Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler Part 3

"_Are you an abolitionist_?"

I was both angry and confounded. I had never in my life made myself conspicuous in this controversy that was going on between North and South, and why should I be insulted with such a question. I did not answer yes or no, but proceeded to give my views on the subject in general. They listened and remarked that they did not see anything offensive in such views; then made this apology for their seeming rudeness: An old man, a preacher, whom they called Father Clark, had come from Pennsylvania to Chillicothe to live with a married daughter, and had said something concerning slavery offensive to the people, and they had called a meeting of the citizens, and he had been driven out of town and ordered never to return. They had, furthermore, resolved that no abolitionist should thereafter be allowed to preach in the city.

These brethren explained that, as I would be called on and interrogated by a committee, they thought it would be better that this should be done by friends, than that I should be questioned by strangers.

"_Are You an Abolitionist_?"

I was angry with myself for having consented to preach a sermon after being met with such a question. But by mine host, Bro. Graves, I was treated with the most frank and manly courtesy, albeit that he was brother to the man that shot a brother congressman in a duel with rifles. He seemed to feel like the town clerk at Ephesus: "What man is there that knoweth not that the city of the Ephesians is a worshiper of the great G.o.ddess Diana, and of the image that fell down from Jupiter?

Seeing then that these things can not be spoken against, ye ought to be quiet and do nothing rashly."

The Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad was just being located through the city, yet the town was a dead town, though it was surrounded by a fertile and prosperous country. Bro. Graves seemed awake to all its advantages, and pressed me to remain, pointing out the rapid advance that must take place in the value of its property. But I kept thinking of the question: "Are you an abolitionist?" and bade him farewell.

At nightfall I found myself beyond Gallatin, on the road to St. Joseph.

As there were no hotels I called at a private house and was hospitably received. This man, on whom I had called, had come from the State of Pennsylvania, and had grown to a prosperous farmer. There seemed to be no books or newspapers about the house; but he was shrewd and sagacious to a proverb, and was eager to hear from the land of his fathers, and of what was the cause of all this din and clamor and excitement of the people about him. What was the meaning of the Kansas-Nebraska bill? What were the intentions of the Black Republicans? What was the _New York Tribune_ doing, that it should raise such a tumult? And what were the purposes of the Emigrant Aid Society that it should be such an offense to the people in Missouri?

On my own part, I also had much to learn from this man, so shrewd and well-informed, and yet so ignorant. What did it mean that citizens of Missouri should go over in force and vote in the Territory of Kansas? We had heard something of this in Illinois, but supposed it was something done by that turbulent and somewhat lawless element that gathers along the borders of civilization; but now it was apparent that this movement was under control of leading citizens of Missouri, and had been partic.i.p.ated in by conscientious men, members of the various churches of Missouri, who would in no wise knowingly do anything wrong. What did it mean?

The reader will not be surprised that we should sit up to a late hour of the night, nor that we should renew the subject again in the morning.

When I had got ready to leave this man, who had so hospitably entertained me, he explained that he had business on the road on which I was traveling, and that he would accompany me a number of miles.

This emigrant from Pennsylvania, now a citizen of Missouri, who carried his library in his brain and read his books when he conversed with men, and kept his own counsel and lived in peace with his neighbors, was now about to say farewell. With some hesitation he said: "Mr. Butler, I thank you for all you have told me. I feel just as you do; but I must advise you to be careful how you talk to other men as you have talked to me. There are many in this country that would shoot such a man as you are. Good-bye."

CHAPTER III.

It is said, "There are two sides to every question." In my a.s.sociation with men in the free States I had learned one side of this question; now I was learning the other side, and began to be able to put in intelligible shape to myself those reasonings by which these men justified their action. They reasoned thus: "War is a state of violence and always involves a trenching upon what we call natural rights; and its decisions depend not so much on who is right or wrong, as on who wields the longest sword and commands the heaviest battalions. And if in carrying on a war some evil comes to innocent parties, this is only one of its necessary consequences, and is justified by the final result; provided always that the war, as a whole, is right and just. And in such a strained and unnatural condition of affairs men can not be governed by the same scrupulous regard for others' rights by which they are governed in time of peace. But the North and South are already practically in a state of war. This comes of the mistakes made at the formation of our government. Thomas Jefferson and the fathers of the Revolution were mistaken in holding slavery wrong. It is a rightful and natural relation, as between an inferior and superior race. The black race is far better off here in America, in slavery, than they would be in Africa, in freedom and in paganism; and if there is something of hardship in their lot, it is only because there is hardship in the lot of every human being."

These men also said: "Consequent on these erroneous views held by Thomas Jefferson and others, the settlement made as between the North and South has been wrong, from the beginning, It was wrong to close the Northwest Territory, embracing Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, against slavery. So also it was wrong to close Kansas against this inst.i.tution by what was called the Missouri Compromise Line, agreed upon on the admission of Missouri into the Union."

So these men reasoned, and they said: "Now we propose to go and take by the strong hand those rights of which we have been wrongfully deprived since the beginning of the American Government. A little severity now--a resolute seizing on our rights now, in this golden opportunity--will be worth more than the shedding of rivers of blood by and by. Therefore the primary and rudimental legislation of this infant Territory will be worth everything to us in the final settlement of this question. It is certain that the law is against us; but the law itself is wrong, and has been wrong from the beginning. The right that belongs to us is the material and inalienable right of revolution."

We have no right to a.s.sume that a majority of the people of Missouri held the sentiments we have here indicated: probably they did not. But the dissent was generally unspoken. The men of this stamp commonly adopted the policy of the man with whom I had just parted. But there was dissent in some cases, bitter and vehement, followed sometimes by bloodshed.

Before I had gone to Iowa, and while I yet lived in Ohio, I had visited Kentucky. An Ohio colony had gone down into Kentucky and located in the counties of Wayne and Pulaski, on the c.u.mberland River. A brother of mine had gone with them, and I had made him a visit. I thought then, and think now, that there is no region on which the sun shines, more desirable to live in than the region of the c.u.mberland Mountains. At Crab Orchard I found a man that was born in the State of New York. He had been a soldier at Hull's surrender, at Detroit, in the war of 1812, with Great Britain. From Detroit he had made his way into Kentucky, had married a rich wife with many slaves, and had become a vehement partisan for slavery. But because he was born in the same State with myself, and because I could tell him much about that people that were once his people, he was glad to have me stop with him. Being old and choleric, he would go off into a fierce pa.s.sion against the abolitionists. He would say: "These men are thieves! Our n.i.g.g.e.rs are our property, and they steal our property. They might as well steal our horses." After awhile he would begin to talk about his children. He would say: "These n.i.g.g.e.rs are ruining my children! My girls are good for nothing! They can not help themselves! They are so helpless they can not even pick up a needle. And my boys! These n.i.g.g.e.rs are ruining my boys! My boys won't work!" And then he would _go_ on to tell the nameless vices the young men of the city were drawn into through their intimacy with the blacks.

I thought, but did not say, "My dear sir, if slavery is working such a ruin on your own children, would not the abolitionists be doing you a kindness if they would steal every n.i.g.g.e.r you have got?"

But there was a still graver aspect that this question was beginning to a.s.sume: A woman that is a slave has neither the motive nor the power to protect her own virtue; and the land was threatened to be filled with a nation of mulattoes. But this mixed race would possess all the pride, ambition and talent of the superior race; at the same time they would feel all that undying hatred that a subject people feel toward the men by whom they are subjugated. We would then be sleeping on a volcano, such as may at any hour engulf the empire of Russia.

All this I pondered in my heart as I slowly made my way toward St.

Joseph, on the Missouri River, which flows along the western border of Kansas. And now this question was coming to the front and forcing a settlement, and in Kansas would be the first real conflict. In Congress they had only paltried with, it; now the people were to try their hand.

And what should I do? Had I any right as a Christian and as an American citizen, when providentially called to this work, to withdraw myself from aiding in its settlement? And should I turn my horse in the opposite direction, go back to my Bro. Graves at Chillicothe, and say to him: "You are a man of undoubted courage, but I am a paltroon and a coward, and I am going to hunt a hole and hide myself, where I will be out of danger when this battle is fought between freedom and slavery."

I did not turn back, but revolving all these matters in my mind, reached the city of St. Joseph. Here I had been commended by a friend to a merchant in the city, a member of the Christian Church. He received me kindly and treated me courteously, but his partner in business did not seem to be of that mind. He was all out of sorts, and gruffly said, "Kansas is a humbug. It will not be settled in thirty years."

In revolutions men live fast. I had been ten days on my journey, and the man that now crossed the Missouri River at St. Joseph was not just the man that ten days before crossed the Mississippi at Quincy. He was a wiser and a sadder man.

On the Kansas side the first company I met was a two-horse wagon load of men that had been exploring the Territory and were returning. They seemed thoroughly disgusted, and said: "The wind blows so hard in Kansas, it would blow a chicken up against the side of a barn and hold it there for twenty-four hours."

"Kansas will not be settled in thirty years." So said my not very amiable friend in St. Joseph. It is now somewhat more than thirty years, and Kansas has more than a million of inhabitants. But the State has a higher boast to make than that it has so increased in wealth and population. It has been the first State in the Union--indeed, it has been the first government in the world--to incorporate prohibition into its fundamental law; and this is the best possible criticism by which to mark its comparative progress in a Christian civilization.

CHAPTER IV.

After crossing the Missouri River I visited some of the princ.i.p.al settlements in the Territory, such as Atchison, Leaven worth, Lawrence and Topeka. Lawrence, Topeka and Manhattan were settlements made by men from free States, and with an eye single to making Kansas a free State.

There was no town located on the Missouri River, and no settlement made in the counties bordering on the Missouri River, that were properly free State settlements. I thought this was a mistake. These counties had by far the largest population, and as these counties would go, the Territory would go; and I thought that no considerations of personal danger ought to hinder, that these counties should have respectable settlements of avowed Free State men among them.

What is now the city of Atchison was then a small village that was being built among--the cottonwood trees on the banks of the Missouri River, about twenty miles below St. Joseph, and the same distance above Fort Leavenworth. It had been named after the notable David R. Atchison, who had been a Senator from Missouri, and acting Vice-President of the United States. D. R. Atchison and Gen. B. F. Stringfellow had at this time won a national notoriety in this struggle now going on in Kansas; and both were leading members in the Atchison town company. Dr.

Stringfellow was deputed to act as editor-in-chief of the _Squatter Sovereign_, a paper at that time started in Atchison; but the editor was Robert S. Kelly. Bob Kelly, as he was popularly called, was a born leader among such a population as at that time filled Western Missouri.

The towns along the Missouri River were the outfitting points for that immense overland freighting business, that was at that time carried on across the western plains, to Santa Fe in Mexico and to Salt Lake, Oregon and California; and here congregated a mult.i.tude of that wild, lawless, law-defying and law-breaking mob of men, that accompanied these expeditions, and were the habitues of these western plains, or were among the gold seekers of California.

Bob Kelly was left an orphan at an early age, and was from his youth surrounded with such a population. In person he was handsome as an Apollo, broad-shouldered and muscular, with fair complexion and blue eyes, and was the natural chief of the dangerous men that were drawn to him by his personal magnetism. Moreover, he possessed so much native eloquence, and such an ability to make pa.s.sionate appeals, as made him a fit person to fire the hearts of these men to deeds of violence,

I obtained a claim to 160 acres of land, twelve miles from Atchison, and on the banks of the Stranger Creek. This claim I would be at liberty to buy, at government price, if I should continue to live on it until it should come into market. My nearest neighbor was Caleb May, a Disciple, and a squatter, from the other side of the river. Bro. May was in his way as much a character as Bob Kelly. He gloried, like John Randolph, of Roanoke, in being descended from. Pocahontas, and that he therefore had Indian blood in his veins. Born and reared on the frontier, tall, muscular, and raw-boned, an utter stranger to fear, a dead shot with pistol or rifle, cool and self-possessed in danger, he had become known far and near as a desperate and dangerous man when meddled with. But he had been converted, and had become a member of the Christian Church, and according to the light that was in him he did his best to conform his life to the maxims of the New Testament, and conscientiously sought to confine all exhibition of "physical force" to such occasions as those in which he might be compelled to defend himself. Then it was not likely to be a healthy business for his antagonist.

After securing my claim, and commencing to build a cabin, I began to look around me. Fully three-fourths of the squatters of this whole region were from the border counties of Missouri. But in Western Missouri the percentage of Disciples was perhaps larger than in any other portion of the United States, consequently I had brethren on every side of me. These men certainly were not refined and educated men, as the phrase goes, still they had the qualities that our Lord found in the fisherman of Galilee.

One thought was in every man's heart, and on every man's tongue. The name _Squatter Sovereign,_ that had been given to the Atchison newspaper, indicated the trend of public opinion. They had been flattered with the idea that if they would come to Kansas they should be "Squatter Sovereigns," that the domestic inst.i.tutions of the infant Territory should be determined not by the nation, nor by Congress, but by themselves. And yet, when the election day came, every election precinct in the Territory, except one, was taken possession of by bodies of men from Missouri, and the elections had been carried, not by _bona side_ citizens, but by an outside invasion. With pain and shame, and bitter resentment, my neighbors told me how they had driven their wagons to the place of voting, on the prairie, and hitched their horses to their wagons, and were quietly going about their business, when with a great whoop and hurrah, which frightened their horses and made them break loose from their wagons, a company of men came in sight, and with swagger and bl.u.s.ter, took possession of the polls, and proceeded to do the voting. Meantime whisky flowed like water, and the men, far gone in liquor, turned the place into a bedlam. In utter humiliation and disgust many of the squatters went home. Caleb May did not get into the neighborhood till afternoon. Before he got to the place of voting, he met Joseph Potter, and on hearing what was done he threw his hat on the ground, and in a towering rage protested he would no longer vote with a party that would treat the people of the Territory in such a way as that. This was done in March, but so far as any public expression of sentiment was concerned, the people seemed dumb. No public meeting was called in the way of protest till the next September, and that meeting was held at Big Springs, sixty miles from Atchison.

But if there was no public protest, there was plenty of it in private.

The men from the State of Missouri grew sick at heart. It was a deep, unspoken, bitter and shame-faced feeling, for it was their old neighbors that had done this.

I often asked myself, Can it be hoped that an election can be held that shall fairly express the real sentiment of the people, if they allow themselves to be held down under such a reign of terror?

The prevalent sentiment of the squatters from Missouri was, "We will make Kansas a free white State; we will admit no negroes into it." These men regarded the negro as an enemy to themselves. They said: "We were born to the lowly lot of toil, and the negro has made labor a disgrace.

Neither ourselves nor our children have had opportunity for education, and the negro is the cause of it. Moreover, an aristocracy at the South has a.s.sumed control of public affairs, and the negro is the cause of that. Now we propose to make Kansas a free white State, and shut out the negro, who has been the cause of all our calamities."

There was, however, a cla.s.s of men among them that had pity for the negro. I will repeat one story, as it was told me by Bro. Silas Kirkham.

Bro. Kirkham belongs to that family of Kirkhams so well known to our brethren in Southeastern Iowa. Bro. Kirkham was raised in a slave State.

He said: "When I was a boy I had never thought of slavery as being wrong. There was a black boy in the settlement named Jim. Jim was so good-natured, faithful and well-behaved that we all liked him. Jim married a black girl and they had twins--boys--bright, likely little fellows, and Jim's wife and twin babies were all the treasure he had in the world."

Bro. Kirkham said: "One day I found Jim in the woods, where he had been sent to split rails. He was sitting down with his face buried in his hands, apparently asleep. I thought I would crawl slyly up to him, and spring suddenly on him, and frighten him. I did so, but Jim was not asleep at all, but lifted up his head with such a look of unutterable woe that I was frightened myself, and said: 'Why, Jim, what is the matter?' Jim cried out: 'O, my boys! my boys! Ma.s.sa sold my boys!'"

Bro. Kirkham said: "_I_ have vowed everlasting enmity to an inst.i.tution that will legalize such treatment of a human being."

But while these ominous mutterings were heard in so many of the Kansas squatter cabins, little did the high and mighty Atchison Town Company, or the editorial staff of the _Squatter Sovereign_, or the puissant Territorial Legislature, reck that so soon they must take up the sad refrain of Cardinal Woolsey:

Farewell, a long farewell, to all my greatness!

This is the state of man: To-day he puts forth The tender leaves of hope, to-morrow blossoms, And bears his blushing honors thick upon him; The third day comes a frost, a killing frost, And--when he thinks, good easy man, full surely His greatness is a-ripening--nips his root; And then he falls, as I do.

The following extract, from an editorial that appeared at this time in the _Squatter Sovereign_, will show what a rose-colored view these gentlemen took of the situation:

SLAVERY IN KANSAS.

We receive letters, by nearly every mail, asking our opinion as regards the security of slave property in Kansas Territory. We can truly say that no Territory in Uncle Sam's dominion can be found where the slave' can be made more secure, or his work command a higher price. Our slave population is gradually increasing by the arrival of emigrants and settlers from the slave States, who, having an eye to making a fortune, have wisely concluded to secure a farm in Kansas, and stock it well with valuable slaves. Situated as Missouri is, being surrounded by free States, we would advise the removal of negroes from the frontier counties to Kansas, where they will be comparatively safe. Abolitionists too well know the character of the Kansas squatter to attempt to carry out the nefarious schemes of the underground railroad companies.