Friday, March 26. 1954 University Daily Kansan Page 11
Leavenworth, Scott, Riley
Forts Important in Territory History
By GENE BRATTON
The history of Kansas cannot be written without some mention of the forts established by the War department. To them, the Army sent its cavalry to clear the new lands of hostile Indians and protect the wagon trains that were constantly surging westward
To the forts, the new settlers came—to clear their acres with the government and to join with others who-desired the companionship and protection of a neighbor on the vast prairie lands.
In 1854, Fort Leavenworth was the most important military post in the new territory. It had been founded in 1827 and was the oldest fort on the Missouri river. Strategically, its location was excellent. Situated just 31 miles above the mouth of the Kansas river, it was a great frontier depot for the other military posts on the Santa Fe and Oregon routes and was a general rendezvous for troops proceeding to other western forts.
The government reservation began on the river and covered nine square miles in all. There was a good riverboat landing, and the permanent buildings were made of stone—a huge barracks for the troops (three hills high), a hospital, a large warehouse and a quartermaster's building. Connected to the fort was a large farm that supplied most of the vegetables needed by the troops.
The land around the reservation was Indian territory, but in 1854, the Indians already were dickering with the government on sales prices for the land and the government was preparing for an onrush of settlers. Several flourishing missions and manual labor schools for the Indians were located nearby, and just four miles up river was Weston, Mo. Deeds to the new lands had to be cleared by the authorities at the fort, but Weston supplied all food-stuffs and supplies that the settlers had been unable to bring with them on their long journey from the east.
In its 127 years, Fort Leavenworth has had one of the most colorful histories of any of the western forts. Gen. Kearney used the fort as a rendezvous on his Santa Fe expedition in 1846. General Lane rendezvous there before his expedition to Oregon two years later, and in 1849, Capt. Stansbury stopped on his way to Salt Lake
several years later, Gen. Custer stopped there on his way to pick up troops for his ill-fated expedition into the Little Big Horn country.
Surveyors for the Central Pacific railroad and Col. Fremont used the fort as headquarters in 1853, and
Fort Riley, in 1854, was a new military post—barely completed. In 1853, Congress had decided that a new fort was necessary for the efficiency of the service, so Riley had been located about 140 miles from Leavenworth at the junction of the two main branches of the Kansas river—the Republican and Smoky Hill forks.
The extremely fertile ground made it a desirable spot for settlers, and many prospered selling supplies and subsistence to the fort and to the emigrants going to California and New Mexico.
Fort Riley's location offered excellent military advantages. The Kansas was navigable up to this point in favorable seasons of the year, and the country around bounded in timber, building materials and good water and grass.
Fort Riley, too, had been built for permanency. The barracks were of stone and large enough to accommodate eight companies of men. It had been fitted especially for the cavalry, and in later years was to become the cavalry training school for the entire U.S. Army. Without the early units stationed at Fort Riley, the settlement of Kansas probably would have taken a much longer time.
Fort Scott was still in existence in 1854, but already its value had practically disappeared. Established on a branch of the Osage river in the southeast part of the state in 1844, it had held troops and served as a post office until 1853.
Never a large fort, the troops were withdrawn in 1853 and transferred to Fort Riley and other western forts. A year later about the only use of the fort was made by the Catholic clergy, who visited it once a month in connection with their work at the 10 missions that they had established nearby.
Kansas' two major forts, Fort Leavenworth and Fort Riley, are still in existence today. Through the past 100 years their importance has grown instead of decreased. They have played major parts in all of the major United States wars since 1854, and in the future, their strategic locations probably will make them even more important to the nation's security than at any time in the past.
Burning of Constitution Marked Garrison Fight
By TOM SHANNON
July 4, 1854. Framingham. Mass.
Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison held a copy of the United States Constitution aloft for all to see. And after shouting that the Constitution was "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell," he burned it on the spot.
"So perish all compromises with tyranny! and let all the people say. Amen!"
"Amen!" onlookers responded cheerfully.
His doctrine was pacific only in his own honestly deluded mind, and in the minds of those who were unaware of sincerity since yet fallacious, reasoning.
With these theatrics Garrison reached the peak of 13 years' preaching for disunion. Garrison believed profoundly that disunion could be achieved and slavery could be done away with without war.
The Kansas-Nebraska bill left it up to the people of each state to determine whether slavery should be tolerated on its soil. As the cause of the free-soilers in Kansas against the Border ruffians was preached in the North as a crusade, Garrison withheld his sympathy. He still taught peace as a duty.
Garrison asserted that the settlers were not contending for liberty, but for their rights as white men. Having "consented to make the existence of liberty or slavery dependent on the will of the majority, fairly expressed," he said, they were but reaping the divinely ordered retribution of their own sinful policy.
The battle in Kansas thickened. Slaveyites against free-soilers, unregulated violence of guerrilla bands, mob murder, private assassination, waste, plunder, and arson, rocked the state.
"You might as well read the Bible so a herd of buffaloes as to those fellows who follow Atchison and Stringfellow. . raked together from the purlius of a frontier state, drugged with whiskey, and hounded on by broken and degenerate politicians." Henry Ward Beecher told Garrison.
"For our own part, we deeply compassionate the miserable and degraded tools of the slave propagandists, who know not what they do." Garrison replied. "Yet they are not beasts, nor to be treated as beasts . . . when Jesus said, 'Fear not those who kill the body.' He broke every deadly weapon; when He said, . . . 'Father, forgive them.' He did not treat them as 'a herd of buffaloes,' but as poor, misguided, and lost men."
"While they are yet standing in common with the great body of the American people with their feet upon the necks of four millions of
chattel slaves." he said. "With what face can they ask for the sympathy and cooperation of those who are battling for freedom on a world-wide basis?"
Finally, Garrison asked, if the settlers should be furnished with rifles, why not the slaves? The answer was to be given at Harper's Ferry.
The new Republican party evoked Garrison's approval of its aims as far as they went, but left him dissatisfied by its devotion to the Union, and its toleration of slavery under any circumstances. His view of the Abolitionist's duty was that he must not abandon his principles, "for they are immutable and eternal;" or lessen his demands, "for they are just and right"; or "postpone the glorious object . . the immediate extinction of slavery, for that would be fatality."
But when the news from Harper's Ferry reached Garrison, he gave Brown praise for honesty, conscientiousness, courage.
The city was founded in 1858 and was named Junction City because it is at the junction of the Republican and Smoky Hill rivers.
Junction City Growth Helped by Fort Riley
An active trading point in central Kansas is Junction City, which has developed in part because of its nearness to Fort Riley.
Library of Congress Exhibit Shows Kansas History in Papers, Photos
The 100th anniversary of the Kansas-Nebraska act of 1854, by which the territories of Kansas and Nebraska were created, is being commemorated in an exhibition that opened in the Library of Congress Feb. 3.
By NANCY NEVILLE
The two territories were established on May 30, 1854, and the states were admitted to the Union in 1861 and 1867, respectively. The exhibition is arranged in two sections—a historical section, containing more than 160 items that document the history of the two states, and a photographic section.
The historical section consists of significant manuscripts, rare books, broadsides, prints, maps, and photographs from the collections of the Library and the National Archives. The materials relate to Spanish, French, German, and Anglo American exploration, Indian life, the creation of the territories and the attainment of statehood, immigration and homesteading, and land transactions, agriculture, and pioneer life.
which includes some 70 photographs pertaining to modern Nebraska and Kansas.
Two documents pertaining to the Kansas-Nebraska act displayed indicate the contemporary political significance of the area. The Kansas area particularly was a key in the slavery controversy, a conflict resulting in a new political alignment that led to the founding of the Republican party.
cities and towns and others pertaining to agriculture, industries transportation,historical landmarks, education,and cultural life comprise the photographic section.
Enlarged photographs of modern
Among the materials concerning exploration is an account of Coronado's journey to the Great Plains
Lincoln Joined Slavery Fight With 1854 Law
By GENE SHANK
When slavery once again pushed its inevitable way into politics, and with the aid of Sen. Stephen A. Douglas, molded itself into the form of the Kansas-Nebraska act of 1854, a 45-year-old lawyer from Illinois became aroused and returned to politics.
That lawyer was Abraham Lincoln, who joined the agitations force that swept the country against the Kansas-Nebraska act and was lifted from a quiet practice in Springfield to national prominence.
After his election to the state legislature in 1834 and his later election to Congress in 1846, Lincoln had tired of politics and had settled down with his wife and sons in Springfield and practiced privately in the 8th Judicial Circuit court. But with the passage of the Douglas bill, Lincoln's fervor for a political career rose to new heights and he began a dramatic comeback into politics that later was climaxed in the Presidency.
The Kansas-Nebraska act that Lincoln bitterly opposed fairly repealed the Missouri Compromise and established a "squatter sovereignty" policy in Kansas and Nebraska, where the settlers could decide for themselves whether or not they would be slave or free states.
Shortly after the passage of the act, Lincoln, then a Whig, began a series of speeches throughout the country, attacking slavery and the Kansas-Nebraska act, and started his historic debates against Sen. Douglas, who had pushed the act through Congress. One observer wrote that "from 1854 on there appeared a new tone in Lincoln's speeches, a notable earnestness combined with adroitness in narrowing the slavery issue to one phase of the question (Kansas-Nebraska act), thus making it a suitable party issue."
In a speech on Oct. 16, 1854, at Peoria, Illinois answered Sen. Douglas, who had spoken in favor of the act in the same hall the previous day. Lincoln's reasoned appeals to the Declaration of Independence, his sarcasm, his searching questions, and his shrewdness in avoiding pitfalls, established him as a leader of his cause and his party.
In speaking of slavery in the Peoria speech, Lincoln said, "I shall try to show that it is wrong, wrong in its direct effect letting slavery into Kansas and Nebraska, and wrong in its prospective principle, allowing it to spread to every other part of the wide world, where men can be found inclined to take it. This declared indifference, but as I think covers real zeal for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate."
In an attempt to explain this period of Lincoln's life and why he came back into politics and remained there with phenomenal success, Edgar Lee Masters makes this observance in his biography of Lincoln, "At forty-five a man is near the climacteric of his powers, but of what use is that if there is no place or work in the world for him, and if life does not ensphere itself and revolve on to some significant destiny? . . .
"How much longer could Lincoln endure the daily walk from his house to the little law office, and the old rounds of the circuit, now a shopworn experience, with some first faces already gone, either to death or to other fields. Life was passing rapidly. He was forty-five and had done nothing."
in 1541. Early French explorations are recalled by several documents, including Claude Du Tseine's report of his journey into Kansas in 1719 and Beaurrain's manuscript historical account of the French in Louisiana with a map showing details of the Kansas-Nebraska region. Early Anglo-American descriptions shown include illustrated accounts of explorations by the Lewis and Clark expedition (1804-1806), Capt. Zebulon M. Pike (1806), and Stephan H. Long (1819-1820).