The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

by Jane Smiley

  "Oh, my goodness! Go to bed!"

  It was three a.m. We bedded the boys down on some quilts in the shop and forbade them to leave before morning. Later, when Thomas and I went to bed, he said to me in a low voice, "He knows who shot Jones."

  "How does he know?"

  "He knows. I heard him and Roger whispering about it when I was bringing them home, but when I challenged them, they clammed up."

  "If Roland were here, he would beat it out of him."

  "We’ll see," said Thomas. "We’ll see if it comes to that."

  The next morning, everyone got into position with regard to the shooting. Jones had been taken to the Free State Hotel, and his wife and the editor Stringfellow, who was also a doctor, had been sent for. As soon as they came, things got very secretive, though Governor Robinson, also a doctor, and Mrs. Robinson tried to be very attentive. The Missourians took Jones and left the next day. Everyone who saw the tyrant Jones said that he didn’t look deathly at all, but he was plenty mad. The people of Lawrence were, of course, shocked, appalled, and astounded. Thomas went to a meeting, where they passed a resolution that went something like: "This was the isolated act of one vicious citizen, in no way sustained by the community," though I do remember there was a phrase in there that referred to Jones as the "so-called" sheriff, or the one who "claimed" to be sheriff. The newspapers in the Missouri River towns, Leavenworth, and Kickapoo were beside themselves. Stringfellow vowed to sacrifice every abolitionist in the territory in revenge, to level Lawrence, and to destroy the Union, if need be.

  Of course, the tyrant Jones was not dead, we all knew that; it turned out there had been two shots, according to the colonel of the dragoons, one through his trouser leg and one more telling, though I never understood rightly if he got hit in the leg, the hip, the shoulder, or the jaw. Alive though he was, the Missouri papers were full of memorials to him and vows to avenge his death with a war, if at all possible. These newpaper reports circulated all around Lawrence, and mostly we had a laugh at them, but it did give you cause to wonder at either the egregious lying or the egregious stupidity. Maybe that was the thing about the Missourians that made the people of Lawrence so angry in the end—they were either too stupid to credit or too outrageous in their lies. As the days went by, most people in Lawrence decided that the shooting had actually been committed by a southern sympathizer. Why not? In the first place, no Lawrence man, no New Englander, would do so rash a thing, and in the second place, Jones was unloved by even his own men—what better for them than the small sacrifice of a tyrant for the sake of blackening the character of the citizens of Lawrence? The Missourians would do anything ; we already knew that about them. Or what about this—the whole shooting was a hoax arranged among Jones and Stringfellow and Jones’s wife? As the time passed, it was easy to forget that Lawrence people had been there, too, tending to the wounded tyrant.

  Thomas and I never quizzed Frank on what he knew. But there was a segment of the town that held the opinion that a boy had done it, one of the group of boys who had been out near the camp. Almost no one agreed with this group—they could never come up with the boy, or said they couldn’t. After long thought, I decided that Frank was not the boy. But I believed Thomas when he said that Frank knew who the boy was.

  A day or so after the shooting, Governor Robinson offered a five-hundred-dollar reward for the capture of the perpetrator. The captain of the dragoons thought he had something to say about the whole affair, too—he sent Governor Robinson a letter, which said that Jones’s shooting had been reported in Washington, D.C. (no doubt, said some jokers, by the ghost of Jones himself, who appeared to the President in his worst nightmare), and that it was being taken most seriously there, etc.

  The congressional committee departed in haste, which seemed ominous.

  And then there was further fuel for outrage: one of the men who’d testified to the committee was followed home and attacked by some very vocal southern sympathizers and left for dead. He lived, fortunately, but there was nary a peep out of any federal body about the attack on him.

  Now the relative calm of the spring, made up of moneymaking and business and planning for the future, gave way to one upset after the other. Sheriff Jones’s deputy, an illiterate who was nevertheless fully armed and eager for any pretext, persisted in trying to arrest everyone involved in the Branson rescue. Sometimes he had the dragoons with him, in which case he would stop people but then let them go if he found nothing against them. Most times he didn’t have the dragoons with him but had other men, men who spoke in the accents of the deep south and looked like roughs, but not entirely like our Ruffians. We all knew they were bringing men in from the south, especially from the hot-blooded places like South Carolina. Thomas and Frank got stopped every day or so. Frank finally got a little pass from the deputy that read: "Let this man pass I no him two be a Law and abidin Sittisin." Well, these were our duly constituted officials. As New Englanders, and generally well educated, the citizens of Lawrence were especially galled to be insulted and arrested by fools and ignoramuses who couldn’t contain their glee (spitting and staggering from tobacco and drink) at getting over New Englanders.

  What was the most outrageous insult? One followed right after another. Some days after the shooting, one of their judges, Lecompte, called a grand jury in Lecompton, the town they’d named after him, and Lecompte instructed the jury about exactly who would be found and indicted as a traitor. Of course, all of our leaders were to be indicted—everyone, from former Governor Reeder to Governor Robinson to Senator Lane, who was in any way responsible for keeping Lawrence moving safely forward. They all escaped, decamped, pursued our interests elsewhere. Reeder hid out in Kansas City for two weeks, then managed to find a steamer that would take him down the Missouri; Governor Robinson got detained at Lexington, Missouri, and was held under arrest. Mrs. Robinson went to plead his case in the east. Jim Lane got off to Iowa, a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment, especially among the Quakers there. All the leaders who weren’t arrested were looking for money or support outside of Kansas—that seemed now to be our only hope.

  And there was more—the Missourians kept stealing our horses and mules. Charles’s mules and one of his horses got taken, and he and Thomas and two other men had to go find them. It took two days, and in the end they found only the horse and one of the mules. I was terrified that Jeremiah would be taken, but we kept him in town as much as possible—it was more usual for horses to be taken on the roads outside of town, or from claims. This was one of the reasons we ended up staying in Lawrence past our departure date, then way past our departure date. Jeremiah was so appealing and so obviously of value that he would certainly call attention to himself and to us. Better, in spite of our best plans, to take refuge in the populous melee of town. Three days, Thomas and Frank and I walked out to the claim early in the morning and back in the evening, to plant our seed. But there was no tending it. If it must come up, it would; if we were to get anything from it, we would. That was our only plan at that point.

  Well, a lot of things happened, I can’t list them all, and at any rate, all of them were swallowed up by what happened next. Sometime in mid-May, on the eleventh or twelfth, I think, the grand jury, so called, announced its findings. The next day, the federal marshal issued a proclamation, all toward Missouri, of course. The news proclaimed was that the marshal needed a "posse of law-abiding citizens." What they were going to do was buried in some sort of legal rigmarole, but we knew what they wanted to do—band together, get their weapons, and clear us out: hang us, shoot us, burn us, knife us, get rid of us. The only question, for Thomas and me, was where we would endure the attack—alone on our claim, with one horse, one man, one woman, and one boy, not to mention four carbines and a hundred rounds, or in Lawrence with our allies.

  May can be a lovely time in Kansas, or so I was told. I only lived one May there, and it was a wet one. Heavy storms marched out of the west nearly every day, great gray curtains of water that moved across th
e horizon, preceded by thick wet winds. The prairies and the prairie tracks were deep in mire. The native vegetation seemed to thrive well enough, but what people planted was drowned or washed away. The rivers were full and difficult to cross, and that was what saved us for a while.

  Thomas and I were concerned about our seed. Every stormy day seemed yet another burden. In the mornings, we went out of the downstairs door and gazed as well as we could toward the west, trying to spot breaks in the clouds. Every noon, when Thomas came home for dinner, we stared at the rain streaming down Louisa’s little windows and brooded over what was surely happening out on our claim, more money wasted; and every evening, we gazed up at the few stars that seemed to appear here and there through the cloud cover. Thomas wasn’t saying much. He divided his time between wondering what our future in Kansas could possibly hold and hauling goods with Charles, who remained unarrested, so simple-minded were the officials trying to arrest him. We got a letter from Susannah Jenkins. She wrote:

  I feel as though I am writing to the figures of a dream, so distant and impossible does K.T. seem to me now. Even though our life is sadly changed by the death of Papa, both Mama and I feel that we have made an escape and that life here in Northampton is all the more to be savored. My looks are of course ruined, and I doubt that I shall find a husband, all in all, unless it is some old man with lots of children, but things that we often complained of before we ever left here, we now hardly remark upon, so pleased are we to still have life and to be living that life in the civilized world. I have two new books from the library today, isn’t that a miracle? This is how I think, now. I think of all of you every day, and Mother and I both pray for you and your safety. The papers are full of K.T., and two editors have already called upon me to ask whether I would like to write a small article for them about our experiences. To any of you who would like to, I say, write me a good letter about events there, and I will see that it is published.

  I also got a letter from my sister Harriet, who wrote:

  Since you have been a lifelong troublemaker, Lydia, and never in one place for more than two seconds from the time you could walk, I am sure you are in the thick of all these unnecessary ABOLITIONIST troubles. I heartily regret sending my child Frank to you, and if I could have controlled him for one minute, I would not have done so, but that’s in the past now, and his Father considers that the experience of the prairies will be good for him, I don’t know why, but it is not my way to say anything, as he IS the Father. I sincerely sympathize with the Missourians in this, as they never asked for anyone to come to Kansas Territory and tell everyone what to do there, just as we never asked sister Miriam to come sit at our tables and tell us what to do, or rather, what to think, since owning slaves is illegal in Illinois, though I’m not sure why, since nobody in Illinois cares one way or the other, any more than folks do in Kentuck or Missouri. But that is the way things turn out. I suppose if people do care, they could simply stay in the towns they were born in, like MEDFORD, MASSACHUSETTS, though far be it from me to condemn the activities and chosen life of a member of our family. But these discussions of slavery are getting way out of hand, and everyone wants to talk about it now, when they didn’t want to even last year, much less when I was a child, and it was considered beneath anyone’s polite notice. In my opinion, it all comes down to the age-old servant problem, and if we all lived like Quakers and had vast quantities of children to work for us, then that would be one thing, but of course not everyone wants to live like that, on a small neat little farm always and everlastingly doing your own work day after day. But you can’t get a servant girl in America. As soon as they get here from wherever, Ireland or Germany, even, well, they want to work for themselves, not you, and so what are you going to do? Will there never be any relief, though running a plantation full of niggers is hard work, I’m told, of a sort. But anyway, and this is just between you and me, I sometimes wake up in the morning, and I think about the day ahead, and I think I would be happy enough to know that some old reliable slave-women were down in the kitchen making my breakfast, but in these days, I suppose they would be sharpening the knife for my throat, like as not. Well, these ABOLITIONISTS have stirred things up, no doubt about it, and I wonder how you are, out there in ABOLITIONIST territory and for goodness sake, don’t get hurt or send young Frank back in a coffin, I would be beside myself. We miss Frank very much, and you, too.

  Love,

  Your sister HARRIET

  In Lawrence, of course, we all knew that something was going to happen and what it was. The question for us seemed to be how we would best defend ourselves, and then it turned out to be whether we would defend ourselves at all. Committees of safety met—one was disbanded and another formed. Most of the citizens wanted there to be drilling and provisioning and manning the forts, as there had been during the Wakarusa War, but for one thing, the committees of safety were reluctant to call upon the merchants for more provisions, as they had hardly been paid a thing for what they’d given in December, and for another, the committees were reluctant to call in the farmers from around the town. Everyone knew how important it was for the fall crop to be a good one. But really, the fact was that the President’s proclamations and the congressional contretemps and the sight of Jones in the company of the captain of the dragoons, and then the findings of the grand jury, all put us so far in the wrong that everyone was of two minds what to do. We knew we were in the right, but there was moral ground that had been taken away from us. We wanted to be in the right, but also to be seen to be in the right. The ranks of the Missourians were rapidly filling up with southerners full of conviction, but our ranks weren’t filling so rapidly. For whatever reason, the north, even New England, didn’t seem to care all that much about us. Those in charge, now that Robinson and Lane were out of the picture, did what people always do when they don’t know what else to do, they decided to wait and see what would happen.

  Now the twenty-first of May came around, and it was a sunny, beautiful day. The prairie ran away in every direction, lively and bright with flowers. We all woke up to the sight of men massed on the top of Mount Oread, not far from Governor Robinson’s new house, looking down on what amounted to a town without defenses. They had plenty of weapons and ammunition, and as we found out later, they even had cannon. They also had a red flag, which read "Southern Rights," and right next to that they carried a Stars and Stripes, and there were other flags, too. From this band, a group of ten "duly constituted authorities" rode into town and started arresting people. Charles was one of the first—they came to the house and arrested him about eight o’clock, and then he rode around with them as they arrested some of the others. Charles made no resistance. It had been decided that no one would make any resistance. And the arresting party, which didn’t include Jones or any of his men, was somewhat more polite than Jones would have been. After Charles left, and Louisa and Frank followed after him, to see what might happen, I said, "Our claim probably looks lovely today."

  Thomas replied, "We should be there. We should have Frank there. I wonder that we find ourselves in a town that has no wish to defend itself." And then he, too, went out—the hunger to watch, and to know what was happening, was an almost irresistible one. I was left alone to clear up the breakfast dishes. The sun poured through the small front windows, lighting up our rooms. I was careful to clean the dishes well and put them away neatly. I didn’t feel any of the fear I had felt before—on coming to K.T., on the commencement of the Wakarusa War, or any other time. Rather, I felt that cheerful peace you always seem to feel when a long dreaded event begins to happen. It is as if something about you is suspended, and while you are waiting for the worst, you get a few moments of actual joy—your room looks pleasing and comfortable, your tasks seem light and delicious, the present life, which you know is about to go away from you, seems the best possible life, and you are grateful for it. When I finished, I went out. Not much business was being done, only the business of arrests. The citizens of Lawrence looked ou
t their windows or stood in the streets or congregated in shops. The day wore on and got a little warm, but it was a pleasant change from the recent damp, chilly weather. We each expected different things. Women and children had been told to leave town in the morning, and some did, crying and carrying off what things they could manage, not having been allowed to take horses or mules with them (the Missourians wanted all of those). I suppose those people expected the worst, burning and shooting and clearing out. But most of us wanted to stay; Thomas didn’t even ask me to leave, knowing that I would leave only when he did. I suppose we expected to see something we had never seen before in our lives.

  I strolled down Massachusetts Street, then up some other streets. I should have felt in danger, but I didn’t. Instead, I marveled at how much Lawrence had changed since September—how many more permanent buildings there were, how the streets had straightened and widened themselves, how much the place looked like a town instead of a congeries of structures. There were even flower boxes and patches of garden here and there, fenced off carefully from pigs and other marauding herbivores. It was a wonder, really.

  The arresting party, or at least the leaders, went over to the Free State Hotel and enjoyed their midday dinner. Some even went into shops and came out with goods, though whether they paid for them was a point of some dispute later. Mr. Eldridge, the manager of the hotel, said for years afterward that none of the "duly constituted authorities" had so much as offered to pay for his dinner. But people went along with them, whatever they cared to do.

  Another example of that was the way General Pomeroy, who had come back from the east, where he’d gone after the Wakarusa War to raise money and support for the Free-Soil cause, let the southerners have our cannon. These artillery pieces, which were smuggled into K.T. by means of various ruses in the winter, had been buried under the foundation of someone’s house—Mr. Roberts’s house, Louisa said—in early May. General Pomeroy had some men go out and dig them up, and then he handed them over as a gesture of good faith. More women and children were leaving town now, not carrying even what they could. They were all crying. Perhaps they expected to be shot and never to need anything. There was no logic to what folks did—each did what he or she thought best, and so each one might do just about anything. There was no logic to my own alternating waves of fear and curiosity, but they came one after the other.