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.”
Less than 40 years after the Civil War, General John G. Haskell, the president of the Kansas Historical Society, described slavery in western Missouri as “a more domestic than commercial institution,” in which the “social habits were those of the farm and not the plantation.” Many of his white contemporaries remembered slavery in a similar way, arguing that conditions were much more favorable on the farms of western Missouri than in the cotton fields of the Deep South.
By Tony O’ Bryan, University of Missouri—Kansas City
When Kansas Territory was opened for settlement in 1854, a number of towns sprang up along the Missouri and Kansas Rivers and each attracted migration and commerce. Some settlements were predominantly proslavery, including Leavenworth, Lecompton, and Atchison, and others were Free-Soil, such as Lawrence, Topeka, and Quindaro.
Growing up in Vermont in the early 19th century, Clarina Howard (Nichols) recognized the need for women’s rights from an early age. Her mother and father taught her values of equality and self-sufficiency that stayed with her throughout her life. In 1828, she attended Timothy Cressy’s Select School in West Townshend, and at the age of 17, she gave her first speech, entitled “Comparative of a Scientific and an Ornamental Education to Females.” While attending school, however, Howard learned the harsh lesson that women in America, no matter how smart or dedicated, were treated as second-class citizens to their male counterparts.
Perhaps the most unique town on the Western Border was Quindaro, Kansas, a town of freed African Americans founded along the banks of the Missouri River northwest of Kansas City, Kansas.
Like its home town, Quindaro, Kansas, the Chindowan newspaper draws its name from a Wyandotte Indian word, in this case meaning "leader." By this time the abolitionist town is established with some three dozen households, most of which are African American.
