was, according to the originally dust-jacket description, “not a biography of John Brown but a penetrating analysis of old and new historical evidence throwing a brilliant searchlight on Brown’s character and his role in the anti-slavery movement.
Malin, James C. “The John Brown Legend in Pictures: Kissing the Negro Baby.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 8 (November 1939): 339; continued, 9 (November 1940): 339-342. The articles include several versions of the painting of this legendary incident, which, according to the Whittier poem, occurred on the way to the gallows.
Moore, Ely, Jr. “The Naming of Osawatomie, and Some Experiences With John Brown.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1911-1912 12 (1912): 338-346. The son of a special agent to Indians (1853) and early Lecompton official here argued “Brown's brain was unbalanced.”
Morse, O. E. “An Attempted Rescue of John Brown From Charlestown, Va., Jail.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1903-1904 8 (1904): 213-226. The plot, concocted by Kansans Richard J. Hinton, James Hanway, and James Montgomery, was reportedly halted by Brown himself; Morse’s essay followed by comments from D. R. Anthony and D. W. Wilder.
Oates, Stephen B. To Purge This Land With Blood: A Biography of John Brown. New York: Harper and Row, 1970. Oates’ well-received biography of “one of the most controversial figures in American history,” describes Brown as “a dedicated emancipationalist and friend of the Negro . . . who instigate the Pottawatomie massacre” and hoped to incite a slave insurrection with his attack on Harpers Ferry.
Quarles, Benjamin, ed. “John Brown Writes to Blacks.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 41 (Winter 1975): 454-467. Reprinted here are several letters from John Brown and John Brown, Jr., to Frederick Douglass’ Paper, beginning in December 1851, and ending in April 1856.
Sherar, R. H. “John Brown and Border Warfare.” Kansas Magazine 4 (September 1910): 52-63. The author, “one of the five survivors of the Battle of Osawatomie,” holds Brown not responsible for the Pottawatomie massacre, since he was allegedly ten miles away on that fateful night; the Battle of Osawatomie was a different story, however.
Villard, Oswald G. John Brown, Eighteen Hundred to Eighteen Fifty-Nine: A Biography Fifty Years After. New York: Peter Smith Publishers, Inc., 1929. In his classic, early biography, Villard agreed that a hundred myths about the Kansas period of his life had attached themselves to John Brown.
Cyrus K. Holliday (1826-1900)
Baldinger, Wallace S. “The Amateur Plans a City.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 12 (February 1943): 3-13. Cyrus K. Holiday, well-remembered for his role in establishing the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, was representative of the many “novice” city planners of his era; Holiday, of course, helped found and plan Topeka in 1854 and 1855.
Barnes, Lela. “Letters of Cyrus Kurtz Holliday, 1854-1859.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 6 (August 1937): 241-294. C. K. Holiday penned these letters to his wife Mary, who did not initially accompany her husband to Kansas Territory, describing varied activities—political and business related—during territorial period.
Seely, Frederick F. “The Early Career of C. K. Holliday: A Founder of Topeka and of the Santa Fe Railroad.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 27 (Summer 1961): 193-200. The focus here is on Holliday’s college and early business ventures in Pennsylvania before his 1854 move to Kansas Territory.
Treadway, William. Cyrus K. Holliday: A Documentary Biography. Topeka: Kansas State Historical Society, 1979. Extensive excerpts from letters written by Holliday, a founder of Topeka and the Santa Fe Railroad.
James H. Lane (1814-1866)
Castel, Albert. “Jim Lane of Kansas.” Civil War Times Illustrated 12 (April 1973): 22-29. A brief but useful biographical essay that conveys a sense of Lane’s complex personality, a troubling characteristic for his contemporaries and for historians, and asserts: “Among demagogues of his time . . . [Lane] was pre-eminent in energy, persistence, and sheer gall.”
Connelley, William E. James Henry Lane: The “Grim Chieftain" of Kansas. Topeka, Kans.: Crane & Company, Publishers, 1899. Connelley left no doubt about how he viewed the enigmatic Lane: “There were giants in those days; and in the ‘imminent deadly breach’ towered the form of James Henry Lane above them all.”
Miner, Craig. "Lane and Lincoln: A Mysterious Connection." Kansas History 24 (Autumn 2001): 186-199. Although Abraham Lincoln and James H. Lane were two very different historical personalities, Miner found some interesting similarities, and throughout the Civil War to the surprise of many and the chagrin of some, Senator Lane wielded considerable influence over the Lincoln administration.
Speer, John. Life of Gen. James H. Lane, "The Liberator of Kansas": With Corroborative Incidents of Pioneer History. Garden City, Kans.: J. Speer, printer, 1896. A Lane intimate, Speer intentionally provided the subtitle for this biography.
Spring, Leverett W. “The Career of a Kansas Politician.” American Historical Review 4 (October 1898): 80-104. Spring’s subject was James Henry Lane, Kansas firebrand and U.S. senator, 1861-1866.
Stephenson, Wendell H. The Political Career of General James H. Lane. Topeka: Kansas State Historical Society, 1930. Uses Lane to show that Kansas “was Western to the core and in some features radical, new and revolutionary.”
Charles Robinson (1818-1894)
Blackmar, Frank W. “Charles Robinson.” Kansas Historical Collections, 1897-1900 6 (1900):187-202. Robinson was, of course, an active participant during the territorial years, being an agent for the New England Emigrant Aid Company, a leader of the Free State Party, governor of Kansas under the Topeka Constitution of 1856, and eventually Kansas’s first state governor.
Blackmar, Frank W. The Life of Charles Robinson, The First Governor of Kansas. Topeka, Kans.: Crane, 1902. This is a relatively lengthy, comprehensive biography that contains numerous quotations from Robinson’s letters and speeches.
Robinson, Charles. The Kansas Conflict. 1892. Reprint. Lawrence, Kans.: Journal Publishing Co., 1898. A major political player in Kansas Territory throughout the “conflict,” Robinson was elected governor under the Topeka and Wyandotte constitutions; for an intriguing discussion of how the book was received and promoted, see Julie Courtwright, “‘A Goblin That Drives Her Insane’: Sara Robinson and the History Wars of Kansas, 1894-1911,” Kansas History 25 (Summer 2002).
Wilson, Don W. Governor Charles Robinson of Kansas. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1975. A relatively brief, but comprehensive biography based on his doctoral dissertation entitled “Charles Robinson: First Governor of Kansas” (University of Cincinnati, 1972).
Other Biographies and Autobiographies
Clark, John G. "Mark W. Delahay: Peripatetic Politician; A Historical Case Study." Kansas Historical Quarterly 25 (Autumn 1959): 301-312. The Democratic editor of Leavenworth Kansas Territorial, Delahay championed a middle way between abolition and pro-slave positions; he soon identified with the Free-state movement.
Connelley, William E. “Daniel W. Wilder, The Father of Kansas History and Literature.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1923-1925 16 (1925): 1-21. Biographical essay of pioneer journalist whose "Annals" were a monumental contribution to Kansas historiography.
Etcheson, Nicole. “Novelists Revisit Territorial Kansas: A Review Essay.” Kansas History 21 (Winter 1998-1999): 276-282. Etcheson, a historian of antebellum America and the Kansas territorial conflict, examines the treatment this subject receives in two novels published in 1998: Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks, which explores the life of John Brown, and The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton by Jane Smiley.
Fellman, Michael. “Julia Louisa Lovejoy Goes West.” Western Humanities Review 31 (Summer 1977): 227-242. Examines the “range and depth of Julia's experiences” in Kansas Territory; she was a New England emigrant dedicated to abolitionism who corresponded regularly with several Eastern newspapers.
Gambone, Joseph G., editor. “The Forgotten Feminist of Kansas: The Papers of Clarina I. H. Nichols, 1854-1885.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 39 (Spring 1973): 12-57; and seven subsequent issues: 39 (Summer 1973):220-261; 39 (Autumn 1973):392-444; 39 (Winter 1973):515-563; 40 (Spring 1974):72-135; 40 (Summer 1974):241-292; 40 (Autumn 1974):410-459; and 40 (Winter 1974):503-562. Nichols, a recognized reform leader in Vermont, moved to Lawrence in 1854 and remained an advocate for equal political and civil rights for women in Kansas until moving to California in 1871.
Hay, Robert. “The Great Seal of Kansas.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1903-1904 8 (1904): 289-299. Background, development, and role of John Ingalls and others; included illustration.
Henry, Stuart. “Solon O. Thacher.” Kansas Historical Collections, 1897-1900 6 (1900): 206-219. This is a useful biographical sketch of a leading journalist and attorney, who settled in Lawrence in the late 1850s and represented that town at the Wyandotte Constitutional Convention.
Johannsen, Robert W. “John Calhoun: The Villain of Territorial Kansas.” The Trail Guide 3 (September 1958): 1-19. Calhoun was the pro-slave, surveyor-general of the Kansas and Nebraska territories.
Kimbrow, Harriet, ed., and Ruth Gates Lindenmeyer, trans. “‘A Genuine Western Man Never Drinks Tea': Gustavus French Merriam's Letters from Kansas in 1860.” Kansas History 8 (Autumn 1985): 162-175. Two letters written from Gardner, K.T., June 5 and June 17, 1860, reflecting on a variety of people, places, and things in the territory, and describing a Shawnee “dance” in considerable detail.
Langsdorf, Edgar. “S. C. Pomeroy and the New England Emigrant Aid Company, 1854-1858.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 7 (August 1938): 227-245; concluded 7 (November 1938): 379-398. Pomeroy, who became one of Kansas’s first U.S. senators in 1861, was a company agent during those critical first years of territorial settlement.
Langsdorf, Edgar, and R. W. Richmond, editors. “Letters of Daniel R. Anthony, 1857-1862.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 24 (Spring 1958): 6-30; three additional parts, 24 (Summer 1958): 198-226; 24 (Autumn 1958): 351-370; 24 (Winter 1958): 458-475. One of Kansas’s most colorful characters, the pugnacious D. R. Anthony was the editor of the Leavenworth Conservative and brother of suffragist Susan B. Anthony.
Litvin, Martin. The Journey: A Biography of August M. Bondi the American-Jewish Freedom Fighter Who Rode With John Brown in Kansas. Galesburg, Ill.: Galesburg Historical Society, 1981. Born at Vienna, Austria, in July 1833, Bondi served in the Fifth Kansas Cavalry after riding with Brown and then spent much of the postwar years in Saline County where he died in September 1907.
Malin, James C., editor. “F. H. Hodder's ‘Stephen A. Douglas.’” Kansas Historical Quarterly 8 (August 1939): 227-237. Reprint of Hodder's first contribution (1899) to “Little Giant” historiography in which he stressed Douglas’ responsibility for the Compromise of 1850 and his overriding concern with the organization of western territories.
Parrish, William E. David Rice Atchison of Missouri: Border Politician. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1961. Recently retired from the U.S. Senate (1843-1855), Atchison took an active interest in the organization of Kansas Territory, riding on some occasions in 1855 and 1856 with the so-called “Border Ruffians.”
Sanborn, Victor Channing. “Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, A.B., 1831-1917.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1915-1918 13 (1918): 58-70. Followed by "Personal Reminiscences" by W. E. Connelley of the New Englander who was "one of the early friends of Kansas," as well as a friend, supporter, and later biographer of John Brown.
Smith, Duane A. "The Kansas Days of Horace Tabor." Kansas Historical Quarterly 39 (Autumn 1973): 367-378. A free-state settler in 1855, Tabor farmed and served in Kansas legislature until 1859; then he moved to Colorado where he made millions in the gold fields and pursued a career in state and national politics.
Taft, Robert. “The Appearance and Personality of Stephen A. Douglas.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 21 (Spring 1954): 8-33. Includes catalogue of Douglas photos with twelve portraits reproduced.
Wells, Eugene T. “Jefferson Davis and the Kansas Territory.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 22 (Winter 1956): 354-357. Davis, soon-to-be president of the Confederacy, was secretary of war (1853-1857) during the most intense and bloodiest years of Kansas struggle.
Williams, Burton J. “John James Ingalls: The Sumner Years.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 33 (Winter 1967): 409-442. As a young lawyer in 1857, Ingalls settled in this soon to be extinct Atchison County river town.
General and Historiographical Works
Andreas, Alfred Thayer [with William G. Cutler]. The History of the State of Kansas. Two Volumes. Chicago, A. T. Andreas, 1883. Reprinted in 1976 with an index of names from the fifteen thousand sketches found in the original volumes. Important for its early county and community histories and coverage of major territorial Kansas incidents.
Berwanger, Eugene H. The Frontier Against Slavery: Western Anti-Negro Prejudice and the Slavery Extension Controversy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967. This important study highlighted the fact that racial prejudice “was a factor in the development of antislavery feeling in the ante-bellum United States” and the “major concern” of most westerners “was not slavery, per se, but the expansion of the institution.”
Corder, Eric. Prelude to Civil War: Kansas-Missouri, 1854-61. New York: Crowell-Collier Press, 1970. In this relatively brief, popular survey (it includes a bibliography but no source notes), Corder concluded that the Kansas conflict was “cataclysmic” and “the war that bean there [in 1854] did not end until . . . April 9, 1865.”
Davis, Kenneth S. Kansas: A Bicentennial History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1976; republished as Kansas: A History, 1984. This was the Kansas volume in the American Association of State and Local History’s bicentennial project, “The States and the Nation Series.” Nearly half of Davis’s 200-plus pages are devoted to Kansas before, during, and immediately after the territorial period.
Etcheson, Nicole. Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. Due out in January 2004, Etcheson’s Bleeding Kansas is, according to Lincoln scholar and University of Nebraska history professor Kenneth Winkle, “an ambitious, important, long-overdue, and very successful revisionist history of the organization of Kansas Territory."
Goodrich, Thomas. War to the Knife: Bleeding Kansas, 1854-1861. Mechanicsburg, Penn.: Stackpole Books, 1998. As in his other work on the border wars, Goodrich focuses on the nature of the violence on the Kansas-Missouri border during the territorial period and the fact that it was perpetrated by a small radical fringe on both sides.
Griffin, C. S. “The University of Kansas and the Sack of Lawrence: A Problem of Intellectual Honesty.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 34 (Winter 1968): 409-426. An interesting historiographical look at the May 21, 1856, sacking perpetrated by Douglas County Sheriff Samuel Jones that centers around a late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century claim against the U.S. government.
"Kansas Quarter-Centennial. 1861-1886. Proceedings of the Celebration of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Admission of Kansas into the Union, Held at Topeka, January 29, 1886.” Kansas Historical Collections, 1883-1885 3 (1886): 367-469. Includes speech by many participants from the territorial period including Charles Robinson, John A. Martin, Chief Justice A. H. Horton, C. K. Holliday, D. W. Wilder, Rev. Richard Cordley, S. N. Wood, and John Speer.
Lyman, William A. “Origin of the Name 'Jayhawker,' and How it Came to be Applied to the People of Kansas.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1915-1918 13 (1918): 203-207. The author examines different opinions regarding origin of this well known, one time infamous, epithet.
Miner, Craig. Kansas: The History of the Sunflower State, 1854-2000. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002. In this first all-new, one-volume history of the state in almost three decades, Miner uses an interpretative history of antagonisms during the territorial period to set the stage for happenings in the state of Kansas.
Mitchell, W. A. “Historic Linn.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1923-1925 16 (1925): 607-657. Series of valuable articles, first published in La Cygne Weekly Journal, on people and events significant in history of Linn County, with emphasis on 1850s.
Morrison, Michael. Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. With an “emphasis on ideological nuance,” Slavery and the American West offers a fresh, solid, and well documented examination of the nation’s divisive antebellum debates.
Nevins, Allan. Ordeal of the Union. 8 Volumes. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947-1971. For the Kansas Territory, the most relevant volumes in this classic, monumental study are volume two, A House Dividing, 1852-1857, and volume three, The Emergence of Lincoln: Douglas, Buchanan and Party Chaos, 1857-1859.
Nichols, Alice. Bleeding Kansas. New York: Oxford University Press, 1954. Although rather dated in its interpretations, this standard account of the conflict in the territory; Nichol’s “approach, not without a touch of iconoclasm, gives the South its due and shows the excesses of the heretofore blameless North.”
Nichols, Roy F. “The Kansas-Nebraska Act: A Century of Historiography.” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 43 (September 1956): 187-212. Nichols here offered a solid piece of political history that rebutted some of the revisionist scholarship of his day; his was a much weaker, almost helpless Senator Stephen A. Douglas, who had little influence over the final Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854.
"Official Roster of Kansas, 1854-1925.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1923-1925 16 (1925): 658-745. Complete listing territorial and state officials, plus Indian agencies and agents “Affecting Kansas” from 1805-1925.
Potter, David M., and Don E. Fehrenbacher. The Impending Crisis: 1848-1861. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. This important study of the antebellum road to war was edited and completed by Fehrenbacher.
Richmond, Robert W. Kansas: A Land of Contrasts. Fourth Edition. Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1999. Earlier editions published in 1974, 1980, and 1989. Kansas devotes one chapter to conventional territorial political activity and part of another to the early development of transportation and the economy.
SenGupta, Gunja. “Bleeding Kansas: A Review Essay.” Kansas History 24 (Winter 2001/2002): 318-341. This first, regular feature in Kansas History’s review essay series examines the extensive territorial Kansas literature, suggests directions for future research, and challenges scholars to continue recent efforts to reconcile the “dynamic interplay between” two “seemingly disparate realms,” the focus on sectional conflict and/or the study of Kansas through the lens of the new Western history.
SenGupta, Gunja. For God and Mammon: Evangelicals and Entrepreneurs, Masters and Slaves in Territorial Kansas, 1854-1860. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1996. An intriguing examination of the complexity of the free-state movement in Kansas Territory as well as the ideology and dynamics of proslavery activism.
Spring, Leverett W. Kansas: The Prelude to the War for the Union. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885. The last chapter was revised in 1906 for a new edition; the rest of the book recounts an anti-slavery view of Kansas history through the Civil War.
Taylor, Quintard. In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528-1990. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998. Taylor’s study, which includes the nineteen western states on or beyond the 98th meridian, only incidentally deals with the Kansas Question but provides important, larger context.
Villard, Oswald Garrison. “Historical Verity.” Kansas Historical Collection, 1913-1914 13 (1914): 423-429. General comments on interpreting the early history of Kansas by a John Brown biographer.
West, Elliott. The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998. An award winning book that examines native cultures and the transformation of the plains that followed the 1858 discovery of gold in what was at that time far western Kansas Territory.
