The Englishman in Kansas

Background Information

To begin to understand the conflict in Kansas Territory that Thomas Gladstone, staff member of the London Times, was sent to report on in spring 1856, one must trace the roots of the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854). This legislation, which granted territorial status to Kansas, repealed the Missouri Compromise (1820), a measure passed a generation before that had forestalled or delayed a crisis between the divided sections of the country—North and South—on the issue of slavery. At the time Maine and Missouri were admitted to the Union, the Congress was intent on preserving the balance between free and slave states. A provision in the legislation to admit Missouri, however, prohibited slavery's extension west of Missouri, into the Louisiana Purchase territory north of the southern boundary of Missouri .

This uneasy balance held for thirty years. By the late 1840s and early 1850s, increased settlement in the West, Southwest and the Middle West (including Kansas) forced legislators in Washington, such as Stephen A. Douglas—Democrat from Illinois, chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories and presidential hopeful—to act. Douglas promoted a policy he called Popular Sovereignty, which left the determination of the issue of slavery up to settlers themselves. This doctrine was a significant feature of the Kansas-Nebraska Act because it allowed for the possibility of slavery in Kansas Territory, which lay north of the line (36 degrees, 30') mandated in the Missouri Compromise as a boundary beyond which slavery could not pass, and spurred a group of politicians opposed to the spread of slavery to found a new political party, the Republican Party.

Popular Sovereignty, supported by President Franklin Pierce and Southerners, who referred to it as Squatter Sovereignty, set the stage for the tragedy that came to be known as "Bleeding Kansas." Pitted against each other were proslavery sympathizers from nearby Missouri and abolitionists from the Northeast, whose settlement of Kansas was being organized and subsidized in part by the New England Emigrant Aid Company. This organization sent more than a thousand settlers to Kansas to found free state towns such as Lawrence and Topeka, but they were still outnumbered, or at least outvoted, by proslavery settlers and armed Missourians who intimidated voters and stuffed ballot boxes, and succeeded in electing a proslavery territorial government, known as the "Bogus Legislature" in 1855. This government ousted all free state members and effected the removal of Governor Andrew Reeder, who was replaced by the proslavery Wilson Shannon. In December of that year, free state settlers convened in Topeka to elect their own government. They named Reeder their Congressional delegate and appointed Charles Robinson, a doctor and a former agent of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, governor. In early 1856, President Pierce renounced the Topeka government, but Congress, divided along party lines, decided to form a committee to investigate fraud in the Kansas elections. This three-person committee arrived in Kansas at the same time as Gladstone, in spring 1856, a day after Border Ruffians had sacked Lawrence.

Gladstone begins his narrative with an account of how he came to travel to Kansas. Chapters two through five recount his stay in Kansas. He then offers a brief background to how "anarchy and unrestrained lawlessness . . . reign throughout the territory." Gladstone quotes at length from the statutes passed by the so-called Bogus Legislature and refers to evidence gathered by the Congressional committee investigating voting irregularities. He continues in this expository vein with chapters on the geography and climate of Kansas, the range of its inhabitants, including an extended description of what he calls "proslavery men" and "free-soilers," and describes the domestic arrangements of Kansas settlers. In his description of Leavenworth, he also elaborates on commercial activities between settlers and Native Americans, and he visits a Sioux encampment near Fort Leavenworth. The last third of the narrative recapitulates the historical background and outlines the significant events that brought about the present circumstances in Kansas.

Questions for Reflection

Gladstone's letters have been characterized as unbiased and objective. This opinion or assertion might be ascribed to his status as a reporter from another country. Do you agree with this assertion? Is his report on Kansas Territory balanced? Should it be? If not, is it surprising since we learn in chapter four that Englishmen and Yankees are regarded with skepticism and hostility by Missourians and Southerners in general?