East to the Dawn Read Online Free

to Kansas in ’54; he would become the first mayor of Atchison and a U.S. senator when Kansas achieved statehood.
    The eloquent, impassioned Thayer fashioned his crusade in a typically “New England” practical way—by appealing to the enlightened self-interest of his audience. Before the ink on the Kansas-Nebraska bill was dry, he was buying up land in the territory and forming free-soil colonies. By the time Kansas was opened for settlement, hundreds of Kansas leagues and Kansas committees were in formation. Word was passed that the antislavery colonies would be receiving steam engines, sawmills, gristmills, and other machinery; that newspapers, churches, and schools would be established. As Thayer noted, “From these facts emigrants inferred readily enough that in these incipient cities, with organized emigration flowing in rapidly, there would be an excellent prospect for making money by the rise of property.” It was just such a sentiment as would appeal to courageous, ambitious young men. Eli Thayer described his “ideal” settlers: “The men who say little or nothing. They show the greatest impatience, and even disgust, when they hear a ranting resolution-maker berating slavery. They seem to think that every Northern man understands the evils of slavery without being informed of them.”
    Just such men as Alfred Gideon Otis and others who, their feet firmly set in the new, bustling frontier town, believed the risks were more than
outweighed by the prospects of success. John Greenleaf Whittier, the popular abolitionist poet, picked up the idealistic mood of the country in his “Emigrants’ Song.”
    Â 
    We cross the prairies as of old
    Our fathers crossed the sea;
    To make the West, as they the East,
    The homestead of the free.
    Â 
    The attraction of Atchison was that it was so strategically situated. The Missouri River makes a great bend to the west as it divides the northern regions of Missouri and Kansas between St. Joseph to the north and Fort Leavenworth to the south. Atchison lies at the westernmost point in this bend, on the western side of the river. Being those twelve miles farther west than the established settlements at St. Joseph and Leavenworth meant two days saved for early settlers heading west in ox-drawn wagons. It meant that at the moment of its founding, Atchison assumed importance as the eastern terminus of the overland stagecoach lines. There was money to be made caring for and feeding the travelers, repairing their wagons, buying and selling them livestock. Rapidly, in growing numbers, came young, idealistic, enterprising northerners bent on establishing themselves and keeping the territory free; they started to tip the balance early on. What drew them was the prospect of good land, of course, and the opportunity to be in on the beginning, to have a hand in the formation of a new government and a new society, but there was something else; those conditions, those opportunities existed elsewhere, where there was no chance of blood being spilled over the slavery question. Kansas was not for the fainthearted. The free-soil men who settled Atchison had to possess an extra quality—a large dose of physical courage had to be part of their makeup—for they were settling a town just being formed in a territory about to be torn asunder.
    There was no question, given his free-soil stand, that Alfred would establish himself quietly and circumspectly: at just about the time he arrived that fall, a southern mob tarred and feathered and set adrift on a raft the Reverend Pardee Butler, who had trumpeted his abolitionist views after being warned not to. Incidents escalated into violence with ever-increasing frequency.
    In May 1856 Senator Atchison, at the head of an armed mob, sacked the free-soil settlement of Lawrence, forty miles to the south of Atchison. Nor was the violence just in Kansas—the day following the sack of Lawrence, the prominent and