Daniel R. Anthony

Seeking the Promised Land: African American Migrations to Kansas

With the promise of freedom and new economic and educational opportunities, Kansas attracted many African Americans in its territorial days, through statehood, and into the 20th century. Slavery existed in the Kansas Territory, but slave holdings were small compared to the South. Many black migrants also came to the territory as hired laborers, while some traveled as escaped slaves through the Underground Railroad. In the 1860s, others joined the Union Army, and some moved from the South in large groups during the Kansas Exodus, a mass migration of freedpeople during the 1870s and 1880s. As a territory that had a long and violent history of pre-Civil War contests over slavery, Kansas emerged as the “quintessential free state” and seemed like a promised land for African Americans who searched for what they called a “New Canaan.”

Kim Warren
University of Kansas

Anthony, Daniel Read

By Claire Wolnisty, Angelo State University

Daniel R. Anthony was a man of strong abolitionist convictions who aggressively voiced his opinions as the postmaster, mayor, and dominant newspaper publisher in Leavenworth, Kansas. While Anthony’s contentious and radical nature isolated some of his contemporaries, he helped shape the territory of Kansas into a free state.

Underground Railroad

By Kim Warren, University of Kansas

In an effort to help runaway slaves escape from slave states to the North and to Canada, white and African American abolitionists established a series of hiding places throughout the country where fugitives could hide during the day and travel under the cover of night. Although runaways tended to travel on foot and trains were rarely employed, all involved referred to the secret network as the “Underground Railroad,” a term which first appeared in literature when Harriet Beecher Stowe referred to a secret “underground” line in her 1852 book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

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