Letter-1855, January 5

Letter from Mrs. Clarina Irene Howard Nichols.

Battleboro, January 5 [1855].

Kanzas.

   But just while the item is in my thoughts, allow me a word in reference to slavery in the Shawnee mission. I see it asserted and copied from the Christian Age, that the Shawnee missionaries hold slaves. There are four mission stations along the Shawnees: the Methodist Church south has two, the Baptist one and the Quakers one. The two ladder and one of the Methodist—doctor Still—are anti-slavery and actively so. The Rev. T. Johnson of the Methodist Church, is a large slaveholder and cultivated 600 acres of the finest lands in the Shawnee reservation. When this man went into the territory, a “humble missionary of the cross,” it is said that himself and wife, with all their worldly goods, rode in, not on “a colt the foal of an ass,” but on an ox, a single ox, which slaveholding has matched at length, humanity bearing the other end of the yoke, that this divine may till his broad acres and fare sumptuously. By the way, when he got elected by the Indians, their delegate to Congress, he procured an absolute title to the acres he had enclosed as his mission farm, and beautifully is it fenced in and kept.

   The government at the same time, and it is said by the influence of the Rev. Johnson, withdrew its aid from the other missions, they being obnoxious to the government and its pet delegate. It is to this mission station Gov. Reeder has retreated from the “rudeness” of Leavenworth influences. He is in the vicinity of the Yankees, at least, and that may be a consideration with him. The mission station is on the direct road to Lawrence, which is some 28 or 30 miles further West.

Daily Republican, Springfield, [MA], Jan. 8, 1855, Webb Scrap Book, v. 2, p. 136.