Capital City of Kansas

The constitution those Topeka delegates wrote would have kept slavery out of Kansas and free Black people out as well. The convention sat from October 23 to November 11, 1855. James H. Lane and others kept a black exclusion clause out of the text but let it go to a separate vote, and in the referendum of January 15, 1856, Free-State voters favored exclusion. The document then went to Washington with a plea for statehood. The House passed it by two votes on July 2, 1856, but the Senate held it in committee.

What the plaque says

Capital City of Kansas Before it became the Kansas capital, Topeka was the seat of a free-state government - an alternative to the official proslavery territorial legislature elected in 1855. These two bodies represented opposing factions in Kansas' battle over slavery. Antislavery Kansans refused to recognize the official legislature because the elections had been heavily tainted by fraud: thousands of residents from proslavery Missouri crossed the border to cast illegal ballots in Kansas. The antislavery faction elected its own delegates in 1855 to draw up a state constitution. Lest the situation devolve into all-out civil war, President Franklin Pierce ordered federal troops to march into Topeka in July 1856 and shut down the free-state government. But the city remained a hotbed of anti- slavery agitation. When Kansas finally gained admission to the Union in 1861 - as a free state - Topeka became the lawful capital. Topeka was also the birthplace of U.S. Vice President Charles Curtis (b. 1860). Curtis was the first American Indian and the first Kansan to hold the office. Erected by the State of Kansas

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park — 0.7 mi
  Monroe Elementary in Topeka, one of four grade schools the city kept for Black children, now the museum of the case that thirteen Topeka families brought and the Supreme Court decided in 1954.
• Prairie Peoples Park (Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation) — 20 mi
  The Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation's powwow grounds west of Mayetta, on the reservation the band held when most Potawatomi in Kansas took allotments and the promise of citizenship.
• Watkins Museum of History — 24 mi
  Douglas County's free museum in J. B. Watkins's 1888 bank and mortgage building on Massachusetts Street, a red-brick fortune built on Kansas farm loans and given to the city by his widow.
• Haskell Cultural Center and Museum — 25 mi
  Haskell Indian Nations University's own museum in Lawrence, built of cypress logs in 2002 to tell the truth about the federal boarding school the university grew out of.

More markers nearby

• Fool Chief's Village — 4.9 mi
• Lecompton Capital of Kansas Territory — 16 mi
• Kansa Indians — 18 mi
• St. Marys — 23 mi