Sara Robinson

Bleeding Kansas: From the Kansas-Nebraska Act to Harpers Ferry

In 1859, John Brown, a settler from Kansas Territory, invaded the state of Virginia with plans to raid the Harpers Ferry arsenal and incite a slave rebellion. Among his small band of insurgents were several young men who had also carried out vigilante violence in Kansas in hopes of abolishing slavery in that territory. The raid itself failed, and those who did not escape or die in the raid were later executed, including John Brown.

Nicole Etcheson

Ball State University

Leavenworth Constitution

By Marc Reyes, University of Connecticut

With language echoing the Declaration of Independence, the future state of Kansas considered the unprecedented measure of extending equal rights of citizenship to black males. Serving as an early example of Brandeisian thinking, wherein states, or in this case a territory, function as “laboratories of democracy,” the delegates who gathered in Leavenworth, Kansas, placed the enfranchisement of black males up for consideration a full decade before the federal government enacted the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Robinson, Sara Tappan Doolittle Lawrence

By Deborah Keating, University of Missouri-Kansas City

Following the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, Sara T.D. Robinson, and her husband, Charles, were two affiliates of the New England Emigrant Aid Company who accepted the challenge of settling in Kansas Territory to counter proslavery efforts and ensure that Kansas entered the Union as a free state. Sara brought her considerable talents as persuasive chronicler to the abolitionist fight and used her pen to document life in the new territory. Observant and articulate, she recorded her experience in Kansas: Its interior and Exterior Life, published in 1856.

Robinson, Charles

By Christopher Phillips, University of Cincinnati

Charles Robinson was raised by abolitionist parents, attended Amherst College, and then studied and practiced medicine. Later, Robinson was appointed a Kansas agent of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, became the extra-legal Free-State governor of Kansas Territory, and eventually the official governor of the state of Kansas in 1861.

Kansas: Its Interior and Exterior Life Published

Wed, 10/01/1856

Sara Robinson, an abolitionist associated with the New England Emigrant Aid Company and wife of Dr. Charles Robinson, writes Kansas: Its Interior and Exterior Life, a book that describes the early violence of the Bleeding Kansas era.