Augusta's Journal

This volume brings to a close our four volumes on the chronicled life of Augusta during a very turbulent and pivotal period in the History of the United States: the opening-up of the West, the question of whether slavery would prevail nationally with political attempts to legitimize it in the new territories, starting with Kansas; a serious depression brought on by over expansion of our then growth industry, the railroads; the explosive discoveries of gold in most of the Western Territories; one of the worst wars in our history to settle once and for all whether we were to be "one nation indivisible" with slavery or not. Augusta's original three bound journals, which I inherited, with some 2,000 entries, beginning before she was seventeen, records not only her personal and occasionally tragic involvement in all of these events, but the influence these events had on her life at the time. Her journal entries from 1857 to 1860 present a record of the founding (by her father and a few other abolitionists) the town of Eldorado, Kansas that is better and more authentic than any professional early history of the city we've seen. She described in detail these two or three-dozen mostly young pioneers that were willing to go far beyond the Frontier to establish a voting district free of proslavery domination.