As I spend time in Lawrence, I thought I might offer some personal comments about the historical significance of the city, more the whole county. At the time of the creation of the American Constitution, European colonialism was economically using and was morally flawed by the existence of slavery. Most Europeans understood the inherent evil slavery represented, and efforts were being made to eliminate the practice. In 1789, the British Empire abolished trade in slaves and moved towards ending slavery altogether. However the final great chapter was to play itself out in the newly formed nation of the United States.
The founding Fathers were all well aware of the moral repugnancy of slavery, but the Southern representatives, especially the Virginians had their economic well being interlocked with the continuation of the "peculiar institution." The problem should have been solved during the Constitutional Convention, but the delegates didn't have the moral fortitude, and made a dreadful compromise, dooming the new nation to future tragedy.
It is ironic that it was one of the Virginian presidents who put into motion the unraveling of the Mephistophelean flaw in the Constitution. Jefferson, acting entirely unconstitutionally, acquired for the United States the right to expand as far the Pacific Ocean. He purchased this right to land that was not the seller's to sell considering the seller really didn't own it; but that is another story. The purchase triggered the western expansion of the new nation.
The original constitutional compromise had been dependent on a balance between slave and free states. If the nation was going to expand and add states in the West, this balance was doomed. Life in the West was not going to care about slavery. Most settlers were certainly not some sort of idealists, though some very much were; most were simply too involved with the rigors of survival in a hostile environment and their values were more concentrated on independent fortitude and skill then on issues of social standing or skin color. Without interference the western population favored freedom. The South understood this and as the first American century unfolded, the South felt increasingly under siege. Several Federal laws were passed to try to keep the status quo, but after the last of these, the Kansas Nebraska Act, it all crashed. States north of the border between Kansas and Nebraska were to be free states, Kansas which everyone assumed would be a slave state was to determine by vote which it wanted to be. The Civil War was inevitable.
It is in Douglas County that all this came to a head. Free staters and slave staters poured into the Kansas Territory to influence the future of the new state. The first territorial capital was founded by slave sympathizers at Lecompton. Abolitionists founded the competing town of Lawrence next door. John Brown, the ardent abolitionist, came to Kansas to influence the outcome by any means possible. Missouri pro-slave advocates poured in to impose their views; and it all broke into open bloodshed.
The conflict between Brown's abolitionist forces from Lawrence and the incoming Missourians is considered by many historians the real opening of the Civil War. The events, the Wakarusa War, the Pottawatomie Massacre, the Battle of Black Jack,the writing of the Lecompton Constitution, the debate in the US House of Representatives about accepting Kansas as a slave state, the Battle of Osawatomie, all polarized opinions in the nation.Compromise became impossible. Douglas County, Kansas had shown that the great original sin in the Constitution was going to have to eradicated with blood.
The war was guaranteed by the election of a western, self educated, log splitting, small town lawyer from Illinois to the Presidency of the United States. His election would never had happened had not the events in Kansas completely split and crippled the established political structure in the nation. The West was the future and war the price the nation was to pay.
Pictures from Lecompton Constitution Hall
