Celia, a Slave Read online

  While residents of Missouri’s western counties, along the Kansas border, were the most ardent proponents of slavery and its expansion into the territories, by late May slavery dominated local politics in the state’s central counties. For example, in Boone County, which bordered Callaway to the west, conservatives viewed with alarm the efforts of “Atchinson and his Mobocrats” to do “all in their power to get up excitement in this locality,” including conducting public meetings to address the issues of slavery and Kansas. Such local meetings were part of a larger plan. Seeking to bolster Atchinson’s campaign to retain his Senate seat, several of his supporters met in Lexington on June 21 and issued a statement addressed to the state legislature and “all true friends of the South and the Union.” They announced a convention to be held on July 12, in Lexington, to develop measures “for our protection against aggression on our slave property” by abolitionists in Kansas, and to consider a “proper Southern response” to the “alarming state of affairs existing in our Country.” This call for a convention prompted yet another flurry of emotional editorials on slavery and Kansas in the state’s press, and in many communities tempers flared at local “conventions” held to elect representatives to the Lexington gathering.9 Thus, the intensified slavery debates in Missouri coincided precisely with the investigation of Robert Newsom’s murder, and the significance of the slavery issue in the politics of neighboring Boone County strongly suggests that residents of Callaway would have been equally concerned.

  Within days after the residents of Callaway County learned of Celia’s indictment, and at approximately the same time that Jefferson Jones was permitted to question Celia about possible accomplices, the slavery controversy in Missouri became yet more heated. On July 9, James Shannon, president of the University of Missouri, entered the debate with an ardent defense of slavery and a provocative attack upon the abolitionists. President of the university for five years, Shannon, an Irish-born Presbyterian educated at the University of Belfast, had arrived in Missouri after service on the faculties of the University of Georgia and Bacon College in Kentucky. With his strong proslavery views, he had soon run afoul of the Benton faction of the state’s Democratic party, and Benton had tried and failed to obtain his dismissal as early as 1852. As the slavery debates heated up in 1854, Shannon again came under attack from Bentonites for his increasing tendency to become actively involved in politics, especially his support of Atchinson’s efforts to protect slavery by insuring its spread into Kansas.10

  In his “card,” sent to all of Missouri’s newspapers, the fiery Shannon attacked those who called him a bigoted, fanatical madman and political priest. “High motives of patriotism and regard for the salvation of the lost world” impelled him to speak out. It was his duty, he declared, to counter abolitionist teachings, so as not to “corrupt the minds of students committed to my trust.” Far from being the evil abolitionists claimed, slavery was “sanctioned alike by the Bible, the Laws of Nature, and the Constitution of the United States,” and Congress had neither the authority nor the right to “impair a vested interest in slaves in the territories, the District of Columbia, or anywhere on earth.” “Unless the swelling tide of anti-slavery fanaticism be beaten back,” Shannon predicted with prescient accuracy, the bonds of Union would break within five years.11

  Shannon’s card hit Missouri like a thunderclap. In St. Louis the Intelligencer and the Democrat railed against Shannon, as did Columbia’s Statesman. On the other hand, the Missouri Republican, also a St. Louis paper, the Jefferson Examiner, the Southwest Democrat and Columbia’s Dollar Missouri Journal supported him. Shannon himself embarked on a speaking tour, addressing crowds of up to a thousand, and arranged to be a featured speaker at the Lexington convention. Indeed, the timing of the release of Shannon’s “card” suggests that he was, as critics charged, part of an orchestrated campaign to use the Lexington convention to crush the Bentonites and place Missouri solidly behind Atchinson’s proslavery programs.12

  On July 12, the proslavery convention met in Lexington, as scheduled. The delegates represented twenty-six counties, with most coming from the large slaveholding counties, especially those located along the Missouri and across from Kansas. Callaway, despite its large slaveholding population, was not represented, and seventeen other counties with significant slave populations also failed to send representatives, an indication that many sympathetic to slavery saw the convention as an event to promote Atchinson. St. Louis, Benton’s stronghold, sent as delegates two individuals the Daily Democrat denounced as unrepresentative of the feelings of either the city or county. Despite the proslavery sentiments of the delegates, Atchinson did not go unchallenged at the convention, for Alexander Doniphan attended, as did Governor Sterling Price, whose name also had been entered in the senatorial contest of the preceding January.13

  James Shannon delivered the convention’s opening address, which set the tone for the two-day event. His remarks were nothing if not unequivocal. Any threat to the biblically sanctioned right to hold slaves, Shannon assured his audience, “is just cause of war between the separate states.” Those who advocated restrictions on slavery he denounced as “liars, yelping curs, assassins, knaves, Negro thieves and horse thieves.”14

  After listening to speaker after speaker berate abolitionists and condemn their efforts to undermine slavery and incorporate Kansas into the Union as a free state, convention delegates adopted a series of resolutions on July 13. The resolutions declared slavery, in every aspect, a matter of state concern; pronounced efforts to stop the admission of Kansas as a slave state hostile to the Constitution and the Compromise of 1850; approved the Kansas-Nebraska Act; and condemned abolitionists for recruiting and sending settlers to Kansas with the purpose of abolishing slavery in Missouri. The resolutions expressed the fears of slaveholders who held slave property valued in excess of $25 million that their property would be threatened if “hired fanatics” controlled Kansas. The resolutions called upon the people of Missouri to take all measures “suitable and just” to “stop this threat,” and appealed to northerners to cease all support of emigrant aid societies.15

  The proslavery convention met with predictable reactions. The Bentonite press found its resolutions absurd and considered the affair as simply another of Atchinson’s political machinations. The St. Louis Daily Democrat, for example, saw the gathering as evidence of Atchinson’s “treasonable designs … to incite a civil war in our midst by riot and bloodshed and trespass against the laws and constitution of the country.” The paper was almost as hard on Doniphan, who, it noted, had attended the convention to stake out his position as the Whig’s proslavery senatorial candidate. The Dollar Missouri Journal and the Missouri Republican, on the other hand, praised the convention’s work. The Republican was particularly laudatory, proclaiming that all “Union loving” people would endorse the resolutions without reservation, and that the convention had placed Missouri “in her right position before the country.”16

  The general furor over the slavery issue created throughout Missouri by the Lexington proslavery convention and President Shannon’s card in defense of slavery, especially the widespread press coverage of both events, indicate that the Fulton Telegraph kept the people of Fulton and Callaway County fully apprised of both developments. Given the state of political turmoil that existed, it is also likely that these events exerted some influence over Celia’s trial. Both the convention and the issuance of Shannon’s card had occurred within two weeks after Celia had been indicted and jailed for Robert Newsom’s murder. It was inevitable, given the local publicity her crime had received, that Celia’s situation would have been on the minds of Callaway citizens even as they contemplated the moral and legal issues raised by the slavery debates.

  The concerns about slavery entertained by the people of Missouri and Callaway County did not cease once the pro-slavery convention adjourned. To insure that the slavery issue remained before the public, President Shannon embarked on a statewide speaking tour, bringin
g his message of alarm directly to Missouri’s communities. Shannon’s messianic efforts were finally halted by the legislature in December of 1855. The legislators adopted a measure that reduced the president’s salary if his official duties were not discharged because of protracted absence from the university. The political maneuverings of Atchinson, Benton, and Doniphan did not stop. Each man continued his struggle to gain Atchinson’s Senate seat, which expired at the end of the year. In the fierce struggle that ensued, Atchinson’s proslavery rhetoric intensified, and in both Washington and Missouri he redoubled his efforts to impose slavery upon Kansas. He had determined to make Kansas a symbol of the South’s demand that slavery be protected in the federal territories, to insure that slavery be allowed the opportunity to expand.17

  During the remainder of 1855, additional vigilante committees and patrols were organized throughout Missouri. Encouraged by the words and actions of Atchinson and his lieutenants, including B. F. Stringfellow and Colonel A. G. Boone of Westport, proslavery advocates in Missouri’s southern and western counties organized into paramilitary units whose members openly talked of invading Kansas to eliminate abolitionists and “nigger stealers.” Such groups were also needed, one paper explained, “for the purpose of purging their communities of Abolitionism, and for the more thorough discipline of the slave population.”18

  With vigilante groups active in so many of the state’s counties, occasional outbreaks of violence related to the slavery issue were predictable. Missouri continued to be plagued by such episodes, just as did Kansas, although in Missouri the violence rarely was carried directly into the political process. Rather, much of the violence was directed against those individuals suspected of abolitionist sentiments. In Forley, Missouri, for example, “Atchinson and Stringfellow Ruffians” forced their way into a Methodist church service and threatened to kill the minister on the spot. The armed mob spared the minister’s life only because of the pleas of the congregation. The attack caused some Methodist ministers to flee the region, and prompted others known to hold anti-slavery sentiments to carry handguns. Travelers on the Missouri River whose credentials were questionable came in for rough treatment. In one incident, a group of angry Missourians attacked a minister from Maine who was returning by riverboat from a tour of Kansas. Members of the mob beat the man about the head with a chair while the passengers urged his assailants to “kill the abolitionist nigger stealer, kill the dough-faced son of a bitch.” The minister, defenders of the mob’s action asserted, deserved his fate for “loudly preaching the higher law doctrine” and saying “the Negro was, in every particular, as good as the white man,” and should have equal rights. In some counties vigilantes rounded up and jailed persons suspected of abolitionist views. Some suspects received rougher treatment than others. In Weston, near the Kansas border, a drunken pro-slavery mob abducted a lawyer from Leavenworth named Phillips, tarred and feathered him, then had a slave conduct an “auction” at which Phillips was sold to the highest bidder. The Weston border ruffians eventually spared the man’s life and allowed his brother to return him to Leavenworth.19

  In Kansas, slavery became the pervasive political issue, overwhelming all other considerations, with proslavery and free state forces both determined to capture the territorial government. Throughout the summer and early fall of 1855 the political struggle in Kansas grew more intense, and supporters of both camps began arming themselves for what seemed an inevitable showdown. Missourians received blow-by-blow accounts of the struggle for control of Kansas in the pages of the Missouri press, and each event in Kansas had its repercussions in Missouri, especially in the western border and large slaveholding counties.

  Although free state forces besieged Governor Andrew Reeder with requests that he nullify the results of the March Kansas elections in which Missourians had helped elect a proslavery territorial legislature, the governor refused to do so. He did, however, call for new elections on May 22 in several counties where evidence of fraud was incontrovertible, and as a result several free state advocates were elected. On July 2, the proslavery Kansas legislature met at Pawnee, just as Atchinson, James Shannon, and others were preparing for their proslavery convention in Lexington. The territorial legislature immediately upped the ante in the struggle for Kansas. In a direct challenge to Reeder, the legislature expelled all of the free state delegates chosen in the special May election, and gave their seats to proslavery representatives. The legislature overrode Reeder’s veto of this travesty, and on July 16 moved to Shawnee Mission, immediately across the river from Kansas City and the border ruffians of Missouri.

  Unburdened of their free state opposition, the proslavery legislators then proceeded to enact the so-called “bogus laws,” including an almost verbatim copy of Missouri’s slave codes. To insure that proslavery forces would control all subsequent elections, members enacted legislation allowing any man present at the polls on election day to vote as long as he swore to support the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and pay a dollar poll tax. Outraged by these actions, the heretofore compliant Reeder denounced the proslavery legislature as a body of renegades, declaring their enactments illegal. The governor’s efforts to curb the proslavery forces drew immediate opposition from southern democrats, including Atchinson, who convinced President Franklin Pierce that Reeder should be replaced. Antislavery forces believed that Pierce had acted upon the advice of his secretary of war, Jefferson Davis, although Davis denied the charge. On July 31, Pierce withdrew Reeder’s commission, and on August 15 the president appointed in his stead William Shannon, a proslavery Democrat and former governor of Ohio who as a congressman in 1854 had supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act.20

  The campaign of intimidation waged by proslavery forces in Kansas and their Missouri supporters failed to subdue Free Soil advocates, who represented a numerical majority among actual settlers in the territory. They were determined to create a territorial government representative of Kansas settlers, rather than the politics of Missouri’s border ruffians. Throughout the summer and early fall of 1855, Free Soil forces organized to challenge the proslavery territorial government. Political direction was furnished by James Lane, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana whc had supported the Kansas-Nebraska bill but recognized in the Free Soil movement a chance to rejuvenate his political career; Charles Robinson, a Massachusetts native and agent of the New England Emigrant Aid Company; and Andrew Reeder, by now thoroughly disgusted with the proslavery policies of the Pierce administration. Efforts to organize an opposition party began when Robinson delivered an impassioned speech in Lawrence, headquarters for the Emigrant Aid Company in Kansas, on the Fourth of July. Robinson urged resistance to the efforts of Missouri’s border ruffians to subvert the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and force slavery upon Kansas against the wishes of the citizenry. He also urged the formation of two military companies, to be armed with two hundred Sharps rifles and two field guns. The increased determination of Free Soil forces to resist, with arms if necessary, the proslavery government elected by the vote of Missouri border ruffians touched off a northern campaign to raise funds for the purchase of Sharps rifles to send to Kansas. Within weeks, wagonloads of repeating rifles began to pour into the disputed territory.21

  Robinson’s speech also provided the impetus for a series of July meetings of Free Soil advocates at Lawrence, including the expelled free state members of the territorial legislature. At a mid-August meeting at Shawnee Mission, antislavery forces called for a convention on September 5 at Big Springs to organize a free state party. Directed by Lane, Reeder, and Robinson, the Big Springs convention marked a turning point in the struggle for Kansas. Convention delegates repudiated the authority of the proslavery territorial legislature and called for yet another gathering in Topeka on September 19 to determine the feasibility of holding a constitutional convention. They also created the Free State party, and adopted a party platform. While creating an institution through which to pursue their fight against the expansion of slavery into
Kansas, convention delegates offered little solace to blacks. Rather, delegates adopted a party platform that advocated the eventual exclusion from Kansas of all blacks, free or slave. The convention also nominated Andrew Reeder as the Free State party’s congressional candidate and set October 9 as the date for congressional elections. With the Big Springs convention, free state advocates served notice to the proslavery territorial government that they intended to create their own territorial government, one which would claim both the moral and legal right to govern Kansas.22

  As expected by both camps, the Free State party convention delegates who gathered in Topeka on September 19 acted to further consolidate opposition to the proslavery territorial government. Under the tutelage of James Lane, the convention did much more than simply issue a call for a formal constitutional convention to convene in Topeka on October 23. The delegates created a territorial executive committee, chaired by Lane, which was to act as a free state provisional government. The committee was also empowered to plan a strategy that would result in Kansas’s entrance into the union as a free state. Delegates chose Lane to chair yet another crucial committee, “the committee on an address to the people,” which was charged with justifying the convention’s actions to the public.

  The Topeka convention only heightened tensions between the two camps. Proslavery forces in Kansas once again appealed for help from Missouri’s increasingly well-organized border ruffians. Atchinson and other ruffian leaders responded. Once more Missourians crossed into Kansas and, in a calculated repudiation of their adversaries’ call for a free state constitutional convention, overwhelmingly reelected J. W. Whitfield as the territory’s congressional representative in an election held on October 1, one week before Celia’s trial was scheduled to begin. Free state forces, who boycotted the October 1 congressional election, marched to the polls as scheduled on October 9, the exact date on which Celia entered the Callaway County courthouse to be tried for the murder of Robert Newsom. They voted overwhelmingly to send Andrew Reeder to Congress as their territorial representative. Kansas now had two governments, each claiming to represent the will of the people, and two congressional representatives, each claiming legitimacy. Free state forces were prepared to draft a constitution and apply for entrance into the Union as a free state while the Pierce administration continued to recognize the proslavery territorial government. The threat of open civil strife loomed ominously on the territory’s political horizon, attracting fanatics of both camps. On the night of October 6 John Brown arrived in Kansas to join his sons, already encamped there, his wagon loaded with rifles and swords.23