The end of the road

It has always come down to this one sentence: “The reasons which influenced me in making the selection shall be hereafter given.” 

I found this article on the very first day I started looking for clues about the original name of Sixth Street and why a city whose founding was premised on anti-slavery would name a street after one of the biggest defenders of slavery at the Constitutional Convention (Charles Cotesworth Pinckney) or his cousin, the literal author of the Fugitive Slave clause in the Constitution (Charles Pinckney)

Finding this quote from Dr. Webb made me believe that somewhere, online or offline, there must be a document outlining his reasoning. So I kept plugging away, whenever I had a little extra time to poke around on the internet, reading another first-hand account of a Lawrence settler, or trying to read the barely legible handwriting on one of their letters that had been scanned but not transcribed and it was unlikely to have any clues. (But better to be safe than sorry, right?) 

Finally, it came down to the nine rolls of microfilmed New England Emigrant Aid Company records at the Kansas State Historical Society. The Kenneth Spencer Research Library here in Lawrence has copies of those rolls (and a few boxes of letters and documents of Charles Robinson) that I was able to arrange to see. COVID restrictions meant that the time I was allowed in the archives was limited and so it took most of the spring to go through them. 

Unfortunately, Webb’s reasoning was nowhere to be found. But what is there is ironclad evidence that Webb did in fact name the streets and he did so by himself - meaning we can eliminate debate about the ‘intentions’ of everyone else when it comes to the street names of Lawrence. Plus there is more circumstantial evidence that William Pinkney was the person Webb intended the street to be named for as well

Evidence of Webb as the sole author of the street names is found in the records of the  organization’s Executive Committee. The Executive Committee oversaw the day-to-day activities of the NEEAC that Dr. Webb, as the organization’s secretary, carried out. The first meeting was on July 24, 1854 (as the NEEAC’ forerunner organization, the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company), meetings then took place almost every week through the end of the year with Dr. Webb, as secretary, taking meeting notes. Most of the discussion revolved around fundraising, the progress of groups of emigrants, and entering into the record letters concerning NEEAC affairs that had been sent to the organization.

The official surveyed map produced by A.D. Searl is Is not mentioned until late in the fall. It had been carried back to Boston by S.C. Pomeroy and presented to the Executive Committee on November 22, and the notes show that the Executive Committee authorized it to be lithographed.

”Mr. Pomeroy exhibited a Plat of Lawrence City which the Secretary was empowered to cause to be Lithographed.”

Also at the same meeting, the EC assigned Dr. Webb to name the new community’s streets and parks as its last order of business:

“The Secretary was requested to select names for the Streets and Parks of Lawrence City.”

At the very next meeting Webb says in the notes that the naming is progressing:

“The secretary stated that he was attending to the subject of selecting names for the streets of Lawrence.”

This was December 2nd. Webb would soon write to Charles Robison regarding the map and to say that he would reveal his reasoning behind the names (the letter published in the Herald of Freedom and pictured at the beginning of this post). So it was with great anticipation that I carefully scrolled through the microfilm, reading those last few meeting notes of 1854. Even if there wasn’t a direct explanation of each individual name, I was hoping for at least a list of the full names of each person chosen, or perhaps Executive Committee members would want changes to some of Webb’s choices, and the ensuing discussion would reveal why some names were deemed worthy while others were not.

Instead, there was only one more mention of the map, on Dec. 23, 1854, when Webb wrote:

“The Secretary exhibited to the Trustees the Lithographed Plan of the City of Lawrence in Kansas Territory. After that the meeting was adjourned.”

And that would be the last mention of the map that I could find in the minutes, at least through the end of 1855.

So despite the hint dropped in the letter to Charles Robinson, there seems to be no surviving record of Webb’s thinking on the subject. In his correspondence that I could locate with other key members of the NEEAC, (such as Amos A. Lawrence, Eli Thayer, E.E. Hale, and Charles Robinson) Webb never asked for advice or feedback on names. Nor are there any drafts of really anything that Webb was involved in producing, such as the Information for Kanzas Immigrants - a 24 page “circular” full of geographical, meteorological, and agricultural information and travel guidance he wrote in mid 1854, shortly after the Emigrant Aid Company as organized. (This was both odd and frustrating, as manuscripts and notes for other Company publications such as E.E. Hale’s similar book Kanzas and Nebraska run to hundreds of pages.)

While it is disappointing not to have this additional proof, I do believe the case for William Pinkney to be very strong. Especially since (as detailed previously) for the next four years, whenever Webb wrote about property owned by the NEEAC on the street, he wrote it as “Pinkney”. As a Harvard-educated doctor and devoted anti-slavery activist, the chances that he was continually misspelling “Pinckney” - including at the presentation of the map - while none of his also highly-educated peers corrected him seems unlikely.

If anything the opposite problem - misspelling Pinkney as “Pinckney” - seems more likely. As I mentioned earlier, there are hundreds of handwritten pages from E.E. Hale, who was a driving force behind the NEEAC, and the organization’s connection to the Northern ecclesiastical community. Beyond his book “Kanzas and Nebraska” these writings include article drafts and fragments written between 1854 and the early 1890s. One undated article fragment about the 1820 Missouri Compromise, shows that Hale clearly knew of William Pinkney: 

“Pinkney had made his debut in public life, by a speech in the Maryland Convention in favor of the Emancipation of Slaves; - but that alas! - was a generation before! The young man of ‘89 was no longer young.”

Later on in the notes, Hale discusses William Pinkney across five pages, misspelling him as “Pinckney” every time and having to later correct himself, as on this page:

Chances are this is also what happened with the earliest and most prominent usage of “Pinckney Street”, when Lawrence’s newspapers printed the inaugural address of Lawrence’s first mayor, James Blood, on July 30, 1857. It was custom at the time for speeches to be written out by their authors for future publication, and a slip up by Blood in his own notes was likely faithfully reproduced by the typesetters when they set up their pages.

Who else were the streets named for?

The other angle I pursued when avenues of research on Webb ran dry was whether a clear theme could be discerned from the names of streets collectively. Were they all anti-slavery activists or thinkers? Or important Revolutionary-era figures? Or maybe just a collection of names of streets near the Boston offices of the NEEAC that an overworked secretary facing a time crunch simply cribbed from?

Here again Webb leaves us little to go on. The formal presentation of the map of Lawrence  - written by Webb - that was published in the Jan 20, 1855 edition of the Herald of Freedom says this about the named streets: “The streets running east and west are named in honor of distinguished men, who have done something in the cause of liberty”, a description so anodyne as to be meaningless. In an updated version of the Webb-authored “Information for Kanzas Immigrants” from 1856, he tweaked the criteria slightly, writing “…other streets, which are named after individuals, distinguished for their Patriotism, Philanthropy, and Love of Liberty.”

So I started researching all seventeen names from the original map, looking for commonalities. But here again there were no clear answers. Here are the names, plotted against some of the common theories for what connects them (listing both Pinkney and Pinckney):

In some cases there are different people who the street could be named for (Adams could be for Sam Adams, John Adams or John Quincy Adams); in others a single person might fit multiple criteria (Morris could be for Gouverneur Morris, the most passionately anti-slavery of all the founding fathers). In some cases a name might fit, but has only a weak correlation with one or both (Reed may have been named for Joseph Reed, an aide to Washington during the Revolutionary War and known to favor a gradual end to slavery.) Some names, like Berkeley, are a huge question mark. (The other blank entry, Penn, was likely named for William Penn, the colonial-era figure who founded Philadelphia and is the namesake of Pennsylvania, and Winthrop is most likely for a key founder of the Massachusetts Bay colony.)

But no while no category can lay claim to being the obvious winner, one thing does appear to be consistent throughout the names: there are no figures who were unabashedly in favor of slavery - unless you believe that a Pinckney is being honored. For while there are likely slaveowners on the list (such as George Mason, Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee) all of them made very public and well known arguments against slavery or attempted to pass laws ending it both pre- and post-Independence. 

On the other hand, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney argued at the Constitutional Convention that South Carolina would not ratify the Constitution if there were a move towards the emancipation of slaves, or even if the slave trade were abolished. Later when arguing for adoption of the Constitution in front of the South Carolina legislature, he crowed “We have obtained a right to recover our slaves in whatever part of America they may take refuge, which is a right we had not before.” He could make that argument because the other Pinckney at the Constitutional Convention, his cousin Charles, had authored and secured the inclusion of the Fugitive Slave Clause.

So while it is true that William Pinkney’s late in life defense of the Missouri Compromise must be considered when weighing him versus one of the Charles Pinckneys (and we know from E.E. Hale’s writing, at least, that he was deeply disappointed and saddened by Pinkney’s support of the Missouri Compromise) we know he never advocated for slavery. Plus, the continued popularity and usage of his 1789 speech by mid 19th century anti-slavery activists made it clear they felt the words of his youth outshone those of his later years. And like Patrick Henry’s Letter to John Alsop, those activists were more than happy to use the elegant arguments of people who didn’t fully live up to them in their own lives.

And that’s where I think i have to leave things. In my view, everything points to a functionary, busy with what he felt was more pressing work, tasked by his superiors with a job they didn’t seem to think was important enough to contribute to themselves, did the best he could to nod to the anti-slavery mission of the organization while still including broadly recognizable figures from history.