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Missourians, Southerners & Pro-Slavery Advocates | Free-Staters, Abolitionists and Free-Soilers

David Atchison
David Rice Atchison was a proslavery leader from Missouri. He represented that state in the U.S. Senate from 1843 to 1855. He was involved in various aspects of the territorial conflict, allegedly riding with the raiders who sacked Lawrence in 1856. The town of Atchison and Atchison County were named for him.

Benjamin F. Stringfellow
Benjamin F. Stringfellow, the fiery proslavery lawyer, politician, and businessman who verbally and physically assaulted Kansas Territory’s first governor, was born on September 3, 1816, in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He was reared on his father’s plantation.  In 1838, he settled in Missouri where he served in the House of Representatives and was attorney general for four years. After moving to Weston, MO, he became a member and officer of the Platte County Self-Defensive Association, an aggressive Pro-Slavery organization. He wrote a pamphlet entitled “Negro Slavery No Evil, or the North and the South”. In 1858 Stringfellow moved to Atchison, Kansas Territory, where he helped build the town and was an attorney for the Kansas City, St. Joseph & Council Bluffs Railroad.

Sheriff Samuel Jones
The Virginia-born Samuel J. Jones, who was to become the “infamous” Sheriff Jones of Douglas County, moved west in the fall of 1854 with his wife and two young children, but he remained true to his native South through his strident supporter of the “peculiar institution.” During the election of Kansas’s first territorial legislature on March 30, 1855, Jones led a group of pro-slavery men that destroyed the ballot box at Bloomington, Kansas. This action coupled with his pro-slavery sentiment prompted his appointment on August 27, 1855, as first sheriff of Douglas County by the acting Governor Daniel Woodson. Jones executed his new responsibilities with much zeal, suppressing the rights of the free-state men under his jurisdiction and fostering an atmosphere of distrust.

Axalla J. Hoole
Axalla John Hoole was a Pro-slavery man from Darlington, South Carolina. At the age of 20 he joined the Darlington Riflemen, a local company of militia and, in 1854, was elected captain. He served in that capacity until March 20, 1858 (his wedding day), on which day he left with his bride for Kansas territory.  They arrived in the territory early in April 1858. Taking a fairly active part in Kansas politics, Hoole was elected probate judge of Douglas county by the Proslavery party under the regime of Gov. Robert J. Walker. During the approximate two years that he remained in the territory, he kept up a rather lively correspondence with his family in South Carolina.

R. H. Williams (Pro-Slavery English Settler)
Williams, a roving young Englishman of twenty, settled in western Virginia in 1852; then to Kansas in 1854, where he took part in the “Border War” on the pro-slavery side. In 1860 he made his way to western Texas, where as rancher in the Frio country, a partisan ranger in the Confederate service, an Indian fighter, he remained until after the close of the war. The remainder of his life he spent in England. He wrote the book With the Border Ruffians - reminiscences based largely upon notes and diaries.

Charles A. Hamelton
A pro-slavery leader during the border troubles, he was a native of Cass County, Georgia, where his father, Dr. Thomas A. Hamelton, was a wealthy and influential citizen. When the Territory of Kansas was organized, Milton McGee went to Georgia to recruit men to aid in making Kansas a slave state. At Cassville he made a fiery speech and Hamelton and his brother were among the first to rally to McGee’s standard.  Hamelton is best known as the perpetrator of the Marais des Cygnes massacre of Free-Staters on May 19, 1858.

Missourian #3 (Vernon County Man)
A southeastern Missourian.  Defending the rights of Missourians - many of whom would cross into Kansas and stake off a small plot of ground thereby giving them residence in Kansas and the right to vote.  Missourian’s claimed the same was being done by Northerners.  Also expressed the cruelty of the jayhawkers.

FREE-STATERS, ABOLITIONISTS AND FREE-SOILERS

Governor John W. Geary
John W. Geary served as the third governor of the Kansas Territory from September 9, 1856, to March 12, 1857. A towering, six-foot-five-inch presence, Geary was 36 at the time of his appointment. Even at this relatively young age, he had compiled a track record demonstrating leadership skills and personal bravery, precisely the combination needed for a territorial executive on the American frontier. During the Mexican-American War (1846-48), Geary had served as a colonel in a Pennsylvania volunteer regiment at Chapultepec and Belen’s Gate– two key battles outside Mexico City. In the early 1850s, he had turned in an admirable performance on the political battlefield as well, serving as first mayor of the rough and tumble city of San Francisco.

Horace Greeley
Horace Greeley was editor of the New York Tribune during the Kansas territorial era. He actively supported the free state cause in Kansas through editorials as well as coming to Kansas in 1859. He advocated resistance to the implementation of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and was involved in the founding of the Republican Party.

Edward Payson Fitch
Fitch was a native of Massachusetts who arrived in Kansas Territory in 1854.  He was a member of the third group of settlers sponsored by the New England Emigrant Aid Company. On August 21, 1863, he was killed in his house by one of Quantrill’s raiders. The daguerreotype was made by Clark’s Daguerreotype Rooms, No. 59 Court Street, Boston, Massachusetts.

John Brown
Brown was an abolitionist who came to Kansas in 1855. Although in the territory for only about three years, he was involved in several skirmishes and helped free some Missouri slaves. Brown was hanged for treason on December 2, 1859, for attempting to overtake the U.S. arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia.

James H. Lane
Lane moved to Lawrence, Kansas Territory, in 1855, and soon became, with Charles Robinson, one of the Free State Party’s most significant if controversial leaders.  His name became a terror to pro-slavery men throughout the pioneer settlements of Kansas, as well as among the slavery propaganda of Missouri. Unlike Robinson, Lane was never an abolitionist, however, and he could be ruthless. His detractors, then and now, paint him more as the “unbalanced,” pugnacious jayhawker whose “men committed depredations fully as atrocious as those of the ‘border ruffians,’ rather than the free-state crusader who helped wrest Kansas from the infamous slave power. But Lane was indeed a dynamic speaker whose charismatic leadership abilities won him a substantial group of loyal supporters, and he was instrumental in strengthening the position of the antislavery cause.

Charles Robinson
A doctor and politician, Robinson attended the first Free-State meeting held December 23, 1854, Lawrence. In 1855, Robinson attended the First Free-State Convention in Lawrence. Robinson and James H Lane were instrumental in negotiating a truce to end the Wakarusa War in December, 1855. On May 10, 1856, Robinson was arrested for treason and taken to Lecompton. Over a year later, he was acquitted at a trail before Judge Cato, at Lecompton. Robinson presided over the Free-State Convention at Lawrence, 1857, and served as the first governor of Kansas from February 9, 1861, to January 12, 1863.

Sara Robinson
Wife of Free State activist Charles Robinson, Sara was not all that fond of life in Kansas during those early years.  When her husband was arrested for treason and detained for several months, however, she did “eloquently report on the plight of her husband and the free-state cause to sympathetic congressional leaders and to officers of the New England Emigrant Aid Company.” Robinson published in October 1856 a book entitled Kansas: Its Interior and Exterior Life that described in vivid detail the social and political situation in Bleeding Kansas. Robinson described the violence that ravaged the territory, the corrupt and fraudulently elected territorial legislature, the Wakarusa War, Sheriff Samuel Jones’s sack of Lawrence, the Topeka Constitutional Convention, her husband’s election as “governor” by free-state partisans, and his subsequent arrest and incarceration. At the time, some considered Robinson’s book second only to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in importance to the anti-slavery cause.

Frederick Starr – Free-Soil Minister
Starr, who held pronounced anti-slavery views was originally a Free-Soiler and joined the Republican party on its formation. He was a forcible speaker and writer and such a believer in the power of the press that he established the Genesee Evangelist and published it for several years. He was a man of unswerving integrity, great force of character, pure-minded, philanthropic, and an enemy of everything low or mean.

Samuel C. Pomeroy-general agent for the NEEAC
Samuel Clarke Pomeroy was a businessman and politician. In 1859, he attended the Convention at Osawatomie and the Republican Convention at Lawrence. Pomeroy was elected president of the Kansas Relief Committee in November, 1860. After statehood, he served as United States Senator from April 4, 1861 to March 3, 1873.

William H. Seward: US NY Senator 1849-1861
William H. Seward represented New York in the U. S. Senate during the territorial era. He was a strong anti-slavery advocate and opposed the Kansas Nebraska bill. He visited Kansas Territory in 1860.

Cyrus K. Holliday –Topeka, founder of Railroad
Cyrus Kurtz Holliday came to Kansas Territory from Meadville, Pennsylvania. He was the first president of the Topeka Town Association and was involved in founding and settling Topeka. He was an agent for the New England Emigrant Aid Company. He was very active in territorial political activities including the Topeka movement. He was a delegate to the Topeka Constitutional Convention.

Northerner (Martin Conway)
Portrait of Martin Franklin Conway, Lawrence, Kansas Territory, a free state activist and political leader. He was a agent for the New England Emigrant Aid Company and the Executive Committee of Kansas Territory. Conway was a delegate to several constitutional conventions and the Republican National Convention. He was the first Kansan elected to Congress.

James Abbott
James B. Abbott was involved in various free state activities and in some of the territorial conflicts. He acquired the so-called “abbott howitzer” in Kansas City and participated in the rescues of both John Doy and Jacob Branson. He was involved in the Battle of Black Jack and was acquainted with John Brown. He lived in Desoto.

John Brown, JR
John Brown, Jr. was one of John Brown’s sons. He came to Kansas in February 1855 along with his brothers Jason, Owen, Salmon, and Frederick and settled near Osawatomie. He was involved in numerous free state activities and, for a time, was one of the free state prisoners held near Lecompton. He also served as the commander of a free state militia company.

Charles ‘Doc’ Jennison
The man most often identified with the moniker Kansas “jayhawker,” Charles Ransford Jennison, was born on June 6, 1834 in New York.  His family moved to Albany, Wisconsin, in 1846. While at Albany he finished secondary school, studied medicine. He practiced medicine for a short time in Wisconsin and later in Minnesota. In the fall of 1857 he moved to Kansas Territory, settling first at Osawatomie and then Mound City. Jennison quickly became a staunch supporter of Brown and his personal temperament toward the proslavery faction soon proved radical and strident. After moving to Mound City a short time later, Jennison associated with James Montgomery, another ardent abolitionist, and from his new home base Jennision led many a raid against the proslavery settlers and forces on both sides of the Kansas-Missouri border.

Augustus Wattles
Augustus Wattles was an abolitionist who came to Kansas from Ohio in 1855. For a time he helped George Washington Brown publish the Herald of Freedom in Lawrence. In 1857, he was one of the founders of Moneka, Linn County, Kansas Territory. He was a supporter of John Brown and Brown stayed at his home several times after the Marais des Cygnes massacre. Wattles served in the territorial legislature in 1855.

Douglas Brewerton New Mexico(1820-1901) Pioneer artist of territorial New Mexico soldier, historian, preacher, lawyer, poet, and real estate agent
George Douglas Brewerton was born in Newport, Rhode Island. He was a sketch artist and painter. Brewerton trained as a solider at West Point and crossed from California to New Mexico Territory in 1848 as part of the Army attachment accompanying Kit Carson. Wrote a book about the Kansas Territorial struggle, “War in Kansas”

Charles Sumner
A Senator from Massachusetts; born in Boston, Mass., January 6, 1811; attended the Boston Latin School; graduated from Harvard University in 1830 and from the Harvard Law School in 1833; traveled extensively in Europe 1837-1840; declined the Whig nomination in 1846 for election to the Thirtieth Congress; one of the founders of the Free Soil Party in 1848; unsuccessful candidate for election in 1848 on the Free Soil ticket to the Thirty-first Congress; elected to the United States Senate in 1851 as a Free Soiler; in response to his “Crime Against Kansas” speech, was assaulted by Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina on May 22, 1856, while in his seat in the Senate, and was absent on account of injuries received until December 1859;

Claiborne Jackson (April 4, 1806 – December 6, 1862)
was a lawyer, soldier, politician, and Governor of Missouri in 1861, then governor-in-exile for the Confederacy during the American Civil War.

James Montogomery
One of Kansas’s most famous (or infamous) jayhawkers, James Montogomery came to Linn County, Kansas Territory, early in the territorial period after living in Ohio, Kentucky and Missouri. He was active in the free state cause and was involved in most of the conflict between pro-slavery and free state forces in that area. He was ordered off his property but refused to leave the area. He raised a militia troop that was active in 1857.

Governor William Walker
Governor William Walker, was a member and leader of the Wyandot Nation. In 1843 he left Ohio with the Wyandots and settled on land that became known as Kansas City, Kansas. He was appointed Provisional Governor of Nebraska Territory in 1853 serving in that position until the territory was divided into the two territories of Kansas and Nebraska. Governor Walker was a noted writer and historian. Politically he was a Democrat, and supporter of the Methodist Episcopal Church South’s stance in favor of owning slaves. He was the owner of a female slave named Dorcas and her husband. However, he freed them both before the Civil War began.

John & Sarah Everett
John Roberts Everett and his wife, Sarah Maria Colegrove Everett, with their two small sons, [4] migrated to Kansas territory from Steuben township, Oneida county, New York, in the spring of 1855 and settled in the vicinity of Osawatomie, present Miami county. The letters here reproduced were written during the period 1855-1864, with the exception of two written by John Everett in October, 1854, while on a preliminary visit to the territory to select a location. They offer an unusual picture of a pioneer family struggling against the hazards of the frontier, the vagaries of nature, and political turmoil.

John Everett’s interest in reform followed closely that of his father, Robert Everett, a Welsh Congregational minister and leader among his people in this country. [5] The latter had revised and published in 1854 a Welsh translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and John Everett traveled among the Welsh settlements in New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania selling this and other books before his removal to Kansas. Sarah Everett was likewise interested in the Antislavery cause, and she and her husband abandoned a plan to migrate to Minnesota in order to lend their aid in making Kansas a free state. Their sincerity of purpose is manifest in their letters.