And the Winner is. . .

This is the third post in honor of National Women’s History Month.

Like most citizens of New England, Lucy Larcom had never seen the broad expanse of Kansas. But also like most citizens of New England in 1855, she had heard about, and had strong feelings about, the slavery question and how it should play out in the new territory.

Lucy had been born in Beverly, Massachusetts and lived in Lowell as a young woman, a town also home to poet and Free-state proponent John Greenleaf Whittier. Whittier encourage Lucy, an aspiring writer. In 1855, while a teacher at Monticello Female Seminary, Lucy heard about a contest sponsored by the New England Emigrant Aid Company calling for a Kansas poem. The New England Emigrant Aid Company was organized to assist in making Kansas a free state and was strangely both a money-making endeavor and a charitable operation. The group encouraged migration to the state and assisted eastern emigrants with many aspects of their travel, especially by conducting organized settlement parties.

Lucy’s entry, “The Call to Kansas,” won the fifty dollar prize. The poem was set to music and served as an anthem for many who left their comfortable homes in New England for the Kansas frontier.

Here is the opening verse:

Yeomen strong, hither throng,
Nature’s honest men!
We will make the wilderness
Bud and bloom again.
Bring the sickle, speed the plough,
Turn the ready soil!
Freedom is the noblest pay
For the true man’s toil.
Ho, brothers! Come brothers!
Hasten all with me!
We’ll sing upon the Kansas plains
A song of liberty!

When contacted in 1891 by the Kansas Historical Society to comment on the poem, Lucy said that the poem brought back many memories of the Kansas border struggles and the excitement that the situation there caused in New England. She commented, “I have always hoped to visit Kansas, but never found opportunity to do so.” Her words did travel to Kansas, however, with thousands of others.