“Kansas & Nebraska” (New York: Morse & Gaston, 1856). Indigenous dispossession had been well underway in Kansas when proslavery settlers and Free-Soilers went to war in 1856. Library of Congress.Perhaps no controversy brought into relief the tensions between Indigenous rights, federal government obligations and duties, and the settler colonial prerogative in Kansas as did the Leavenworth Town affair. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs George Manypenny was the man who turned settler dealings into a major government scandal when he charged three military officers at Fort Leavenworth with orchestrating illegal land speculation and squatter settlement near the military installation. At the time, in late 1854, the area was being transitioned, per treaty agreement, from Delaware possession to U.S. territory, but Manypenny believed fort officers, in anticipation of the government’s extension of preemption laws to the territory, were using their military influence to secure for themselves and hundreds of their civilian co-conspirators prime real estate at dirt-cheap prices.[12]
Manypenny’s accusations traveled through multiple Departments, between Congressional representatives, and eventually to the president, whose ear was ultimately won by the Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis. Davis’s opinion effectively ended the discussion: “An examination [of the case] has satisfied me that the Delaware Indians have no right, whatever, to any portion of the military reservation at Fort Leavenworth…. [and that Manypenny’s charges] may be met by the reply that his… allegations of official misconduct on the part of the officers there, have not… been sustained by any proof, while they have been indignantly denied and repelled by the party accused.” Manypenny was left with his tail between his legs – and his own set of dishonorable accusations.[13] As one of the accused fort officers retorted, “[because] the charges of this guardian of the ‘poor Indian’ seem to be so utterly baseless, it is natural to ask what could have led him into a position where three responsible men point the finger at him as a willful calumniator!… [I am] hoping the gentleman will now turn from the Army to his own Department, where he can have ample employment in regulating abuses.”
Title Page of George W. Manypenny’s Our Indian Wards (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co., 1880). Manypenny defended his actions against the Fort Leavenworth officers in his 1880 reflection on U.S. Indian policy.
The question of slavery’s influence on the motivations and machinations of the various parties involved – Native actors, White settlers, and government agents – is a significant but less transparent matter. In some instances, it seems apparent that ostensibly legal concerns about “Indian rights” and treaty obligations served as rhetorical covers for imposing Free-Soil or proslavery outcomes in Kansas Territory. Historian Tony Mullis has offered some speculation along these lines regarding Jefferson Davis’s animosity toward specific officials, as well as Territorial Governor Andrew Reeder’s attempts to move the seat of government from the Shawnee Mission to the new town of Pawnee in 1855.