Three summers in Kansas, and Adam Cabot still had not adjusted. He started his mornings as he had in Boston, early and brisk, but by ten o’clock the sun had baked him dry. He rose early and campaigned hard, a foolish move, he knew, but an impulse he couldn’t shake. Running for office meant visiting homes, shaking hands, arguing over ideas. He couldn’t campaign from the safety of Lecompton; if he was going to be Leavenworth’s representative to the constitutional convention, he needed to know the people of Leavenworth.
His friends warned him of the danger, but he’d been living with danger ever since he crossed into slave territory in the spring of ‘54 with fifty fellow abolitionists and a dozen wagons of supplies, each with a crate of Beecher’s Bibles hidden under a false bottom. They’d stayed off the main roads through Missouri, crossing in the far north where the proslavery sentiment was not as strong.
Once in Kansas, most of the men headed toward the Free-Soil settlements farther south, but Cabot stayed in Leavenworth; the town was booming, and it felt like a place where a man could do some good. That was all he’d asked when the Anti-Slavery Society had called for volunteers to emigrate to Kansas, volunteers who would tip the scales against slavery by the simple weight of their bodies—to do some good. He had no skill with plow or ax. All he had was the freedom of youth, a college degree, and a desire to fight the great evil.
He had grown up in world where a certain amount of mild abolitionism was acceptable, even expected, as long as one kept it under control. It was fashionable to attend the lectures and to express one’s outrage, but one stayed to the back of the hall and watched the loons try to shout each other down. One evening, though, Cabot had gone to see the famous William Lloyd Garrison, and something about the man’s manner—his knife-edged precision of speech; his eyes, magnified by rimless spectacles, giving his gaze a strange, luminous, penetration; the curious contrast between his mild, intellectual appearance and the vehemence of his opinions—captured his imagination. He stayed after the speech to introduce himself.
“How can I help your cause?” he stammered.
Garrison’s gaze flickered over him as if he were choosing fish at the market. “What are your capabilities, young man?”
Cabot was taken aback. “I can write. I can—” He stopped, uncertain.
A smile crossed the man’s thin lips. “Harvard boy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, perhaps you can write, then. Do you have money?”
“Some,” he said, blushing. “Not much.”
“A Harvard boy with no money! You are a rarity.”
“Some of my classmates are going into politics. Perhaps—”
Garrison interrupted him. “Politics! The art of compromise. How does one compromise? Make a man part slave? Perhaps only the right arm is enslaved, and the rest of the body free? No, my well-wishing friend, do not embrace politics. The Declaration of Independence is whistling wind, and the Constitution is the devil’s document.” He broke off abruptly, gathering his papers and turning to the door. “But you must excuse me. I speak at Uxbridge tomorrow.”
Over his shoulder, he called, “Write something for The Liberator. We’ll see if we can use you.”
“What shall I write?”
Garrison paused, a look of amusement crossing his face. “Write an account of this lecture. I was planning to do it myself. We shall see whose is better.”
The next week, it was Garrison’s account of his lecture that appeared in The Liberator’s pages, but by then Cabot was committed. Throughout his youth and college years, he had intended—what? He had never been sure. A career in the ministry, perhaps; or law, like his father; or a comfortable spot in business somewhere. But now he had a cause, something larger than himself, and devoting himself to it gave him a sense of meaning he had never known. He spent his days at The Liberator office and his nights at anti-slavery meetings. Old friends from parties and dances dropped away; new friends, earnest people with vigorous ideas and a penchant for argument, came into his life. And when the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed Congress, with its provision for popular sovereignty in the territories, Cabot saw a chance to act on his beliefs.
After the first territorial election, when Missourians swarmed across the border to send a slavery man to Congress, Cabot understood Garrison’s words. Politics was a game for reasonable men, and Kansas was no place to be reasonable. Cabot did not have it in his nature to join the fighters, unlike those hollow-eyed fanatics he had come to the territory with, so he sought to be useful within the range of his talents. He wrote East for a Washington press and labored to learn typesetting, eking out pamphlets, broadsides, and a four-sheet newspaper when he could manage it. He filed for office and rode the trails west and north, encouraging the settlers to come out and vote for him. A quixotic move and likely dangerous, given the last election, but at least he saw himself as a part of the making of history rather than a bystander to its creation.
The road from Easton was stony and bare, and the lowering sun burned on his back. Sweat stung his eyes. With a full day of campaigning behind him, both he and his mare needed water and rest. He patted her flank and thought of the creek ford a couple of miles ahead, where the shade of a birch grove and hazel bushes offered a good place to pause and maybe even nap.
At the bottom of a small ravine, a man sat on the ground under a blanket draped over two sticks to keep off the sun, his horse tethered to a bush. He stood up as Cabot neared. The man didn’t appear armed, but something about him made Cabot suspicious.
“Hello, friend,” the man said.
“Trouble? Horse gone lame?”
The man was thin and bearded, dressed in a greasy linen shirt that had once been white and a pair of buckskin leggings that were down to a couple of strands of fringe. He gazed down the road where Cabot had come. “No,” he said after a while. “I just stopped to think.”
“I’ll not disturb you, then.”
“I was thinking about this road,” the man continued. “How far you think this road goes?”
Then there was not one man but five, the others stepping out from the thicket on the other side of the road with leveled rifles. Cabot realized that no one in Kansas stopped to think on a summer afternoon.
“Get down,” the man said, his voice suddenly hard. Cabot did as he was told. “What’s your name, friend?”
“Charles Adams,” Cabot said.
“Never heard of you. Ever hear of him, boys?”
Cabot’s throat was parched. He could hear his heart beating in his ears.
“Where you from, Mr. Adams?”
“Leavenworth.” Short answers—hide the Boston accent.
“No, before Leavenworth. Ain’t nobody from Leavenworth to start with.”
“Cincinnati.” Anywhere but New England.
“You one of them seminary boys from Cincinnati? Jim Lane’s seminary?”
Cabot tried to laugh, but his mouth was so dry it came out as a cough. “No seminary for me.”
“Boys, let’s toss this man in the wagon and take him up to the shed,” the man said. “We’ll see about this Cincinnati rooster.”
“Alive or dead?” said one of the other men.
“Oh, alive,” said the leader with a wave of his hand. “Tie him up and hand me them saddlebags.”
Cabot found himself in a split-log shed a hundred yards off the road, blinking in the darkness as the men rifled through his possessions.
“How do you like Kansas, Mr.—what’d you say your name was?” the leader asked.
“Adams.”
“Right.”
“I’d like it better if I could travel in peace.”
The man ignored him as he sorted Cabot’s belongings. Bread, ham, coins, some notes on debts to be paid—and, Cabot recalled with a chill, his battered copy of Emerson, with a letter from his parents tucked in to save his place.
“Doff your hats, boys, we have a celebrated man among us,” the man called out. “Our friend here is Adam Cabot, candidate for the constitutional convention—from the Free-Soil Party.”
The men sent up a derisive cheer.
“I’ll not be intimidated by violence and threats,” Cabot choked out.
“Oh, we ain’t going to intimidate you,” the man said. “We’re going to tar-and-feather you. Then we’re going to take you down to the square in front of the Leavenworth House. And then we’re going to hang you.”