About Kansas Herald of Freedom

Kansas Herald of Freedom

The Kansas Herald of Freedom was the first free-state newspaper in Kansas Territory, founded by George Washington Brown with the backing of the New England Emigrant Aid Company and first issued, from Pennsylvania, with a dateline of Wakarusa, Kansas Territory, October 21, 1854. Published at Lawrence from January 1855, the Herald became the principal printed voice of the campaign to make Kansas a free state. Pro-slavery forces destroyed its office in the Sack of Lawrence on May 21, 1856, and attacked it a second time in December 1857, yet Brown revived it, and it chronicled the whole violent territorial struggle known as Bleeding Kansas.

The Herald was more than a local paper. Its subscriptions were sold in New England, its reports were reprinted across the North, and it formed a direct link between the settlers fighting for Kansas on the ground and the eastern public whose money and emigrants they needed.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Race for Kansas

On May 30, 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act became law, providing that the settlers of Kansas would decide for themselves whether the territory would permit slavery, and nullifying the Missouri Compromise restriction. Pro-slavery, abolitionist and Free Soil groups hurried to settle Kansas to gain the upper hand, and both sides understood that newspapers were weapons in that race.

Three editors independently fixed on the new free-state settlement at Lawrence as their goal: George W. Brown with the Herald of Freedom, Josiah Miller and Robert G. Elliott with the Kansas Free State, and John Speer with the paper that became the Kansas Tribune. Brown's paper won the race by a lead of only about one week, and the Herald has stood ever since as the first free-state newspaper of Kansas.

George Washington Brown and the Emigrant Aid Company

Brown was editor and publisher of the Courier at Conneautville, Pennsylvania, when, as early as March 1854, he announced in its columns his intention to go to Kansas and start a newspaper. He procured the backing of the newly organized Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company, later known as the New England Emigrant Aid Company, which widely advertised the proposed paper at Lawrence, where the company's first settlement was to be made.

The company lent Brown funds to start the Herald, then sold subscriptions to settlers in Kansas and supporters in New England. Eli Thayer, the company's founder, promoted the paper in a circular as one of the mightiest agencies in making Kansas a free state, and more than one hundred subscribers were enrolled in Thayer's hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts, alone. The Herald's prospectus was published in the Conneautville Courier in July 1854.

A First Issue Printed in Pennsylvania

On September 21, 1854, Brown printed the first number of the Herald of Freedom at Conneautville, bearing the dateline Wakarusa, Kansas Territory, October 21, 1854. Twenty-one thousand copies of this issue were widely circulated, an extraordinary printing for a newspaper that did not yet have an office, a press on site, or a town to publish in. Wakarusa was the intended name of the Emigrant Aid settlement, which was renamed Lawrence before Brown arrived.

Soon after the issue appeared, Brown started west with a party of about three hundred prospective settlers, including a printing crew of seven persons and a newly purchased press. Difficulties of transportation delayed the party until December. With the aid of the Emigrant Aid Company's sawmill, a building for the newspaper plant was completed about the first of January 1855, and the first issue of the Herald of Freedom printed at Lawrence appeared on January 3, 1855, dated January 6.

Lawrence, the Free-State Capital

Lawrence was the headquarters of the free-state movement, and the Herald was its organ. The paper reported the fraudulent territorial elections in which armed Missourians crossed the border to vote, the organization of the free-state government in defiance of the pro-slavery territorial legislature, and the escalating armed confrontations of 1855 and 1856. Brown's sister-in-law Annis Gleason worked at the paper as a proofreader, and her husband James Gleason built the Herald's office, a reminder that territorial newspapers were family and community enterprises as much as businesses.

The Herald also carried the assumptions of its sponsors. Historians of the Kansas press note that its editorials framed Kansas as Indian country wrongfully taken, treating Native dispossession as settled background while concentrating on the slavery question, a narrative that suited the goals of the Emigrant Aid Company and linked New England readers imaginatively to the western struggle.

The Sack of Lawrence, May 21, 1856

On May 21, 1856, a pro-slavery posse under Sheriff Samuel Jones entered Lawrence to execute process against the free-state leadership, acting on indictments that declared the Free State Hotel and the two free-state newspaper offices public nuisances. The newspaper offices were the first objects of attack. First the Kansas Free State, then the Herald of Freedom underwent thorough demolition: the presses were broken to pieces, the type was carried away and thrown into the Kansas River, and papers and books were piled in the street and burned.

The destruction made the Herald a national symbol. Northern newspapers raised a subscription, headed by Chicago papers including the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Journal and the Staats-Zeitung, with Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune also helping, to purchase new type and a new press for the Herald's owners. For months after the sack, Lawrence was without a free-state newspaper, until George Brown restarted the Herald of Freedom in November 1856.

John Brown, Pottawatomie and Editorial Judgment

The Herald's editor was a free-state partisan but not an uncritical one. After John Brown and his followers murdered five pro-slavery settlers at Pottawatomie Creek in May 1856, George W. Brown described John Brown's territorial violence in the Herald of Freedom as counterproductive to the free-state cause. Two years later he expanded the argument in Reminiscences of Old John Brown, contending that the real heroes of the Kansas struggle were not the men of the sword.

That editorial independence, exercised from inside the movement, is part of why historians read the Herald closely: it records not only what the free-state party did, but what its own newspaper thought of the doing, including its doubts about the most famous fighter on its side.

Attacked a Second Time

Revival did not bring safety. The Library of Congress's Bleeding Kansas timeline records that on December 29, 1857, the Herald of Freedom was attacked for the second time by Border Ruffians. The paper nevertheless continued, summing up the situation in Kansas for eastern readers, as in its issue of December 27, 1856, which the Library of Congress singles out as a summary of the territorial crisis.

Thomas A. Osborn, later governor of Kansas, arrived in the territory in November 1857 and found work as a compositor on the Herald of Freedom, rising by industry to foreman, with the paper often left completely in his hands. The Herald's composing room was thus a training ground for Kansas public men, as the printing office and the political convention were adjoining rooms in territorial life.

The Final Years

The Herald outlasted the worst of the violence. It reported the constitutional struggle that produced the Wyandotte Convention of July 1859, whose constitution called for a free state and ultimately carried Kansas into the Union as a free state in 1861. Douglas County's early official history records that the Herald, re-established in November 1856 after the sack, continued until 1859, when it finally expired, though some listings carry its run longer.

By then its mission was accomplished and its reason for existence, eastern subsidy for a territorial campaign, was gone. Lawrence had other newspapers, Kansas was about to become a state, and the Herald of Freedom passed into history as the paper that had arrived before its own town had a settled name.

Legacy and the Historical Record

The Herald of Freedom survives in substantial files, with hundreds of issues preserved in newspaper archives, and it is one of the most cited sources for Bleeding Kansas. The Kansas Historical Society holds its record in photographs of its staff and office, in the papers of its editor, and in the standard scholarship on pioneer printing in Kansas, which treats the race of the three Lawrence papers as the founding event of Kansas journalism.

Its importance is institutional as well as literary. The Herald demonstrated a new model of American newspaper founding: a paper capitalized by an eastern corporation, its first issue printed a thousand miles away, its subscriptions sold as an act of political commitment. It was propaganda in the honorable nineteenth-century sense, a herald, and for the cause named in its title it was, as Thayer promised its subscribers, a mighty agency.