Gihon, John H.:

$950 · Offered by William Reese Company · No longer available

GEARY AND KANSAS. GOVERNOR GEARY'S ADMINISTRATION OF KANSAS. WITH A COMPLETE HISTORY OF THE TERRITORY. UNTIL JUNE 1857. A significant association copy of this book examining the tenure of John Geary as the territorial governor of "Bloody Kansas," given as a gift two months following the conclusion of the Civil War from one early civil rights leader mentoring another. The present volume was part of early civil rights leader John Wesley Cromwell's personal library and bears a penciled gift inscription from African Methodist Episcopal (AME) minister and early civil rights activist, Jeremiah R.V. Thomas: "J. Wesley Cromwell, Presented by Rev. J. R. V. Thomas Portsmouth Va, June 8, 1865." Just two months prior, Cromwell left Pennsylvania where he had completed his education and returned to Portsmouth, Virginia, where he had been previously enslaved, to start a private school. Reverend Thomas must have recognized a budding civil rights activist in the then nineteen-year-old Cromwell and offered this book just two months following the conclusion of the Civil War likely as an object lesson in the political cost of slavery.John Geary was appointed by President Franklin Pierce as the governor of Kansas Territory during the violent "Bleeding Kansas" period of civil unrest over the slavery question. This series of violent conflicts between the pro-slavery faction and free-state/ abolitionist factions was a foreshadowing of the violence that took place over the question of slavery during

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