Pardee Butler

Born in New York in 1816 and raised partly in Ohio, Pardee Butler became a minister in the Restoration Movement and later moved west. In 1855 he settled near Atchison in Kansas Territory, where he farmed, preached, and threw himself into the struggle over whether Kansas would enter the Union as a free or slave state.

He is most often remembered for a dramatic act of intimidation that backfired: pro-slavery men in Atchison forced him onto a makeshift raft and sent him down the Missouri River because of his abolitionist views. Rather than leaving, he returned to Kansas and continued speaking and organizing, and he has also been described by the Kansas Historical Society as one of the early founders of the anti-slavery Republican Party in Kansas.

Butler died in 1888 in Farmington, Kansas. He remains a vivid figure from the Bleeding Kansas era, not only because of the violence he endured, but because his writing and the records preserved about him show a man whose religious faith and anti-slavery politics were tightly bound together.