Embattled Lawrence: Conflict and Community

Abstract

If past is prologue, then Lawrence will be a contentious place in the twenty-first century. With abolitionists' fervor from the beginning, leaders of the New England Emigrant Aid Company conceived Lawrence, Kansas, as a line in the sand. Under no circumstance would they permit Kansas to be a slave state. To prevent that from happening, they collected money and people and sent a party of ninety-six like-minded abolitionists to found Lawrence in 1854 as a spearhead for freedom in what would become Bloody Karisas. John Brown, meaning to draw a sword against the evil of slavery, soon followed this idealistic band of crusaders to Lawrence. There he found men such as James H. Lane, who like Brown, would spend the rest of his life wrestling with causes that preoccupied Lawrence. Both Brown and Lane led skirmishes between slavers and free-staters in Lawrence, helping to foment an intense hatred between the combatants that erupted on August 21, 1863.