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Volume CXXXIII, Number 9 |
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Goodbye to Mr. Pierce, and Sam Fessenden goes to Kansas
KID WONGSRICHANALAI
STAFF WRITER
In 1854, William Pitt Fessenden, of the Bowdoin class of 1823, went to
the United States Senate as a Whig. A year later, he joined a newly formed
political party to help fight the expansion of human slavery. The members
of this party called themselves Republicans.
Hopeful that the upcoming presidential elections might swing in their
favor, the Republicans quickly organized. Fessenden dedicated his time
to helping with conventions and rallies. In Washington, he also waged
a war in the Senate against President Franklin Pierce's (Bowdoin class
of 1824) condemnation of Northern supporters in Kansas.
In 1856, as the Republicans met to nominate a presidential candidate,
Fessenden's youngest son, fourteen-year-old Sam, decided to run away and
join the fight in Kansas, which was quickly escalating to a civil war.
After his return from the West, Sam Fessenden, a few months shy of joining
the Bowdoin class of 1861, wrote about his adventures.
He had set out in the summer of 1856 and journeyed as far as Illinois
and Iowa. There, he found passage to St. Louis with little money and only
one set of clothing. In the midst of his journey he suddenly became quite
lonely. "I stood on those streets without money," he wrote,
"without friends, and let my thoughts wander back hundreds of miles
away to one family hearthstone, where stood one vacant chair, made so
by my thoughtlessness." Despite this sudden homesickness, Sam decided
to push on. He went to Missouri where he joined a band of twenty men from
Illinois, headed for Kansas.
Kansas, at that time, had two political factions waging a war over whether
the territory should be a slave state or a free one. The idea of popular
sovereignty was showing itself to be a disaster, as both sides killed
and pillaged for their own cause. The sacking of anti-slavery town Lawrence
by Southern sympathizers near the end of May had set off a spark that
was to earn the territory the nickname, "bleeding Kansas."
On July 3, 1856, Sam Fessenden arrived in this, his first war zone. Remembering
that there was no opposition to this armed group's landing in Kansas City,
the teen recalled that trouble was waiting for them when they tried to
collect their supplies at a local warehouse. From "out of every grocery
and groggery poured a motley crowd, some armed with U.S. muskets,"
Sam wrote, "…others with bowie-knives, revolvers, and all sorts
of firearms, and we found ourselves surrounded, and had we been armed
it would have been madness to resist. We surrendered…."
When the mob found that these Union men had with them weapons, "a
shower of oaths mingled with threats and menaces" were hurled at
them. "I was the youngest of the band, [which was] surrounded, robbed,
and subjected to any amount of abuse, but I thought myself shrewd and
accordingly assumed an air of perfect indifference, sat upon the top of
a barrel, lit a cigar, and calmly watched the opening of trunks, valises,
and everything that was supposed to contain firearms of a larger or smaller
sort." Threats "of hanging, lynching, and various other pleasantries
issued from the mouths of chivalric Southern gentlemen" were heard,
but Sam Fessenden and his fellow freedom fighters were soon out of danger.
The mob escorted the Northerners through "a crowd of yelling and
hooting ruffians" and sent them back to Illinois on a boat headed
in the same direction in which they came. As a parting gesture, Sam remembered
that the Southerners proclaimed "that Territory …should be filled
with slaves, and thus consecrated to sin and darkness forever."
Pitt Fessenden was no doubt very glad to have his youngest son back at
home. Soon the boy would be at Bowdoin College to pursue a career and
watch from Maine as the country slipped into civil war. In the same class
as Sam Fessenden was a youngster from Bath named Thomas Worchester Hyde.
A new administration entered the White House in 1857 as Franklin Pierce
exited the stage. It was the time of James Buchanan, and it was the final
step before the bloodletting of the Civil War.
Next Week: Thomas Hyde's beliefs and the coming of the War.
Some editing (by the Orient staff) may have occurred before this piece
was published. To view a full version of the entire series (including
source citations) please visit my website. (This site includes the Chamberlain
and Howard Series and is updated weekly during the school year) at: http://www.bowdoin.edu/~kwongsri
Also, please send comments and ideas to: kwongsri@bowdoin.edu