Robert K. Sutton

“When the fugitives arrived in Lawrence, most had only the clothes on their backs, and in many cases those were rags. “They were strong and industrious,” Rev. Cordley wrote, “and by a little effort, work was found for them and very few, if any of them, became objects of charity.” But while they were eager to make their new lives in freedom, they needed help translating their industriousness into livelihoods. Nearly all were illiterate because most slaveholding states had strict laws making it illegal to teach slaves to read or write. Fugitives arriving in Lawrence equated learning with liberty, so their thirst for education was overwhelming. But the town’s fine educational system was not able to accommodate the number of eager new students. Mr. S. N. Simpson, one of the town’s 1855 pioneers, had started the first Sunday schools in town when he arrived, and he conceived a system of education for the fugitives based on his Sunday school model. Classes would be taught by volunteers in the evenings, and the curriculum would include basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, along with lectures designed to help them establish themselves in the community. The people of Lawrence were as excited to teach as their students were excited to learn, and enough volunteers were available to split the first class of about one hundred men and women into groups of six or eight.214 Josiah C. Trask, the editor of the Lawrence State Journal, spent an evening in January 1862 visiting the school and devoted an article to his observations. Eighty-three students, taught by twenty-seven teachers, met in the courthouse. “One young man who had been to the school only five nights,” Trask wrote, “began with the alphabet, [and] now spells in words of two syllables.” He observed that there was a class of little girls, “eager and restless,” a class of grown men, “solemn and earnest,” a class of “maidens in their teens,” and “another of elderly women.” Trask observed that the students were “straining forward with all their might, as if they could not learn fast enough.” He concluded, observing that all eighty-three students came to class each evening “after working hard all day to earn their bread,” while the twenty-seven teachers, “some of them our most cultivated and refined ladies and gentlemen,” labored night after night, “voluntarily and without compensation.” It was “a sight not often seen.”215”
― Robert K. Sutton, Stark Mad Abolitionists: Lawrence, Kansas, and the Battle over Slavery in the Civil War Era