Bloody Dawn (7 page)

Up the front steps of the Eldridge, under the arched passageways fancied with wrought iron trimming, through the dark wooden doors and onto the ground floor, an arcade of shops and offices was located. A wide flight of stairs led up from the street to the second-story landing. On this floor was the lobby, more offices, and a spacious dining hall. A noisy dinner gong nearby called the guests to meals. On the hotel's third and fourth floors were rooms and several elegant suites. Sixty patrons were currently lodged at the Eldridge, including a group of Eastern businessmen, a bishop and his circle of traveling priests, and in a room overlooking Massachusetts, the state provost marshal Alexander Banks.

A platoon of employees catered to the needs of the visitors, including the hotel seamstress, Sallie Young, a “bright and witty Irish girl.” It was one of the largest, most luxurious inns beyond the Mississippi, and for the citizens of Lawrence the Eldridge always had been and always would be the seat of great pride and good memories. “Magnificent,” praised a former guest, New York editor Horace Greeley.
⁹

On Massachusetts just north of the Eldridge was the courthouse with a cannon parked nearby. A few doors down was the armory, and half a block further, by the riverside, sat the palatial home of Dr. Charles and Sara Robinson.

The first governor of the state, one of the wealthiest men in Kansas, just turned forty-five in good health; Charles Robinson should have been the happiest man in Lawrence. But he wasn't. Instead, the quiet, native New Englander was perhaps the most disconsolate and forlorn person in the state of Kansas.

To the best of his abilities he had tried. From the day he entered the territory in 1854 and staked his claim in Lawrence, it was Charles Robinson's hope that a sane, peaceful solution could be found for troubled Kansas. He more than any was responsible for holding back the storm by leading his free-state followers on a firm, yet moderate course.
¹⁰
“We must have courage,” the balding,
bewhiskered doctor had insisted, “but with it we must have prudence!”
¹¹

And for almost two years his strategy had worked. His calm and wise decisions, his solid, steady leadership when radicals on both sides were pounding for war proved a blessing both for Kansas and the nation, and when all else seemed about to go under in an angry red sea of hatred and violence Robinson held forth like a rock for all to grasp. And to show their appreciation free-soil settlers had simply ignored the proslavery territorial government and voted Robinson their man for governor. But then came the sack of Lawrence in 1856, the burning of his home on Mount Oread, and the imprisonment of free-state leaders, including Robinson himself. And it was the cruelest of ironies that the doctor's internment as much as the plundering of Lawrence was the source of his waning popularity, for even
from his prison tent near Lecompton one day he heard the free-state cannon shots that graphically thundered a change in philosophy. In his prolonged absence, the reaction caused by proslavery aggression gave the radicals of the Free-Soil party the unchallenged ascendency. Acts of violence in the next few years were the rule while Robinson and moderation were all but shoved aside.
¹²
Even so, the doctor's dedication to freedom was not forgotten, and when the issue had finally been settled and Kansas was admitted to the Union he was in fact awarded the laurel of governor. It was the crowning moment of his life.
¹³

Charles Robinson was sworn in on February 9, 1861, as the first governor of Kansas. Within weeks he found that he had also become a war governor. Although privately he bristled at the sight of treason and revolt in neighboring Missouri, the new head of state stood by his old policy of moderation publicly, and hence the safety of Kansas became his chief concern, not the pillaging of western Missouri.
¹⁴

“If we are careful,” other moderates added, “it strikes us that Kansas will suffer proportionally less than any other State.”
¹⁵
But the radicals, still riding high from the territorial days, would have none of it, and the governor's wishes were once more ignored as the jayhawkers swarmed across the border.

“It is true small parties of secessionists are to be found in Missouri,” argued Robinson to military authorities, “but we have good reason to know that they do not intend to molest Kansas in force.” If the jayhawkers could be forced from the line, he pleaded, peace might yet be restored and then, the governor confidently announced, “I will guarantee Kansas from invasion.”
¹⁶
His entreaties were to no avail.

Later that year, incensed at what they termed his cowardice—yet in truth, Robinson was the last check to their designs on the border and political primacy in Kansas—a smear campaign was whipped up by the radicals and efforts were made to unseat him. Then, early in 1862, articles of impeachment were handed down against the state auditor, the secretary of state, and finally, against the governor himself. The charge was “high misdemeanors” regarding the sale of state bonds—stealing. Although the two cabinet members were found guilty as charged, Robinson was acquitted by a nearly unanimous vote. Nevertheless the odor of guilt by association lingered long after the judgment, and the governor found himself a ruined man.

At the end of his two-year term, Robinson retreated to his home by the riverside, a pariah in the land of his making. Lawrence and Kansas were more his creation than any other could claim, and
perhaps, deep within a troubled soul, they were the children he was never allowed to sire. Now even the fatherhood of these was denied him. Somewhere amid the broken hopes and shattered dreams of his mind was the faith that healing time would erase the memories of the scandal and enable his comeback. Then, once more, Dr. Charles Robinson could assume the position in Kansas he so rightfully deserved.

At the river's edge where Massachusetts Street ends, down from the huge liberty pole with its gigantic U.S. flag, construction on the new bridge was under way. One of the workers milling about was Jim O'Neill of Lecompton. Originally from Ireland, he and his large
family were forced out during the famine of 1847, and all chose America as their ark. Much of the clan drifted south, and with war three brothers had entered the Rebel army. O'Neill was an antislavery man, however, and had been all along. He enjoyed his new home on free soil as did his wife and their six small children. Because of the distance, O'Neill chose to live in Lawrence during the work week and return to his family only on weekends.
¹⁷

Across the wide river, brown and deep after heavy rains to the west, the sandy Leavenworth Road led up from the ferry and disappeared into a tall forest. A dozen soldiers were camped here performing guard duty on the Delaware Indian Reserve.

One block east of the liberty pole, on New Hampshire Street, stood the City Hotel. Nathan Stone ran the brown, two-story inn with help from his wife and son and attractive daughter, Lydia.

There were few businesses on New Hampshire, homes mostly, and much was the same with its partner across Massachusetts, Vermont Street. But in the second block of Vermont, on the west side, was the blacksmith and assembly shop of Ralph Dix. A little to the south was Dix's three-story home. The lower level of the house was used as a work place for the business, while the family—Dix, his wife, Getta, their children, and the three Dix brothers, all from Connecticut—lived on the upper floors. Adjoining the building on the south was a tiny barber shop, and one door further was the second-best hotel in Lawrence, the Johnson House.

Ben Johnson was one of the town's more strident abolitionists. He was also a man who split no hairs when it came to who he liked and who he allowed in his hotel. Last year, learning that a number of Missouri property hunters had signed his registry, the irate innkeeper collared the startled men and kicked them into the street, a sight that gave everyone a good round of laughs. If you're from Missouri, and you're looking for strayed property, “give the Johnson House a wide berth,” chuckled editor John Speer.
¹⁸

For quite some time now the white-plastered hotel had been a notorious Red Leg hangout where George Hoyt and his boys drank and “raised hell” between trips to the border. None were here today though, and only a dozen guests or so were in their rooms, riding out the torrid midday heat.

Directly across the street was the pretty, whitewashed Methodist Church.

Sundown comes earlier to Lawrence than to the rest of Kansas, one-half hour earlier. Mount Oread ensures this. In the evening the shadow from the hill crosses and cools the town, and the beauty of
sunset is captured each dusk in the cottonwoods across the river, glinting strawberry-gold.

Five blocks west of the Eldridge, through the Central Park and over a short bridge spanning the deep, wooded ravine, at the limits of the city sat the spacious home of Dr. Jerome Griswold.

Dr. Griswold, a curly haired, husky man, and his wife, Ellen, were just returning this evening from a long trip east. And the house they returned to was a house of friends as well as of guests. Three other
families boarded with the Griswolds: Mr. and Mrs. Harlow Baker, newspaperman Josiah Trask and his wife, and State Senator and Mrs. Simeon Thorp.

A block south of Griswold's, close by a large cornfield, stood the finest home in Lawrence, the Lane mansion.

There had never been anyone quite like him before, and most Kansans supposed there would never be anyone quite like him after. He was “heroic,” he was the “devil incarnate.” He was the “liberator of Kansas,” he was a “thorough bred demagogue.” He was at once generous, loving, caring, even “saintly.” He was at once a murderer, a liar, an adulterer, “as bad a man as they make 'em.” He was anything, he was everything, but to his numerous friends, even to a few of his yet more numerous enemies, he was known simply and aptly as “one of our things.” He was Senator James Henry Lane, the “humble servant of the people.”
¹⁹

Jim Lane blew into Kansas one fine day in 1855, and whatever small chance there had been for a peaceful solution to the territorial issue quickly went up in smoke. Although he announced shortly after arriving that he would “just as soon buy a nigger as a mule,” Lane saw the shape of things to come and wasted no time in joining the free-soil cause.
²⁰

Vying with Charles Robinson from the first for control of the free-state forces, the sandy-haired scrambler could at once be all things to all men at all times. Part whoremaster, part: camp evangelist, after taking the measure of an audience Lane had the uncanny ability to hold, mold, bend, and sweep it to such fantastic lengths that normally sane, sober-minded men rattled “like a field of reeds shaken in the wind.” One wild moment he might blow thunder and hell fire at slavery and Missouri while he twisted and trembled with excitement, flinging down a coat, then a vest, then a tie, pausing just long enough to roll up his sleeves and, as if it were a whitehot poker, move a long, crooked finger slowly and threateningly over the torchlit crowd. A moment later, while listeners elbowed forward and strained to catch every word, “Jeems” might humor and toy with his audience and in a hissing, hoarse whisper carry on ribaldly about women or his “humble” Indiana childhood. Then, just as the crowd relaxed with this new theme, a chilling scream—“Great God!”—would shatter the night air and slam the audience back to earth.

“He talked like none of the others,” said a spellbound listener. “None of the rest had his husky, rasping, blood-curdling whisper or that menacing forefinger, or could shriek ‘Great God!' on the same day with him.”
²¹

Because he said the things Kansans wanted to hear in the raw and earthy way they wanted to hear it, Lane soon became a feature attraction. Quiet, pragmatic Robinson was never such a pleaser, and consequently the more excitable, impressionable—unfortunately, the vast majority in Kansas—flocked to the Grim Chieftain's camp. Eventually, a simmering dislike between the faction leaders bubbled into a boiling hatred—Robinson was for patience and peace; Lane for action and war.

And when that war he so feverishly worked for finally came in 1861, Lane lost no time in urging utter destruction on Missouri and slavery. Kansans needed but little prodding to assail the old foe, and advice from their newly elected senator and close friend of Abe Lincoln was merely icing on the cake. Some men, notably the moderates and Governor Robinson, pleaded with fellow Kansans to remain at their farms and shops and let well enough alone. But these were the sage minority, and amid the mad cheers for Lane their voices were all but drowned out as the border war he demanded began.
²²

The opportunity for the senator to exhibit his martial prowess, to “play hell with Missouri,” as he styled it, came that autumn as Gen. Sterling Price marched through Missouri and briefly threatened Kansas. When the Rebels finally moved on, “General” Lane and his “smart little army” of fifteen hundred jayhawkers crept behind in their wake, supposedly to harry Price's rear and slow his movements. In truth, the army was little more than a mob of thieves and adventurers who immediately began treating themselves to the spoils of war.
²³
At Osceola, a beautiful, bustling city along the Osage, the Kansans scattered a tiny band of Rebels, then broke ranks and got down to business. Stores were looted, safes emptied, homes, barns, and warehouses were torched, horses and mules rounded up, even the tobacco-chewing chaplain Hugh Fisher went to work on local churches. Reportedly, Lane's share of the booty, which included silk dresses, a piano, and $13,000 snatched from the hands of a widow, topped everyone's.
²⁴
Later that day, with all that Osceola had to give loaded into wagons and carriages—including 300 jayhawkers too drunk to sit in the saddle—Lane and his men marched off to new fields of conquest.