“The Ride of the Immortal Ten: A Transatlantic Quest for Justice, Freedom, and Survival in the Border West,” 10/18 Homecoming Colloquium with Kinder Institute Chair in Early American History Jeff Pasley

In a special October 18 homecoming edition of the Friday Colloquium Series, our own Jeff Pasley, Kinder Institute Chair in Early American History, will preview his new book project, an epic nonfiction western that tells the saga of Kansas abolitionist Dr. John Doy and the motley team that rescued him from Missouri captivity in 1859. A failed businessman and self-taught homeopathic physician from Hull, England, Doy brought his family to Kansas with the New England Emigrant Aid Co. and embroiled them in misadventures that included slave escapes, shootings, lynchings, assassinations, book tours, and suicide, all in the name of abortion rights, scientific farming, spiritualism, and racial justice. Festivities begin at 3:30pm in Jesse 410.

Abstract

On July 23, 1859, in the middle of a driving summer thunderstorm, ten heavily armed men from Lawrence, Kansas, broke into the St. Joseph, Missouri, jail and broke out its star prisoner, Dr. John Doy. A failed businessman and self-taught homeopathic physician from Hull, England, Doy had brought his family to Kansas with the New England Emigrant Aid Co. and gotten himself kidnapped by Missourians while trying to help escaped slaves flee north. With their compatriot facing life in prison, a motley cross-section of jayhawking abolitionists assembled to rescue Doy, including “fighting preacher” John E. Stewart (a fellow Brit), arms smuggling shoemaker James Abbott, innocent young book lover Silas Soule, and Joseph Gardner, a hulking Quaker with a knife as big as his heart. The mission succeeded, as captured in an iconic photo of “The Immortal Ten.” Yet, 1859 proved only the start of the group’s sometimes tragic adventures across the West, which included leading Black troops in battle; trying to rescue their friend John Brown; standing for both Indigenous rights and reproductive freedom; as well as deaths by lynching, assassination, and suicide.

Jeffrey L. Pasley is Professor of History and Journalism, Frederick A. Middlebush Chair of History, and the Kinder Institute Chair in Early American History. A graduate of Carleton College, he was a reporter-researcher for The New Republic and a speechwriter for Al Gore’s 1988 presidential campaign before entering academia. He completed his Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University and taught at Florida State University before coming to Missouri in 1999. His teaching and research focus on American political culture between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Professor Pasley is co-editor of Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (2004) and author of “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (2001) and The First Presidential Contest: The Election of 1796 and the Beginnings of American Democracy (2013), the latter of which was named a finalist for the prestigious George Washington Book Prize.