On the Town:
From the Life and Opinions of Sam Wood, with Commentary (I)

THE HIGH-NOON WAGON

 

This is happening in north-central Ohio in 1849, and the young white man coming down the road in his four-horse wagon is about to put his cargo and himself at risk with a dangerous and rash yet logical boldness, but the young schoolteacher he is soon to meet—who will be standing in front of the small farmhouse with the decorative tomato plants (she knows them to be poisonous)—will say some forty years later when she lives in Cottonwood Falls, Kansas, I think if I could have looked forward and seen what was in the future, I should have shrunk from it.

It is nearly noon, and the dust rises from the slow revolution of the wagon wheels as they press into the road from the burden lying covered by canvas. Sometimes the canvas moves as the load shifts, and sometimes it speaks softly to curse the road or the entrapped heat, and after every curse comes a shushing, and the burden goes still and jostles on another mile, mute and motionless. The young driver, as if addressing his team, calls a word of encouragement, and he sits surprisingly relaxed as if he wished for an encounter, a confrontation that will draw life right to the edge. The wagon jolts, the burden grumbles, and the driver calls, Steady! as if the horses were doing other than plodding in sweating silence. A man can be hanged for carrying such cargo, freightage most carriers transport only in the dead of night.

Then: five horsemen, armed, ride up to block the wagon. They are hunting runaway slaves who have crossed the Ohio River and are heading north. One of the riders, the largest, says in a calm that reveals sureness and strength, What’ve you got in that there wagon? The driver turns to look at his humped cargo as if to remind himself, and then he faces directly into the squint of the big horseman and says, I got me here a load of runaway niggers. The riders are used to men quailing before them, and such effrontery is a surprise. One aims a pistol at the canvas and pretends to shoot it, and the men laugh and ride away, and the wagon rolls on, and the burden remains dead-still. It is not the last time the driver will speak the truth and be taken for a liar.

The wagon groans up into the yard of William Lyon, whose farmhouse is a station on the Ohio underground railroad. Lyon, a Presbyterian, has been called before a session of his church for his abolitionist work. He knows the wagon driver, Samuel Newitt Wood, twenty-four years old, a Quaker whose parents are also fervid abolitionists; Wood is not a large fellow, weighing but 130 pounds, handsome in a boyish way, his hair deeply brown and thick; he habitually fixes his gaze on people and evaluates them so intensely that he unnerves them. He looks at Lyon’s petite and pretty daughter: her hair parted and drawn back, she stands beside the tomato plants with the lovely fruit she is afraid to eat. Her father uncovers the sweating burden of ten blacks and hurries them from the wagon, out of the high-noon sun and into hiding, and he comments on the risk of transporting runaways in daylight, but Wood believes in frontal challenge and the logic of the unexpected. He is a man whose conscience is not a shield but a weapon. The daughter, Margaret, a relative of Stephen Foster, hums as if her mind is far, far away and not listening to Wood tell of facing down the slavers with a misunderstood truth that saved him and the blacks. Years later in Chase County, she will tell her granddaughter, I said to myself, there’s a brave man—and a smart one. I’ll catch him if I can.

 

First Commentary In May of 1854, Congress passed the Kansas Nebraska bill, which repealed the 1820 Missouri Compromise, legislation permitting that state to draw up a pro-slavery constitution while outlawing slavery north of about the thirty-sixth latitude. The Kansas-Nebraska Act permitted settlers of those two territories to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery, Congress assuming Nebraska would become free soil and Kansas, heavily influenced by neighboring Missouri, would go to the pro-slavery faction, thereby keeping a national balance between North and South. Thomas Jefferson’s firebell in the night was ringing again, and this time it would not go silent until eleven years later at Appomattox Court House, Virginia.

 

THE SAM CLOON

 

This is in Mount Gilead, Ohio, 1854: one evening Sam Wood comes home to Margaret, his wife of four years, and their two sons. He works in a law office and is about to be admitted to the bar. Although he has only a common-school education, he has discovered he can get on a porch or stump and make speeches that people will listen to, his command of anecdote more useful than rhetorical flourishes. He is a mixture of fire and frost, passion and logic, impulsiveness and vision, and he can at once mock and take mockery. He likes politics and spends much time campaigning for antislavery candidates, and he has little interest in leaving for the California goldfields as others here are doing; Margaret says, Always he is reading, studying, trying to get new ideas of government.

This evening he comes home and begins talking about the Kansas-Nebraska bill and how he sees it as a federally sanctioned means to extend slavery into the West, and then he says without warning, As soon as that bill is passed, I’m going to Kansas, and Margaret sits quietly, not surprised really, and she knows that she must always expect things like this from Sam Wood, and she knows that, while he likes jokes that flush into the open a person’s character, he is not joking now. He asks, What will you do? She understands what he wants her to say, and she realizes he does not want to take her from the safety of Ohio to the tall prairie country of the border ruffians along the Missouri-Kansas line, just now the most dangerous place in the nation. Their boys are one and two years old. Margaret says, If you’re going, then I’m going too.

On the thirtieth of May, President Pierce signs the bill, and one week later Sam and Margaret and sons have sold out and are in a wagon headed for Cincinnati: of that June morning, Margaret will say later, The birds sang and the flowers bloomed, and the long, slender branches of the beeches seemed waving a farewell as the little family passed, going to the front, where the forces of freedom and slavery were soon to be marshaled for mortal combat.

At Cincinnati the family boards the steamboat Sultana for Louisville, where they change for passage to Missouri. (Nine years later the Sultana will sink in the Mississippi and drown more than fifteen hundred prisoners of war just released from Andersonville and Cahaba prisons.) The going is easy. At St. Louis they get on a crowded packet, the Sam Cloon, and head up the dark Missouri. Passengers at first talk about the dangers—snags and sawyers and sandbars—but, once well under way, they speak of their expectations. Aboard is a contingent of Mormons heading for Kanesville, Iowa, where they will start their thousand-mile walk to the new settlement on the Great Salt Lake. Margaret watches after the boys, and Sam is all about, strolling on board almost as many miles as the boat travels up the Missouri, and especially he questions the Mormon leader, Orson Pratt, one of Joseph Smith’s twelve apostles and his intellectual editor and proselytizer, sometimes called the gauge of philosophy, who is doing for Mormons what Wood wants to do for the Free State cause. He asks Pratt many questions about the western country.

Word comes that three passengers are ill, and, within hours, more travelers develop headaches and diarrhea, and they vomit often, bringing up something that looks like rice water, a fearful and telltale sign. Their thirsts are unquenchable, they become holloweyed, their skin wrinkles as if they were aging a year for every half hour, and their legs cramp, and the contractions move up to their arms and hands, and they collapse, and some slip into comas. Within hours of his first symptoms, a man dies, and then another. The passengers begin to panic, clamoring to be let off the death boat, but the river towns do not let such packets dock. Only two men are both hale and bold enough to aid the sick: Orson Pratt, who has encountered the disease on the overland trail, and Sam Wood, who has never seen cholera. He holds the head of a woman, wipes her forehead, gives her water, but she dies before him, and he moves to help another traveler. No one has the prescribed cholera medicines: pills-compounded of opium, camphor, cayenne pepper, and calomel, or a rectal injection solution of sugar of lead, laudanum, and gum arabic. By the time the Sam Cloon reaches Independence, some of the ill have begun to recover, and Sam and Margaret and sons are well and now baptized in the dangerous waters of the border country.

 

Second Commentary Across the border from Westport, Missouri, Sam Wood began reconnoitering in Kansas. Day after day he encountered pro-slavery ruffians who told stories of maimed and lynched abolitionists trying to take up residence in the territory, a place now called Bleeding Kansas even before John Brown’s arrival. Sam, young and ignorant of the frontier, for a while kept his peace and listened to the rant and bully of the border ruffians, and he continued exploring. Some forty miles from Westport, well into Kansas, he climbed a huge, flattish, treeless hill and looked over the country: below, cutting a broad and backward S across the prairie lay the Oregon Trail, then called the California Road, and where it passed close to the Kaw River was a lone and unfinished log house that would soon be the first building in Lawrence; the great hill, Mount Oread, was to become the campus of Kansas University. Three miles west of the lone cabin, Wood took a claim on the California Road below the hill and set up a “house” with a roof of prairie hay and walls made from blankets and wagon-top canvas.

The family had been in the territory less than a month when Sam began writing letters to eastern newspapers to encourage settlement by opponents of slavery, people who could counter immigrants the pro-slavery men were pushing into Kansas. He continually appealed to a person’s sense of justice and desire to make a profitable new life. He concluded one letter to Washington, D.C.: Say to free men, “Come on, secure a home, and assist in this great struggle between Slavery and Freedom!” He castigated the Methodist Shawnee Mission near Westport for the hypocrisy of trying to Christianize Indians while keeping Negro slaves; and, always, he talked the practical facts of Kansas: soils, minerals, climate, diseases, and he listed boat fares and claim fees, and he called for somebody to bring a printing press. He said:

 

Emigrants must expect to meet some hardships. We have no fine houses to receive you in; everything is inconvenient yet; settlers are generally of the right kind, with pioneer hearts. Society is good; we are all sociable, accommodating, and the person who now has the will, and meets these difficulties, and gets his choice of the land, will never regret it. Were I in Ohio today, with my knowledge of Kansas, I should lose no time in coming here, pitching my tent, building a cabin, and preparing for living. Understand me, I urge no one to come; for, as in all new countries, many chicken-hearted ones will get home-sick and leave. But if you have made up your minds and are coming, now is the time.

 

Wood’s letters and his increasing unwillingness to keep silent in front of ruffians made him notorious only weeks after arriving, and the pro-slavery secret societies, called Blue Lodges, began talking about him as trouble, and to this dark and dangerous fame he became addicted.

 

ELI THAYER AND LEMONADE

 

Sam Wood is returning from Westport, that ruffian cockpit, where he goes once a week to get supplies and mail and to read the eastern newspapers. This morning he heard men speak in anger about Eli Thayer of Massachusetts and his New England Emigrant Aid Company that is beginning to promote anti-slavery settlement of Kansas. East of the Wakarusa River, really a creek, Sam loses his light on the way home and pulls up to make camp. He builds a fire, eats a small meal, and, to amuse himself, he peels a square in the trunk of an old elm, and he carves:

 

ELI THAYER CLAIMS 20 MI SQ
THIS THE CENTER
FOR EMIGRANT AID SOCIETY

 

When he returns to Westport days later, he hears rumors that Thayer is in the territory and staking out land. With Daniel Anthony, his abolitionist friend, Wood stops in a grocery for a cup of water. A half-dozen armed men lounge about the store, one of them near a handbill offering a thousand dollars for the capture of Thayer, dead or alive. Wood reads aloud the poster and asks the men, Do you endorse this? and they say they do, and he asks, Would you arrest Thayer if you could find him? You goddamn bet, they say. Well, says Sam, you can make a thousand dollars very easily, and he places his hands on his eight-inch revolvers, and he says, I am Eli Thayer—take me if you can. The ruffians straighten but no one steps forward, and Wood and a dumbfounded Anthony leave.

As stories of Sam’s provocations spread, especially after he throws to the floor a large ruffian blocking his exit from the Westport post office, some of his fellow abolitionists find the Quaker’s behavior uncharacteristic and threatening to a peaceful settlement. On a later summer trip to Westport, Wood loses his friend Roff, and goes in search and finds him in a saloon. Sam steps to the bar and orders lemonade for the sixteen men there, and they come up to drink, and he says, My apologies for treating you only to lemonade, but I never drink anything stronger. Still, I claim the right to propose a toast, and the men assent. Roff is getting edgy knowing Wood is up to something, and Sam raises his glass and says, Here’s to Kansas and a Free State! Roff looks at the surprised men, and then they all cheer.

Soon after, Wood writes to the National Era in Washington:

 

I was much mistaken in the character of the Missourians. A few fanatics, who were resolved to extend slavery at all hazards, seem for the time being to give tone to the whole people; but a better acquaintance convinces me that a great majority of the people condemn the violent resolutions of Westport and other places. But the die is cast. Westport will be another Alton. Blood is in her heart. . . .

“Do you apprehend any serious difficulty with the slaveholders?” is frequently asked. I answer, no; although they have boasted and threatened much, yet they are not fools, and well know the shedding of Northern blood to sustain slavery here, would raise a storm that would end only with slavery itself. Northern men need not fear; all they have to do, is to be true to themselves, and not, coward-like, knuckle to the demands of these slaveholders, and padlock their lips, and “wait till the proper time to meet the question.” Now is the proper time—now is the time that slaveholders are moving heaven and earth to establish slavery here; and now is the time, like men, we should meet them, and not, like cowards, cry, “Hush, be quiet; don’t agitate the question now; wait till we are stronger.”

 

Third Commentary Sam Wood left his claim on the California Road, and that autumn in Lawrence he built a home of split timber—the first frame house in town—albeit only fourteen by sixteen feet (but having a wooden floor), a single room with a loft and a narrow stair that bowed under a climber. As all their homes would be the rest of their life together, the Woods’ place was the ganglion of radical activity, and in this little house (on what is today Massachusetts Street, the main thoroughfare of Lawrence) as many as twenty people might be bedded down, and Sam’s invitations were for a night, a week, a month, or what suited the traveler. The place became a station on the Kansas underground railroad: one evening a woman, escaping from a slaver down on the Marais des Cygnes River, came in, her back torn as if it were old muslin, her exhaustion her only analgesic; Margaret Wood treated the welts and lacerations, and she wept at the woman’s agony, and she said, Oh God, what would I do if this were my sister?

Sam practiced a little law (defense counsel in the first murder trial in the territory), became justice of the peace, speculated in real estate as did the other town founders, and he joined John Speer in operating the Kansas Tribune, the first of seven newspapers he would own or edit, all of them, like their competition, primarily defenders of political and economic views; Wood attacked opponents with a rough sarcasm and sometimes facts, and from them he received the same with added flam and outright bangers. Accused of this and that, he usually ignored lies, overlooked his adversaries picturing him a treasonous, grafting coward: but even today Kansans have not yet sifted the truth of his contributions from the twaddle of lesser men who publicly reviled him.

Throughout his life, Sam Wood was relentless and bold in his beliefs, first opposing slavery, later advocating universal suffrage, and always fighting political graft; for a third of a century he was probably the most contentious man in eastern Kansas (Margaret once said were he locked in a room alone, he’d have a dispute with himself), yet, forever a believer in judicial process, he was never a hater, never a John Brown. A few years before his death Wood challenged the local nineteenth-century opinion of the man:

 

I now give it my deliberate judgment that John Brown never did any good in Kansas; that we would have been better off if he had never come to the state. His object was war, not peace. It was his constant aim to produce a collision between the Free State men and the government, which would have wiped us out in Kansas as effectually as he and his band were wiped out in [West] Virginia. There cannot be any question to a man who knew Brown as I did, that he was crazy or rather had that religious delusion that he was another Gideon, or rather, a chosen instrument in the hands of God to accomplish a great work. He died as the fool dieth, and for one I was willing to let his soul go marching on. But to have him thrust down this generation as ever being of any benefit to Kansas is an insult to the men who made Kansas free.

 

MOONLIGHT RIFLES
AND GUNPOWDER GIRDLES

 

Ten miles south of Lawrence, Monday afternoon, November, 1855: some ninety men mill around the cabin of Franklin Coleman, a proslavery emigrant who has shot in the back his neighbor Charles Dow, a Free State man; the body has lain in the dirt most of the day, and Coleman has been taken into friendly custody by a zealous proslavery postmaster, Samuel “Bogus” Jones, recently appointed sheriff by authority the Free Soilers do not recognize. (A contemporary, John Gihon, described Bogus: His complexion is cadaverous and his features irregular and unprepossessing. His eye is small, and when in repose, dull and unmeaning.)

The crowd moils, yells threats, calls for retribution, and someone throws a torch against the cabin. Sam Wood and others smother the flames, and Wood climbs onto Coleman’s fence and shouts to the men: Arson and murder are the avocations of our enemies! You all know that any house here is too scarce to be burned! Don’t disgrace this meeting! Don’t burn the house! Do you agree? There are still calls for a torching, but other voices shout down arson, and the crowd begins to disperse though unsatisfied. It is clear the Kansas troubles are a bed of dry tinder.

Wood then heads toward Lawrence but his pony gives out, so he stops at Jim Abbott’s to rest it. While they are at supper, a rider comes in and says Bogus Jones and a ruffian posse are moving toward the Wakarusa to arrest Jacob Branson, who has retrieved Dow’s body and threatened Coleman’s pro-slavery friends. Wood and Abbott must walk a half mile to get fresh horses, and then they take off to warn Branson, but it’s too late: the posse has him, and Wood thinks the old man will be executed. In search, he and Abbott ride into the dark prairie but cannot pick up any traces, and they return to Abbott’s, where the messenger has gathered thirteen men. They open a box of eight Sharps rifles and load them; three of the Free Soilers have no guns. About two in the morning, someone hears the sound of horses far down the road, and the men hurry into the night to block the lane, and the unarmed ones take from Abbott’s woodpile heavy sticks that they hope will pass for rifles in the moonlight. The posse rides up but sees the trap too late and cannot shy around the lines. With much cursing, Bogus calls out, What’s up! and Wood answers, That’s what we’d like to know! and asks whether Branson is there, and Bogus says he has the prisoner, and Wood calls to the old man, If you want to be among your friends, come over here! The posse threatens to shoot Branson, and a Free Stater shouts, Shoot and be damned! and Wood says, Gentlemen, fire one gun at Mister Branson, and not a man of you will be left alive. The old fellow rides cautiously over and dismounts, and Wood takes the bridle of the mule and gives it a whack and says, Go back to your friends.

The sheriff shouts, My name is Jones, and I have a warrant to arrest old man Branson! and Wood calls, We know of no Sheriff Jones in Kansas—we only know of a postmaster in Missouri named Jones. Bogus says he has a warrant, and Wood answers, If you must arrest him, go at it. I’m Branson’s attorney. Let me see the warrant. Jones says he does not need to show it. Six more Free State men ride up and shift the balance, and the Kansans move away with Branson, leaving Bogus (John Gihon will say later) mad with anger and loudly vaporing in the road. Jones goes off to report to the governor that open rebellion has begun.

The next day in Lawrence, Wood’s action alarms some citizens and they are reluctant to endorse it, hoping to avoid giving any pretext for a long-threatened attack on the town. Wood volunteers to get arrested in order to try in the Supreme Court the right of Missouri to make laws for Kansas Territory. The citizens meet and reject Sam’s idea; Jacob Branson offers to leave the area, but they say no to that also. Wood points out that the rescue was bloodless, but a Boston immigrant says, I guess the tea’s been dumped into the harbor again. The townsmen talk and finally draft a wordy and Latinate resolution protesting the lack of properly constituted law in the territory and pledging themselves to resistance.

Over the next five days, more than two thousand armed proslavers come into Kansas, a large number of them surround Lawrence, and the residents begin digging trenches and drilling in ranks. On a December afternoon, Lois Brown, wife of the editor of the Herald of Freedom, visits Margaret Wood in the little slab-sided house. Jim Lane, leader of the defenders, comes in most disturbed about the small ammunition supply, and Mrs. Brown says her father has hidden a keg of powder on his place twelve miles south on the Santa Fe Road. But Lane knows, even at night, men cannot get through the blockade. Lois and Margaret volunteer to go.

The next morning the women put knitting and a large medical book in their baskets, and they climb into a little one-horse cracky wagon and set off accompanied by soldiers to the edge of town, and the ladies head south past the ruffian camps. Two miles along, pickets halt them and ask questions, and Lois inquires how to find a Mr. Burge, a pro-slaver living near her father, and the riders give directions and let them proceed. The women move slowly, stopping only to pick up an empty whiskey bottle they plan to fill with milk.

Mrs. Brown’s mother feeds them a meal and gives them two pillow slips, one of which they load with gunpowder and then tie under Lois’ long and full dress, giving her the roundness of pregnancy. They go on to the Abbott place, scene of the Branson rescue, and wait for a man to unearth a trunk: from it they fill the other pillowcase with more powder and some ammunition. Caps, cartridges, bullet molds, and gun wipes they stuff into pockets, sleeves, and waistbands; bars of lead they slip upright into their heavy stockings. The small women waddle to the wagon, but, gravid with explosives, they are unable to hoist themselves onto the seat and must be lifted up.

They ride back across the Wakarusa and work to resist their impulse to move fast. A few miles out, two scouts stop them, one man taking a position behind them, his rifle at the ready, the other alongside to look into the wagon bed: he finds only knitting, a medical book, and a bottle of milk, and to these young wives obviously in the family way, he says, Excuse me ladies, but we thought you were men, and we have orders to let no man pass this road into Lawrence. The scouts consult, the women moving along slowly, pretending boredom, and then the riders wave and abruptly gallop away; once out of sight, Margaret and Lois can no longer restrain their tension, and they roll fast into Lawrence, and the people come out into Massachusetts Street to cheer them. The ladies must be lifted out of the wagon, and an unknowing fellow will say later, When I saw those women, I just allowed that bustles had come into fashion again for they were swelled out awful. They go inside to shed garments and armaments, and they learn a man has just been killed crossing through the lines.

That night a strong north wind comes up and blows down tents of the ruffians, some of them taking shelter with people they came to fight. The next morning many of them begin packing up, and soon the governor, seeing the resolve and arms of the Free Staters, formally recognizes their militia, and the ruffians withdraw. This so-called Wakarusa War (which some Kansans will later consider the first engagement of the Civil War), with no battle and but a single man shot down, has been precipitated by Sam Wood’s bloodless rescue partly accomplished by moonlight rifles of sticks and helped to conclusion by Margaret’s gunpowder girdle. Having achieved a tottery truce that will soon collapse, the citizens ask Wood to leave for a while, and he walks to Topeka and then goes east to recruit settlers. Sarah Robinson, wife of the future first state governor, writes in her diary:

 

Mrs. Wood, whose husband has ever been most active in the free-state cause, and for whom the enemy feel no little bitterness, has offered her little “shake” cabin, next the hotel, for the general use. Daily and nightly the ladies meet there, in the one room, with its loose open floor, through which the wind creeps, to make cartridges, their nimble fingers keeping time with each heartbeat for freedom, so enthusiastic are they in aiding the defence.