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The Ipswich Fright: Terror Strikes a Town Even When the British Aren’t Coming

In the days after the Battles of Lexington and Concord, a general panic seized the population around Boston. Would the British regulars march to other towns, murdering their inhabitants and burning their homes? Nowhere was the fear greater than on the North Shore, where a fast-spreading rumor caused the Ipswich Fright.

Hundreds of frightened Ipswich citizens fled their homes, filling the roads with carts carrying what household goods they could grab. Their panic spread to the nearby towns of Newbury, Newburyport, Beverly, Salisbury and even Haverhill, Mass., 20 miles to the west.

John Greenleaf Whittier

The rather ignominious show of fear might have been forgotten, save for John Greenleaf Whittier. He immortalized the Ipswich Fright in 1866 with a story about it in his Prose Miscellanies.

Whittier described the Great Ipswich Fright as “the way in which the woof of comedy interweaves with the warp of tragedy.”

The Ipswich Fright

Ipswich, in the days of revolution, was a steady, conservative town solidly behind the patriot cause, wrote Whittier. Midway between Salem and the ancient town of Newburyport,

…the traveller on the Eastern Railroad sees on the right, between him and the sea, a tall church-spire, rising above a semicircle of brown roofs and venerable elms; to which a long scalloping range of hills, sweeping off to the seaside, forms a green background.

The John Whipple House in Ipswich

On April 22, the able-bodied men and boys of Ipswich had marched off to Cambridge after the Battles of Lexington and Concord three days earlier.

Rumors flew that the soldiers would come out again, and they would burn, kill and destroy everything that came in their way. Coastal towns had special concern that the British would attack from the sea.

So on that morning, old men, women and children rushed to the village green to hear the news.

“A rumor, which no one attempted to trace or authenticate, spread from lip to lip that the British regulars had landed on the coast and were marching upon the town,” wrote Whittier. “A scene of indescribable terror and confusion followed.”

Carrying Off Goods

Thomas Franklin Waters reported that someone had seen two small vessels standing in the Ipswich River. “We may be sure there was fright with good reasons at the farms on Castle Hill and Castle Neck,” wrote Waters in Ipswich in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1917.

View from Castle Hill

People hid their valuables, piled their household goods into ox carts and headed north to New Hampshire.

Diarist John Tudor described the scene that followed. “[M]en and horses driving past, up and down the roads…People were in great perplexity; women in distress for their husbands and friends who had marched. …All confusion, numbers of carts, etc., carrying off goods, etc.

Contagion

The rumor quickly spread to Beverly that the enemy had massacred every man, woman and child in Ipswich. The scene repeated itself.

At mid-afternoon in Newburyport, the town had assembled to hear the details of the Battles of Lexington and Concord., according to a later account in the Newburyport Herald. Parson Carey was opening the meeting with a prayer when a rider named Ebenezer Todd rushed up. “Turn out, turn out, for God’s sake,” he cried, “or you will be all killed! The regulars are marching on us; they are at Ipswich now, cutting and slashing all before them!”

The people of Newbury ran to Salisbury, while the people of Rowley ran to Newbury. The people of Haverhill fled in boats across the Merrimack River to Bradford.

Many spent the night in empty houses in Salisbury. The houses were empty because their inhabitants had fled farther north into New Hampshire.

Woof of Comedy

During the Ipswich Panic, one woman threw her silver down her well. A man hid his private documents under a stone and stood guard in his home with a musket.

Another man put his family into a boat to find safety on Ram Island. Through the evening dusk he imagined the enemy pursued him. An infant started crying in the stern of the boat.

“Do throw that squalling brat overboard,” he said to his wife. “Or we shall all be discovered and killed.”

A woman ran four or five miles up the river. She stopped to take a breath and nurse her child, when she found to her great horror that she had brought the cat instead of the baby.

The Newburyport Herald also reported,

In another instance, a Mr. J. L. seeing Mr. C. H., a very corpulent man, standing at his door with his musket loaded, inquired of him if he was not going. “Going! No.” said he, “I am going to stop and shoot the devils.”

Not until the next morning did most of the refugees learn the truth. Some, however, found out earlier. According to Whittier, a young man from Exeter, N.H., happened to be staying in Ipswich.

[H]e mounted his horse and followed after the retreating multitude, undeceiving all whom he overtook. Late at night he reached Newburyport, greatly to the relief of its sleepless inhabitants, and hurried across the river, proclaiming as he rode the welcome tidings. The sun rose upon haggard and jaded fugitives, worn with excitement and fatigue, slowly returning home ward, their satisfaction at the absence of danger somewhat moderated by an unpleasant conscious ness of the ludicrous scenes of their premature night flitting.

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Learn more Revolutionary history in this complete guide to Revolutionary War sites in New England. Brought to you by the New England Historical Society. Click here to order your copy in paperback, here to order an ebook.

Images: Whipple house By Elizabeth B. Thomsen – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28573446. View from Castle Hill By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11189622. This story updated in 2025.

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The Siege of Scarborough and Maine’s Long War

In 1676, the colonial settlers in Scarborough, Maine, had abandoned the town after fierce fighting with a small army of Indians. That set the stage for the siege of Scarborough the following year.

King Philip’s War had been raging since 1675. Maine — the war’s northern theater — had so few settlers the fighting was on a relatively small scale.

West Point, Prout’s Neck by Winslow Homer (owned by the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass.)

The government in Massachusetts had banned weapons sales to the natives. The natives had generally allied with the French, who encouraged them to harass the English settlements along the Maine coast. Some tried to negotiate a peace between the English and the Maine natives, and the tribes were not of one mind about whether to fight or make a treaty.

Around the mouth of the Saco River, one Wabanaki leader, Mogg Heigon, had gathered a force of perhaps 100 men and some 30 ships. Mogg, who had friendly relations with the English settlers, had been slow to support the war. Nevertheless, by the fall of 1676 his army had successfully harassed the fishermen and farmers until many abandoned the area. In October of 1676, Mogg’s men surrounded the small garrison at Scarborough’s Black Point.

The Surrender of Scarborough

Henry Jocelyn led the English settlers at Black Point. Mogg and Jocelyn knew each other, and Mogg spoke English. Mogg offered Jocelyn a deal. If the colonists would surrender, they could leave peacefully.

It’s not clear why Mogg made the generous offer. It may have been simple decency. Or he may have had some reason to suspect taking the garrison by force would be more challenging than it appeared. It may simply have been that he was accustomed to friendly dealings with the settlers and the negotiation came naturally.

Jocelyn accepted the offer, and Scarborough was left completely in Indian control. Having driven off the settlers in much of the Maine coast, however, the Wabanaki were not nearly numerous enough to protect their lands. In 1677, a group of the settlers came out of hiding and returned to Scarborough, along with a larger military force that included Bartholomew Tippen, most likely a sergeant.

The return of the colonists provoked Mogg to action. He returned to Scarborough with his small army. He sealed off the garrison and lay siege to it. But the colonists inside were better armed in 1677 than they had been in 1676. They were not considering retreat. After three days, during which the Indian’s siege had inflicted only a few casualties, Tippen shot and killed Mogg.

After the Siege of Scarborough

The loss of their leader prompted the Wabanaki to abandon the siege. It also cleared the way for another leader to emerge among the natives, Squando. In retaliation for the death of Mogg, Indians returned to the Black Point garrison and again attacked about a month later. This time they were cleverer, drawing roughly 100 of the settlers outside. The fight killed the colonists’ military leaders and decimated the settlement.

Site of Black Point Fort

According to legend, Squando had become an ardent foe of the English when settlers drowned his son. True or not, his elevation weakened any chance for a peaceful settlement of the disputes. King Philip’s War would continue in Maine until 1678 when it ended by treaty.

But it hardly ended the fighting between the persistent English colonists and the Indians (aided by the French). A new garrison was established at Black Point in 1681, near what was then known as Great Pond. The tug of war with the Native Americans would continue for more than 20 years, and in 1703 a group of Indians attacked and killed a group of settlers at the Black Point garrison, inspiring the name the pond has today – Massacre Pond.

Mogg’s name, meanwhile, was immortalized by John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem, Mogg Megone, which was also turned into a film. Its story line bears little relation to actual history.

This story about the Siege of Scarborough was updated in 2022.

Image of Black Point Fort By John Stanton via FortWiki, CC By-SA 3.0.

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In 1662 Robert Pike Halts a Quaker Persecution in Massachusetts

In 1662 three English Quakers arrived in Dover, N.H. It didn’t take long before the Puritan townspeople spoke up about the newcomers. They petitioned Richard Waldron, the magistrate at Dover, “humbly craving relief against the spreading and the wicked errors of the Quakers among them.” Dover was frontier country and Waldron was the vice president of the New Hampshire colony. He also served as representative to the Massachusetts General Court, which hotly debated Quaker persecution.

Illustration of Mary Dyer, a victim of Quaker persecution

An ornery English Puritan who arrived in New Hampshire in 1635, Waldron came from wealth. He expanded it greatly, acquiring lands in Dover and building mills on the Cochecho River. He also ran an active trading post with the local Pennacook Indians, with whom he maintained largely friendly relations.

The Quakers, meanwhile, proved themselves a thorn in the side of New England’s Puritans. They had begun arriving in the colonies in 1656, and agitated for religious freedom. The General Court in Massachusetts repeatedly voted to ban them.

Quaker Persecution

The Puritans punished Quakers by an assortment of methods, including whipping and branding.

But the Quakers persisted in demanding their rights. Several chose to suffer as martyrs rather than accept offers of leniency. They insisted the colonial authorities rescind the bans on Quakerism. In 1660, Massachusetts had even executed four Quakers who refused to renounce their faith. They included Mary Dyer, a martyr who knew her execution would prove controversial for the political leaders of Massachusetts.

Statue of Mary Dyer in front of the Massachusetts Statehouse.

In 1662, Waldron had the three Dover Quakers – Ann Coleman, Mary Tompkins and Alice Ambrose – arrested as vagabonds. He ordered them tied to the back of a cart and made to walk the 60-plus miles to Boston. Waldron ordered that at each town along the way they were to be stripped and whipped by the local constable.

After carrying out the sentence in Dover, the cart was dispatched to Hampton. There, the constable also carried out the punishment.

They then came to the next stop along the punishment trail — Salisbury, Mass. The whippings then stopped.

Robert Pike

Robert Pike served as constable, militia leader and deputy to the Massachusetts General Court for Salisbury. Though the General Court had outlawed Quakerism, the decision was far from unanimous. Pike and others supported religious freedom, and he and others in Salisbury were outraged at the order to whip the women.

Pike and Walter Barefoot, a political rival to Waldron in New Hampshire, treated the three Quakers’ wounds and helped them escape to Maine. The Quakers correctly believed that the persecution was backfiring. Each incident brought greater attention to their struggle and fresh converts to their faith.

In 1661, the King of England had ordered the colonies to stop executing and imprisoning Quakers. Rather, they were to be sent to England. Waldron probably intended to have them sent to England from Boston.

Instead, the three Quakers returned quietly to Dover and established a church there. Fully one third of Dover’s population would eventually convert to Quakerism. Active persecution of the Quakers died out around 1670.

Karma

Waldron, in New Hampshire, would meet a horrific fate. Following King Philip’s War in 1678, a group of Indian fighters had fled to New Hampshire. Waldron managed to trick the Indians into attending a “war game.” As soon as they had discharged their muskets, he seized the Indians and sent them to Boston. From there they were sold into slavery.

As a result, many New Hampshire Indians viewed Waldron with contempt. In 1689 a band of Indians tortured and killed him. Waldron was 80.

Robert Pike, meanwhile, had continued his protests for greater religious tolerance. In 1692, as the Salem witch hysteria gained momentum, Pike authored a letter to one of the witch trial judges. Pike criticized the way the trials were conducted. While he did not dispute the reality of witchcraft, he argued the trials used flawed methods to determine guilt and credibility.

Pike’s letter made him the first of many who began attacking the witch trials, eventually bringing them to an end. He died in 1706.

Memorial to Robert Pike in Salisbury, Mass.

John Greenleaf Whittier immortalized Robert Pike’s stand against Quaker persecution. In the poem, How the Women Went from Dover, the word of justice Pike are recorded:

Cut loose these poor ones and let them go;
Come what will of it, all men shall know
No warrant is good, though backed by the Crown,
For whipping women in Salisbury town!

This story last updated in 2022.

Images: Memorial to Robert Pike By Ricky Pike – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22303717

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Yankee Troubadour Jonathan Plummer – The First Massachusetts Poet Laureate

There has never been an official Massachusetts poet laureate, but there certainly was an unofficial one. Jonathan Plummer of Newburyport, while not anyone’s idea of a master poet, nevertheless managed a partial living off his tales and verses.

Though he wore many hats – peddler, preacher, odd-jobs man – he ultimately chose poet laureate to the people as his crowning achievement.

Jonathan Plummer

Born in 1761, oldest of eight children, his biographers described him as, ”mentally weak and easily imposed upon.” His parents schooled him at home. They sent their other children to school, however – a slight that troubled him until the end.

He was not a handsome man. One biographer described him: HIs feet were long and clumsy, his legs were thick, his chest broad and strong, his face was long, with a prominent nose, wide mouth, and thick lips. His voice was deep-toned and solemn, and of great compass. He is remembered by thousands who retain a recollection of his air and manner as well as the tones of his stentorian voice.

Plummer’s own description of himself was hardly any kinder. He was, he noted, “Persecuted, despised, hated, slandered and defamed with one gloomy, real distressing and uncommon infirmity in the bargain, viz. an offensive breath, occasioned by a catarrh of the nose.”

As a teenager, Plummer began selling halibut in Market Square in Newburyport. He was unmercifully taunted and became the butt of jokes, invited to non-existent parties.

Illustration of Jonathan Plummer

Privateer, Peddler, Poet

According to his autobiography, in 1776, just 15, Plummer enlisted in the Continental militia. But he saw no battlefield action, serving at a garrison in Dorchester, Mass. He reenlisted in 1777, but again saw no action before his discharge.

Plummer also made an abortive attempt at becoming a privateer, an experience that nearly ended his life. He said he signed on in 1777 with a ship, The Hero, but deserted before it sailed. He soon learned that the Hero was lost at sea.

Next he became a common peddler, selling spectacles, scissors, thimbles, combs, needles, pins and verses. Basket and books in hand, he worked the marketplace in Newburyport as well as travelling door-to-door,

Still, Plummer did possess talents. He had a remarkable memory and could recite poetry when asked, his loud voice booming through the marketplace.

He obtained, and quickly lost, teaching jobs. A fan of religious revivals, Plummer took to searching for a congregation to minister to. He identified himself as “lay bishop extraordinaire.” But he could find no congregation that agreed with him.

All the while, Plummer continued his house-to-house peddling. Along with the necessities of life, he began to offer broadsides and books he wrote and printed himself.

He initially turned to poetry as a way to woo women. He titled his first effort To Florella of Deerfield. But he failed to win Flora’s or any woman’s heart.

He soon found that storytelling captured a broader audience.

Boating accidents, smallpox outbeaks, hurricanes, fires, and murders all were fodder for his one-man publishing empire.

Fair Ladies

A sampling of his verse from a poem about a girl he feared died in a smallpox outbreak:

“She’s gone! her matchless soul has fled!
Her body’s number’d with the dead!
Relentless death has with his dart
Pierc’d lovely Katy to the heart!

Plummer’s caustic side also found an outlet in his publishing. In 1793 he produced Plumer’s Declaration of War with the Fair Ladies of the Five Northern States. He swore off young women, turning his attention to a succession of spinsters, courting in turn nine “vigorous and antiquated virgins.” But he found no takers.

They thought a ballad feller too mean to associate with, and often insulted me on account of my offensive breath, cruelly despisin me because I was unwell.

Whittier Remembers

John Greenleaf Whittier

Among Plummer’s customers was the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, who recalled him in his book, Yankee Gypsies.

“Twice a year, usually in the spring and autumn, we were honored with a call from Jonathan Plummer, maker of verses, pedler and poet, physician and parson,—a Yankee troubadour,” wrote Whittier.

“[F]irst and last minstrel of the valley of the Merrimac, encircled, to my wondering young eyes, with the very nimbus of immortality,” Whittier recalled.

Whittier remembered how Plummer brought with him pins, needles, tape and cotton-thread for his mother. He brought jack-knives, razors and soap for his father. And he brought verses of his own composing, “coarsely printed and illustrated with rude wood-cuts” for the younger members of the family.

“No love-sick youth could drown himself, no deserted maiden bewail the moon, no rogue mount the gallows, without fitting memorial in Plummer’s verses,” he wrote. “Earthquakes, fires, fevers, and shipwrecks he regarded as personal favors from Providence, furnishing the raw material of song and ballad.”

Whittier recalled Plummer’s welcome appearance in his family’s country seclusion. “We listened with infinite satisfaction to his reading of his own verses, or to his ready improvisation upon some domestic incident or topic suggested by his auditors,” he wrote.

At first Plummer stumbled when he started a new subject, but then his rhymes flowed freely. “His productions answered, as nearly as I can remember, to Shakespeare’s description of a proper ballad,—”doleful matter merrily set down, or a very pleasant theme sung lamentably.

“He was scrupulously conscientious, devout, inclined to theological disquisitions, and withal mighty in Scripture. He was thoroughly independent; flattered nobody, cared for nobody, trusted nobody. When invited to sit down at our dinner-table he invariably took the precaution to place his basket of valuables between his legs for safe keeping. “Never mind they basket, Jonathan,” said my father; “we shan’t steal thy verses.” “I ‘m not sure of that,” returned the suspicious guest. “It is written, ‘Trust ye not in any brother.'”

Lord Timothy Dexter

Lord Timothy Dexter with his hairless dog

In the mid-1790s, Plummer finally found a patron. Newburyport’s quixotic Lord Timothy Dexter took him on as a sort of protégé. Dexter provided Plummer with a small stipend. In return Plummer recounted Dexter’s exploits in flattering poetry.

In 1806, Dexter died and left no money for Plummer, though it did nothing to dampen Plummer’s praise for his former patron. He then published two accounts of Dexter’s life.

Bitterness eventually consumed Plummer, however. He lived with several of his cousins. He took to self-harming and mutilated himself. Plummer eventually died, apparently of self-starvation, in 1819.

The newspaper announced the death of “Mr. Jonathan Plummer, aged 58, Massachusetts poet laureate to their majesties the sovereign people.”

Bequests of Jonathan Plummer

Plummer left a considerable estate of more than $1,500. He left several wills that revealed his bitterness.

One will directed: “Should my father or any of either my brothers have hypocrisy to follow me in mourning, or to walk between my coffin and the other people who happen to attend my funeral, I desire my executor to endeavor to prevent their so dong.”

In his final will, Plummer directed his estate to publish 600 copies of his memoirs. The remainder of his money was to be given to the Methodist church in Greenland, N.H. His money, instead, went to his surviving brothers and sisters as the court judged him not of sound mind when he drew up his will.

Thanks to: The Life of Lord Timothy Dexter by Samuel L. Knapp; History of Newburyport, Mass., by John Currier and The Memoirs of Jonathan Plummer, Jr. 1761-1819 by Roger Wolcott Higgins and Jonathan Plummer, Jr. This story updated in 2022.

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Fanny and Oliver, The Unlikely Pair Who Secured the Legacy of Walt Whitman

On July 4, 1855, Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman was first published – to widespread shock and awe. Today’s literary classic was 1855’s obscenity. Amid the furor over Walt Whitman’s explicit sexual imagery, two New England powerhouses conspired to make sure it was never forgotten.

Fanny Fern strongly defended Whitman’s collection of poems. Fern was not a force to be ignored. Born in Portland, Maine in 1811 as Sara Willis, she had plenty of grit. She fought her way out of the poverty that enveloped her after her first husband’s death.

Walt Whitman at 35

Fern became a widely read columnist in the New York Ledger, proving her brother wrong. He was a magazine publisher who rejected Fern’s writing as too provincial. For good measure, she published a best-selling roman-a-clef that pilloried her brother. Her main character ignored any responsibility to a struggling sister while actively working to inhibit her career.

So when Leaves of Grass created a hubbub, Fanny Fern couldn’t resist getting into the thick of it.

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman published the book because of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem that called for a new voice to examine American culture and mores.

Leaves of Grass shocked proper society. Emerson praised it, but many others did not. According to some accounts, the New England poet John Greenleaf Whittier threw the book in the fire. Critics decried it as filth. They called Whitman a hack. One even hinted in print that Whitman was homosexual.

Walt Whitman was employed at the U.S. Department of Interior at the time of the initial publication. The Secretary of the Interior thought the work pornographic and summarily fired him. (Whitman would recover with another government job).

Unspeakably Delicious

All this noise focused Fanny Fern’s firepower on the topic in May of 1856:

Fanny Fern

“Leaves of Grass thou art unspeakably delicious,” she wrote. “Walt Whitman, the world needed a “Native American” of thorough, out and out breed—enamored of women not ladies, men not gentlemen; something beside a mere Catholic-hating Know-Nothing; it needed a man who dared speak out his strong, honest thoughts, in the face of pusillanimous, toadying, republican aristocracy; dictionary-men, hypocrites, cliques and creeds; it needed a large-hearted, untainted, self-reliant, fearless son of the Stars and Stripes, who disdains to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage …”

The praise from Fern and other critics helped give publishers the spine-stiffening they needed. They kept Leaves of Grass in print as Walt Whitman revised, expanded and reworked his masterpiece for decades.

Oliver Stevens

Thirty years later, Bostonian Oliver Stevens would give Leaves of Grass another needed boost – but in a very different way.

Stevens was the district attorney for Boston. He rose to prominence in 1875 in the trial of the notorious “belfry murder case.” Warren Avenue Church janitor Jim Piper had killed a young girl, Mabel Young, in the church belfry. The girl’s body and the baseball bat used to kill her were hidden in the belfry.

The case against Piper was a difficult one to prove and the attorney general, who usually prosecuted murders, was ill and unable to handle the case. Stevens, the young Suffolk County district attorney, stepped in. He masterfully procured a conviction that launched his 30-year career.

A fixture on Beacon Hill and his summer estate in North Andover, Stevens was part of a movement to clean up the out-of-control crime in Boston at the time. Liquor, prostitution and vice was severely squelched during his time.

Watch and Ward

Stevens worked closely with the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice, an organization formed in 1879 to reduce crime and immoral practices in Massachusetts. It would later change its name to the New England Watch and Ward Society and have a 100-year run as the morality watchdog in Massachusetts.

A who’s who of Brahmin society made up the group’s membership. In 1882 the group persuaded district attorney Stevens to intervene with the publisher and censor Leaves of Grass. So Stevens wrote to the publisher and condemned it as obscene. He insisted that the publisher remove the poems “A Woman Waits for Me” and “To a Common Prostitute.” He also demanded revisions to several other poems.

Whitman’s publisher, feeling the heat, asked the author to approve the changes. Whitman refused, and the publisher backed out of the project. But another publisher stepped in. The “Banned in Boston” label and controversy would step up sales, Whitman’s new publisher theorized. And that’s exactly what happened.

The title found new life, and the 1882 version went through five printings. By then, critics warmed to the work. Walt Whitman would continue to revise and republish it up to his death in 1892.

The book again received a boost when the government distributed it to troops serving in World War II as a celebration of the American way of life for which they fought.

This story about Walt Whitman was updated in 2022.

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Hannah Ropes Spends 6 Months in Kansas With Loaded Pistols and Bowie Knife

On Sept. 11, 1855, Hannah Ropes, a 46-year-old single parent, stepped onto a train in Boston and headed to the ‘Far-Off Land’ of Kansas to fight slavery.

She was with her daughter Alice and about 25 other people, including men, women and 10 children. They were part of the exodus of abolitionists from New England to establish a strong anti-slavery presence in the Kansas Territory.

When the Kansas-Nebraska Act became law on May 30, 1854, it allowed the residents of each territory to vote on whether they’d be free or slave when they qualified for statehood. The territories were then flooded with pro- and anti-abolitionists.

During that arduous journey to Kansas, Hannah Ropes’ party encountered slavery supporters on a steamboat. The two sides then got into an argument. “There is not a good spirit shown on either side,” she wrote.

That was an understatement.

Homesteaders

She was born Hannah Anderson in New Gloucester, Maine, on June 13, 1809, to a family of prominent lawyers. She grew up deeply religious and passionately opposed to slavery. At 25, she married William Ropes, an educator, and they moved to Waltham, Mass. They had four children, two of whom lived to adulthood.

The marriage failed and her husband abandoned her. When her son Edward turned 18 in 1855, he left to claim a homestead in Kansas and to help build the Free Soil presence. He built a small cabin outside of Lawrence.

Hannah Ropes and her daughter Alice then decided to join him. The New England Emigrant Aid Company may have sponsored them.

It started out in April 1854 as the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company in Worcester, Mass. The first party, of about 1,250 people, arrived in Kansas on Aug. 1, 1854. By the spring of 1855, 13 parties of similar size came to Kansas.

The company advertised in newspapers. Lucy Larcom wrote Call to Kansas, and John Greenleaf Whittier wrote The Kansas Emigrants, poems widely published in newspapers to promote the cause.

Eventually the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company merged with another to form the New England Emigrant Aid Company. It founded Lawrence, Kan., named after the company secretary, Amos Adams Lawrence. It also founded Manhattan, Kan., and was instrumental in Topeka and Osawatomie. The company built gristmills and sawmills in Lawrence, Topeka, Manhattan, Osawatomie, Burlington, Wabaunsee, Atchison, Batcheller (now Milford) and Mapleton.

The founders hoped the company would send 20,000 emigrants to Kansas a year, but that dream was never realized. What did happen was that Border Ruffians from Missouri moved to Kansas to tip the balance toward slavery.

Bleeding Kansas

Hannah Ropes and her daughter left New England with a party. They boarded a train in Boston on Sept. 11, 1855 and traveled to Albany, N.Y., where they all spent the night together in one room that lacked a bed. They continued by train through Ontario and past Detroit, arriving in Alton, Ill. There they boarded a steamer for St. Louis. From there she boarded a steamboat to Kansas City via the Missouri River. From Kansas City, Ropes and nine others traveled by covered wagon to Lawrence, arriving on Friday, Sept. 23.

She got there just as ‘Bleeding Kansas’ was earning its nickname. Newspapers were reporting on the rape of several Northern women – including a mother and daughter – by pro-slavery ruffians in Kansas.

For the next six months she tended to sick people in Lawrence ‘with loaded pistol and a Bowie knife on my table at night.’

Conditions in Kansas

In November she wrote a letter to Sen. Charles Sumner describing conditions in Kansas. “There is not, there has not been, a single cabin safe from outrage anywhere in the territory for the two past weeks,” she wrote. “Without the slightest provocation, men are cut down, leaving families in lone places without any protection; our cattle are taken; teams of freight stopped on the public way, and all the merchandize handled over, to see what it contains.”

She described how marauders stole ammunition from wagoners and sent back with apples, potatoes and flour unsold. When “gentlemen” rode their carriages from Kansas City, half-drunk Missourians seize their horses’ heads, demand their business and make them pledge they won’t tell Lawrence people how near armed men camp around them.”

She then described how “a strong and noble specimen of a man” passed by her cabin. “I heard his cheerful voice, and the slow tramp of his horse, as though he did not wish to disturb our sleep, but only to assure us of safety. To-day, while off of duty, he is cut down as a butcher would an ox.”

She told Sumner their houses are no protection. “Long before this reaches you, other victims will sleep their last sleep,” she concluded. “There is hardly a cabin which a strong man could not tear down.”

In February, she was staying at the Free State Hotel, originally built as a fort. She wrote to her mother about the mice: “There is no space of this room which they have not measured with their rapid feet, and no secret hiding place they have not peered into.

Back East

Ultimately, Hannah Ropes couldn’t stand the threat of violence and the unsanitary living conditions that caused disease to spread. She returned to New England after six months. Her fears of violence proved correct. Pro-slavery people sacked the town of Lawrence a few months after she left. Eight hundred border ruffians looted the town after bombarding the Free State Hotel, destroying the printing presses and burning down the governor’s house.

The remains of the Free State Hotel after the sack of Lawrence.

Hannah Ropes made the most of the experience: She published a book, Six Months in Kansas: By A Lady, a collection of letters she wrote to her mother. She dedicated it to her own mother and blamed the conflict in Kansas on that ‘most unmitigated calamity Heaven ever suffered upon the earth–Franklin Pierce.’

Years later she took her Kansas nursing experience to Washington, D.C., where she volunteered as a Civil War nurse with Louisa May Alcott. She then caught typhoid pneumonia in the hospital and died on Jan. 20, 1863, at the age of 53.

With thanks to Civil War Nurse: The Diary and Letters of Hannah Ropes. This story was updated in 2022.

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