East to the Dawn (3 page)

Alfred had a difficult childhood. He was the first child of Isaac and Caroline Curtiss Otis, who had left him, as a little boy, with his grandparents in Little York while they picked up stakes and, taking his baby brother George with them, joined the great westward migration to Michigan, where 200,000 homesteaders claimed land in the first part of the century. They settled in Prairieville in Barry County, cleared land, and put up a log cabin and later a proper house. It would be six long years before Caroline returned for him and he was rejoined with George and met his new brothers and sisters. It made him a loner.

Alfred, having studied in the evenings after farm chores, entered the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor as a sophomore, graduated as a classics major three years later, and attended law school in Louisville, Kentucky. After a brief stint in Louisville, he settled in Atchison, Kansas. His brother George also became a lawyer, set up his law practice in St. Paul, Minnesota, and one by one three of the younger brothers who also became lawyers joined George there. None would follow with Alfred.

Alfred was intensely ambitious, obsessed with the idea of becoming rich, and channeled all his energy into his career. He never changed. “As to my course after graduation,” he informed George, “money is the first object. I can be admitted at the bar in three months. Money I say first, money money and then Glory—Is this putting first last. ” He never lost sight of his goal.

As the American frontier continued to roll west, new choices appeared for the ambitious in Alfred's generation, just as for his parents. Never again in history would there be such a plethora of open, arable land free for the taking as then, as the land became territories and the territories became states. The choices were almost limitless. Alfred chose Kansas, still grazed by buffalo herds and home to Indian tribes. And in Kansas he chose Atchison, one of the new settlements. It was a brave choice. Not only was Kansas on the brink of war, but Alfred was an abolitionist, and he was settling in a pro-slavery town.

On May 30, 1854, President Franklin Pierce signed into law the Kansas-Nebraska bill. It accorded Kansas territorial status, which meant people could legally take title to land, but at the same time it repealed the Missouri Compromise, which had excluded slavery—forever—from all Louisiana territory north of 36 degrees 30 minutes latitude. Passage of the law stunned the free-soilers who had thought that Kansas territory, by virtue of geography, was safe forever from the “peculiar institution.” The Kansas-Nebraska law reopened the question—it returned the choice to the people living in the territory. It also set Kansas up to be the first battleground of the Civil War.

By leaving it to the settlers to decide by vote whether Kansas would be admitted to the Union slave or free, the pro-slavery forces had won a great victory. As Senator William H. Seward put it so eloquently for the North just before the territory was opened for settlement and the opposing forces poured in, it would be a fight to the bitter end: “Come on then, gentlemen of the slave States, since there is no escaping your challenge. I accept it on behalf of freedom. We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to the side that is stronger in numbers, as it is in right.” It was the militant Missouri senator David Rice Atchison who controlled the fledgling town in the beginning. He planned to make the settlement on the western bank of the Missouri a showcase for the pro-slavery forces. Three months after Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska bill
into law, on the September day the town lots were put up for sale, Senator Atchison, a charismatic orator, was on site making a widely publicized speech, and as the result of the well-orchestrated effort, southerners came in droves to stake their claims to land. The first newspaper in Atchison was
The Squatter Sovereign,
and emotions ran so high that one committed southerner on the staff swore “to kill a baby if he knew it would grow up an abolitionist.”

Alfred settled in Atchison largely because of Eli Thayer of Worcester, Massachusetts, who had founded the New England Emigrant Aid Company and turned the antislavery sentiment in the North into a free-soil crusade to save Kansas. Though never large in terms of numbers, the Emigrant Aid Company drew to Kansas solid, committed northerners who believed they could do right and at the same time pursue the American dream of success. Senator Green, speaking in 1861, said that, “but for the hotbed plants that have been planted in Kansas through the instrumentality of the Emigrant Aid Society, Kansas would have been with Missouri this day.” One such, Samuel Clarke Pomeroy, from Massachusetts, a financial agent of the Emigrant Aid Company, accompanied the second party of settlers to Kansas in '54; he would become the first mayor of Atchison and a U.S. senator when Kansas achieved statehood.

The eloquent, impassioned Thayer fashioned his crusade in a typically “New England” practical way—by appealing to the enlightened self-interest of his audience. Before the ink on the Kansas-Nebraska bill was dry, he was buying up land in the territory and forming free-soil colonies. By the time Kansas was opened for settlement, hundreds of Kansas leagues and Kansas committees were in formation. Word was passed that the antislavery colonies would be receiving steam engines, sawmills, gristmills, and other machinery; that newspapers, churches, and schools would be established. As Thayer noted, “From these facts emigrants inferred readily enough that in these incipient cities, with organized emigration flowing in rapidly, there would be an excellent prospect for making money by the rise of property.” It was just such a sentiment as would appeal to courageous, ambitious young men. Eli Thayer described his “ideal” settlers: “The men who say little or nothing. They show the greatest impatience, and even disgust, when they hear a ranting resolution-maker berating slavery. They seem to think that every Northern man understands the evils of slavery without being informed of them.”

Just such men as Alfred Gideon Otis and others who, their feet firmly set in the new, bustling frontier town, believed the risks were more than
outweighed by the prospects of success. John Greenleaf Whittier, the popular abolitionist poet, picked up the idealistic mood of the country in his “Emigrants' Song.”

 

We cross the prairies as of old

Our fathers crossed the sea;

To make the West, as they the East,

The homestead of the free.

 

The attraction of Atchison was that it was so strategically situated. The Missouri River makes a great bend to the west as it divides the northern regions of Missouri and Kansas between St. Joseph to the north and Fort Leavenworth to the south. Atchison lies at the westernmost point in this bend, on the western side of the river. Being those twelve miles farther west than the established settlements at St. Joseph and Leavenworth meant two days saved for early settlers heading west in ox-drawn wagons. It meant that at the moment of its founding, Atchison assumed importance as the eastern terminus of the overland stagecoach lines. There was money to be made caring for and feeding the travelers, repairing their wagons, buying and selling them livestock. Rapidly, in growing numbers, came young, idealistic, enterprising northerners bent on establishing themselves and keeping the territory free; they started to tip the balance early on. What drew them was the prospect of good land, of course, and the opportunity to be in on the beginning, to have a hand in the formation of a new government and a new society, but there was something else; those conditions, those opportunities existed elsewhere, where there was no chance of blood being spilled over the slavery question. Kansas was not for the fainthearted. The free-soil men who settled Atchison had to possess an extra quality—a large dose of physical courage had to be part of their makeup—for they were settling a town just being formed in a territory about to be torn asunder.

There was no question, given his free-soil stand, that Alfred would establish himself quietly and circumspectly: at just about the time he arrived that fall, a southern mob tarred and feathered and set adrift on a raft the Reverend Pardee Butler, who had trumpeted his abolitionist views after being warned not to. Incidents escalated into violence with ever-increasing frequency.

In May 1856 Senator Atchison, at the head of an armed mob, sacked the free-soil settlement of Lawrence, forty miles to the south of Atchison. Nor was the violence just in Kansas—the day following the sack of Lawrence, the prominent and persuasive abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner was beaten unconscious on the floor of the United States Senate. That act was followed within days by a singularly ugly abolitionist act: John
Brown dragged from their beds and murdered five pro-slavery settlers on the Pottawatomie Creek, to the west of Atchison. The violence in Kansas territory—unrestricted, devastating, widespread—was finally curbed by Governor John Geary, who called in federal troops to stop the Missouri pro-slavery forces, the border ruffians, the Free State marauders, and the thieves who followed in their tracks. Even David Rice Atchison was forced to disband his army. Alfred described the situation to his brother: “The grand jury indicted on an average every other man in the territory all over it—pro-slavery and free soilers all have to catch it. Almost all our citizens are indicted for something or other. I took but little active part in last row and am thus out of the scrape. During the war every man did as he pleased—pressed horses, took provisions, cattle, wagons, teams, etc. and raised the devil generally. Many did it in good faith believing it was all right; others did it for plunder.”

1857 was the watershed year for the territory, the year the settlers, in a resounding vote, rejected being admitted to the Union as a slave state. In the face of the defeat of their cause, most of the southerners gave up. John Martin, twenty years old, arrived from Pennsylvania, bought
The Squatter Sovereign,
renamed it
Freedom's Champion,
and ran it for the free-soil cause; Samuel Pomeroy, former agent of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, became Atchison's first mayor.

Alfred had arrived in October 1855 with little more than the clothes on his back, yet he was so capable and such a hard worker that even against this backdrop of violence and mayhem, he had managed to prosper. “His capital stock was a copy of Blackstone, a genial temperament and an abundance of brains,” a contemporary wrote of him later. So well did he do, primarily in land litigation, that by 1862 he had enough money to buy his land and build his house and marry.

Mary Ann arranged Amelia's marriage. She and William Challis had moved out to Atchison from New Jersey in 1857. William was a doctor who gave up his practice to join his entrepreneur brothers George and Luther in buying land and starting businesses in the fledgling town. William's first task—bringing the first ferry up the Missouri to Atchison and running the ferry franchise that connected Kansas with Missouri—was the first of many he would creditably perform. They started out in a log cabin, but within a short time William and Mary Ann lived in a “handsome” big brick house, at 203 North Terrace on the bluff overlooking the Missouri.

There is a photograph of Amelia Otis that shows timid, lashless, apprehensive eyes, brunette hair curled carefully, limply, flatly, and very unflatteringly on her head, attired in an ill-fitting dress; she is devoid of brooch, lace, or any adornment. Mary Ann, with whom she had in
common the high forehead and chiseled features of their mother Maria, in contrast, was a handsome woman: there was a vibrancy and assuredness and warmth about Mary Ann entirely lacking in her sister. It is hard to overstate the difference in expression and outlook in these two women so strikingly similar in feature. Mary Ann was vivacious, pretty, outgoing, and a good organizer. Amelia, lacking in confidence, single in her twenties, was clearly in danger of spinsterhood—not just because of her retiring nature but because time was pressing—at her age in those years, most young women were long married. To avoid spinsterhood, she would need the help of her family. And there, as if by Providence, Mary Ann produced her family's new Atchison friend, Alfred Otis. Alfred was an obvious choice of husband: upstanding staunch churchgoer, already a lawyer of note and wealthy, and most important, never married. Alfred was a thin man with a strikingly broad skull, a spade beard, thick brows, and heavy-lidded eyes. He didn't have the gentle sense of humor or the friendly mien of his brother-in-law William, but he was honest, upstanding, and a very hard worker. He was thirty-five; it was time for him to settle down and raise a family—he would have been looking for a wife. Amelia came out for a visit.

Cold
and
remote
are the words family members use to describe him. He was respected but not loved. Still, he certainly evinced the normal interest in girls as he wrote to his brother. (The part of going to church he liked best when he was an impecunious law school student in Kentucky, he had written George, had been shaking hands with the “many pretty young sisters whom of course none should slight.”) Now he had amassed sufficient fortune to marry. Alfred knew that for a wife, he couldn't do better than shy, well-brought-up, well-connected Amelia. His new bride would even look up to him—being ten years his junior, she would consider him a man of the world.