American Thumb-prints: Mettle of Our Men and Women — Story, Setting & Ideas

n and American women possessed by the one dominating idea of holding its territory and its wealth to themselves and their opinions. They went in first in the fifties with bayonets packed in Bible boxes. All along railways running towards their destination they had boarded trains with the future grasped close in hand, and sometimes they were singing Whittier’s lines:

“We go to rear a wall of men On Freedom’s southern line, And plant beside the cotton-tree The rugged Northern pine!

“Upbearing, like the Ark of old, The Bible in our van, We go to test the truth of God Against the fraud of man.”

In exalted mood they had chanted this hymn as their trains pulled into stations farther on in their journey, and the lengthening of the day told them they were daily westering with the sun. They had carried it in their hearts with Puritan aggressiveness, with Anglo-Saxon tenacity and sincerity, as their steamers paddled up the muddy current of the Missouri and their canvas-covered wagons creaked and rumbled over the sod, concealing then its motherhood of mighty crops of corn and wheat, upon which they were to build their home. They were enthusiasts even on a road beset with hostiles of the slave State to the east. Their enthusiasm worked out in two general lines, one the self-interest of building themselves a home--towns, schools, churches,--the other the idealism of the anti-slavery faith. They were founding a State which was within a few years to afford to northern forces in the struggle centring about slavery the highest percentage of soldiers of any commonwealth; and their spirit forecast the sequent fact that troops from the midst of their self-immolation would also record the highest percentage of deaths.

They came from many quarters to that territorial settlement of theirs, but the radical, recalcitrant stock which had nested in and peopled the northeastern coast of our country was in the notable majorities from Western States--from Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, and Iowa; and from New England, New York, and Pennsylvania also. Some came, indeed, who could trace no descent from Puritan or Quaker or Huguenot forebear. But there was still the potent heirship of spirit.

To these men nature gave the gift of seeing their side of the then universal question. She added a living sympathy with workers, and an acute sense of the poverty and oppression which humanity at large is always suffering from those who take because they have power. A free discussion of slavery and their opposition to slave-holding had put this deep down in their hearts.

Each man of them--and each woman also--was in fixed principle and earnestness a pioneer, in pursuit of and dwelling in a world not yet before the eyes of flesh but sun-radiant to the eyes of the spirit--the ideal the pioneer must ever see--and holding the present and actual as but a mote in the beam from that central light.

From a more humorous point of view, each man was clearly a Knight of La Mancha stripped of the mediæval and Spanish trapping of his prototype. His Dulcinea--an unexampled combination of idealism and practicality--his much-enduring wife, upon whose frame and anxious-eyed face were stamped a yearning for the graces of life. Her fervor, with true woman strength, was ever persistent. “I always compose my poems best,” said one of the haler of these dames whose verses piped from a corner of the University town’s morning journal, “on wash-day and over the tub.”

These were the conditions of those men and women of the fifties and early sixties to less lifted, more fleshly souls. The old enthusiasm that lighted our race in 1620 and many sequent years in Massachusetts Bay, and the old devotion that led the Huguenots and other oppressed peoples to our Southern coasts and on “over the mountains,” were kindled afresh. And the old exaltation of the descendants of these many peoples--the uplifting that made way for and supported the act of the Fourth of July in 1776--rose anew. The flame of an idea was in the air heating and refining the grossest spirits--and the subtle forces of the Kansans’ vanguard were far from the grossest.

Once in their new home these men and women lived under circumstances a people has almost never thriven under--circumstances which would prey upon every fibre of calmness, repose, and sober-mindedness, and possibly in the end deprive their folk of consideration for the past and its judgments. “Govern the Kansas of 1855 and ’56!” exclaimed Governor Shannon years after that time. “You might as well have attempted to govern the devil in hell.” “Shall the Sabbath never immigrate,” cried a Massachusetts woman in 1855 in a letter to friends at home, “and the commandments too?”