To “c” or not to “c”
How would a town founded on the premise of eradicating slavery from the United States come to name one of it’s original streets for a family that ensured slavery would be written into the Constitution? Spoiler - it didn’t!
My original post about the name Pinckney was created to talk mostly about the school that bears the name and how it came to be, and then to discuss how the name ended up in Lawrence in the first place as an afterthought.
I added more and more to that post as I discovered more, until the “afterthought” became the focus. At the same time, information coming out in the local paper and other sources has muddied the waters around this story and likely left the impression that the case for William Pinkney as the namesake for the street is not nearly as strong as it is.
So let’s start at the beginning.
Slavery as a tension in the American body politic has existed literally since the nation’s founding, but it ebbed and flowed in importance and passion among its citizens. But two events very near to the founding of Lawrence brought the issue to the forefront of political life and kept it there until the end of the Civil War: The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. The first radically extended the reach of Slave power into the communities of Northern free states, and the second removed the lid - the Missouri Compromise - that had held the expansion of slavery in check since 1820. To the abolitionists and anti-slavery activists of the mid-19th century, it seemed that the slave power was on the precipice of becoming even more dominant in American life.
It was under these circumstances that various aid groups sprung up in abolitionist hotspots throughout the northern states in an effort to encourage anti-slavery settlers to emigrate to Kansas and beat back the slave power in the newly opened territories. Lawrence was founded by the efforts of one of them: the New England Emigrant Aid Company (né Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company). It was the “ethical investing” of its day, intended to foster abolitionist communities that would keep Kansas free and provide a profit to its shareholders.
To that end, the towns that were founded by the Company didn’t evolve haphazardly like some of America’s earliest colonial settlements did; they were planned and plotted, so that lots could be marked and ownership clearly delineated. Lawrence was no different. A. D. Searl, arriving with the second group of Society settlers in September 1854, officially surveyed the town site that would become Lawrence. That survey would provide the basis for the first known map of Lawrence, Kansas, and the one that spells the street “Pinkney”.
The Street Names
Thomas Webb was the Secretary of the MEAC/NEEAC from its inception and through the end of its active period in Kansas settlement in 1861. He was, in essence, the only active employee of the MEAC/NEEAC and ran its day-to-day business. It was he who, upon receiving Searl’s original map of Lawrence, arranged for it to be published and who named the streets. The Emigrant Aid Company was creating publications to encourage more people to make the move to Kansas and Webb noted in a letter dated Dec. 21, 1854 and published in the Lawrence newspaper that the Company sponsored, the Kansas Herald of Freedom, on January 20, 1855 that “The plot of Lawrence City will be completed by the lithographer tomorrow”
Critically, Webb also tells us the following about how the streets would be named: “The naming of the streets devolved on me, and the names selected, I hope, will prove acceptable. The reasons which influenced me in making the selection shall be hereafter given.”
In a letter published a week later, using language that would be repeated in Company pamphlets produced to encourage emigration to Kansas, the ‘reason’ for the street names is given: “The streets running east and west are named in honor of distinguished men, who have done something in the sacred cause of liberty.”
So far as what I have been able to find via online archives, no further explanation for the individual names on the east/west streets of Lawrence has surfaced. But it does seem unlikely that a community named exclusively by an educated anti-slavery activist would contain the name of the architect of the fugitive slave clause in the Constitution that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 drew its authority from. Especially when Webb skipped naming streets after the most known and broadly admired Americans (Washington, Jefferson, etc.) and went with far more obscure names that line up with contributions to anti-slavery. William Dane (namesake of 2nd St.), for example, drafted an amendment to the Northwest Ordinance during the first Continental Congress that banned slavery in the Northwest Territory. There are still dozens of letters and writings of Webb and other town founders from those first years of Lawrence on microfilm in the collections of the Kansas State Historical Society yet to be examined that might yet shed light on this.
Pinkney or Pinckney
Much has been made of the spelling of Pinkney Street in the earliest map as a mistake, because post-civil war maps all show the street spelled with a C. But I believe there are three key elements being overlooked:
Broader historical evidence
Who William Pinkney was and what his name meant to anti-slavery and abolitionist groups in 1854
How quickly the makeup of the Lawrence’s citizens changed in the years after its founding
More than maps
With important early official maps missing due to the destruction of records caused by Quantrill’s raid, there are other clues that can provide help. First is the original City Directory from 1855, recording the owners of lots in the newly plotted town. Pages 5 & 6 contain the names of the owners of lots on “Pinkney Street”
There is also the 1869 “Bird’s Eye” map of Lawrence, which still has the street spelled as Pinkney:
Second, and stronger, are business listings and other announcements with addresses printed in the Lawrence newspapers of the time. Newspapers are spotty between 1855 and 1865, (there are several large gaps in the online archives.) The earliest listing of Pinkney Street is an advertisement for Dr. C.E. Milner, who had an office on the corner of Pinkney & Tennessee. Beginning in July of 1857, he placed an ad that would run regularly in the Lawrence Republican, unchanged until late December 1858, when the spelling switched to “Pinckney Street.” This appears to be an editorial decision by the Lawrence Republican, as other mentions of the street in their municipal reporting also changed to “Pinckney.” At the same time, Lawrence’s oldest paper, the Herald of Freedom (later the Kansas State Journal) used “Pinkney” exclusively until late 1862, when in a few editions the reporting would spell it “Pinckney” while ads placed by the city for bids on street work would spell it “Pinkney.” The Kansas Weekly Tribune began publishing in January 1863 and used “Pinkney” in all reporting and property listings, save two, until it was destroyed in Quantrill’s Raid. Oddly, the emergence of a more consistent use of “Pinckney” in most papers began just a few months before the raid in the spring and summer of 1863. By 1864 only the Kansas State Journal continued to use “Pinkney” (and only in property listings), and by 1865 the “Pinkney” without a “c” seems to have all but disappeared.
Third, and most importantly, are Thomas Webb’s own writings about Lawrence that mention the street. Remember, the MEAC/NEEAC was set up as a corporation and expected to make a profit from the businesses it operated and the properties it owned in the territory. To that end, Webb corresponded on three separate occasions in 1858 and 1859 with the Company’s business agent in Lawrence about properties on Pinkney Street, never once spelling it with a “c”:
The properties are also mentioned in the Company’s annual report in May of 1858. In this, as well as in the agent’s responses to Webb, the street is never spelled with a c.
William Pinkney’s speech
One of the things about the way history comes down to us is how it necessarily must be cropped and condensed to the essence of the story. But just because figures and events don’t make the cut of the “commonly understood” draft of history doesn’t mean they were without influence. William Pinkney - or more importantly, his 1789 speech to the Maryland House of Delegates - had an impact on the abolitionist movement and was often referenced in anti-slavery speeches and texts in the 1850’s.
The speech itself was made in opposition to a bill that prevented the manumission of slaves upon their owner’s death. But Pinkney used the opportunity to call into question the practice of slavery on moral grounds, and in doing so made clear that black people were equal in their basic humanity to whites. The speech was quickly turned into a pamphlet that remained in circulation in abolitionist circles until the Civil War. In 1854, a writer in the North American Review reminded readers of how Pinkney’s speech tackled the absurdity of slavery directly, something that had been lost after decades of proslavery propaganda: “It is curious at this present time, when we are so familiar with anti-slavery appeals directed to the reason, the imagination, and the sympathies, to go back to the infancy of the cause, and read his exceedingly elementary argument on the ills of slavery.” (Find a copy of the speech here)
A long section of Pinkney’s speech was read into the Congressional record in 1856 by Indiana congressman Samuel Brenton on the floor of the House of Representatives, as a response to the caning of Charles Sumner in the Senate. It had been entered into the record in previous decades as well in earlier slavery debates. The Company’s own Lawrence paper, the Herald of Freedom, printed an article on April 21, 1855 that led with the following: “The great Pinkney proclaimed but plain and simple truths, when he stated, in the Legislature of Maryland, that Slavery was contrary to the eternal principles of natural justice, and that the most fruitful soil must ever wither beneath the touch of the unpaid slave.”
Finally, The importance of this speech to the abolitionist movement is reflected in a popular biography of William Pinkney that was published in 1853. It appears to have been written specifically to combat the influence of the pamphlet in the abolitionist world. The author of the biography, William Pinkney’s nephew, was himself a southern sympathizer and sought to keep the elder Pinkney from being a source of inspiration for abolitionists. The nephew attempted to elevate Pinkney’s speech in the Senate in favor of the Missouri Compromise in 1820 as his crowning achievement. (The Missouri Compromise speech isn’t a defense of slavery as much as a defense of a state to decide the question for itself, but it clearly marked a turn from his anti-slavery youth.) In the introduction to the book, the the nephew writes: “I shall dwell upon this, because the views of Mr. Pinkney have been singularly misconstrued and misrepresented on the floor of the American Senate. He has been identified with modern abolitionism.”
A different town
Probably the most important thing to remember about the town of Lawrence is just how quickly it changed from a community founded on a political cause to a center of commerce for an agrarian region. No more than 2,000 settlers came to all of northeast Kansas as a direct result of NEEAC efforts in the mid-1850s, and likely a third soon returned east. The NEEAC itself dissolved their holdings and direct involvement with Kansas settlements in 1861 upon Kansas entering the Union a free state.
The early population of several hundred politically motivated settlers was quickly diluted by farmers coming from across the Ohio valley, meaning the original abolitionists were vastly outnumbered even at the time of Quantrill’s raid in 1863, when the town’s population stood at 3,000. By the mid-1870s the population would grow to 8,000. It is unlikely that many of them were educated at all, much less steeped in abolitionist writing and thought. Those who did have some education would much more likely have associated Pinkney street with a Revolutionary War general and signer of the Constitution - Charles Cotesworth Pinckney
This ties into something that was in the Lawrence Journal World about the official city maps made sometime after Quantrill’s raid - that new maps had to be made after the originals were destroyed. The LJW article quotes Douglas County Registrar of Deeds Kent Brown that the earliest map the county holds lists the street as “Pinckney” and that the map has notations that it is a “copy” of the original plat of Lawrence; the original having been destroyed in Quantrill’s raid. His thinking is that the copy would have been made as quickly as possible after the raid as official information would be needed for legal purposes in the aftermath of such a catastrophe.
Now, remember something I wrote earlier, about the emergence of the spelling “Pinckney” in addresses and other notifications? It really began in earnest 1864. If there is a moment in time where a misspelling occurred, this is likely it. As fewer and fewer people in Lawrence remain who knew the real spelling or the reason for it and the literal corporate sponsor of Lawrence itself completely gone, the new “official” spelling - the product of an accident - takes over, slowly blotting William Pinkney’s name from Lawrence’s history.