Finding the Forgotten Senator
By Johanna Wickman
When I first encountered Kansas Senator and Civil War officer Preston B. Plumb while researching my master’s thesis back in 2012, I never could have imagined that I would write a biography of him, let alone discover the magnitude of unpublished historical information that I did in the process. Some might think that writing a historical book is a boring process of sifting through archives, but in the case of “The Forgotten Senator” this was nothing short of an adventure for me that led to an unusual format for the book.
I had been collecting snippets of information on Plumb since 2012, but I didn’t begin researching in earnest until early 2021. I knew I would have to travel to Emporia, Kansas (the town he helped found in 1857 where he remained until he died in 1891) to obtain most of the research material. I headed to the Lyon County History Center and spent weeks with my scanner digitizing thousands and thousands of pages of material. Small museums don’t get the notoriety of their larger, more well-known counterparts, but within them often lie troves of undiscovered material just waiting for the right researcher to come along. This was exactly what happened to me.
In 1910, I learned, Carrie Plumb (widow of Sen. Preston B. Plumb) hired respected Kansas historian William Connelley to write a biography of her late husband. Over the course of three years, he completed this task while also managing to run afoul of Carrie. The book devolved into something more like an elaborate resume of Sen. Plumb’s, as Carrie demanded that Connelley withdraw all personal information, which he did.
But though “The Life of Preston B. Plumb” (1913) lacked depth, Connelley gathered a wealth of information to write it, all of which is in the collection of the Lyon County History Center. Connelley spent nearly three years traveling the country conducting interviews with early Kansas pioneers who settled in Emporia when Plumb founded it; fellow smugglers who brought in guns with Plumb to support the Free-State movement; soldiers who served in the Civil War with him; and fellow U.S. senators and legislators who knew him intimately—not to mention the interviews with Carrie and the rest of the family.
These interviews had never been published and contained new information on early Kansas towns, Civil War battles, Bleeding Kansas skirmishes and nationally significant political stories. Did you know that Plumb was the man who arranged for James A. Garfield to be the Republican presidential nominee at the 1880 Republican convention? There were only four men in that room (including Plumb and Garfield) when that discussion happened. Connelley interviewed one of them, Ben Simpson, who even drew diagrams of where everyone was seated and chronicled the discussion that took place that fateful night.
I fell in love with the stories and made the choice to include them, verbatim, in my book. For the first time, these stories could see the light of day and perhaps better inform historians around the country of these events as they were originally taken down by the people who lived them more than 100 years ago.
When conducting research, never discount the small museums or family members of your research subjects. They are often sitting on stories just waiting for the right historian to come along and share them with the world.
[Johanna Wickman lives in Casper, Wyoming, where she provides historical research, and exhibit design and collection services to museums and historians. Her books in include Lost Forts of Casper, and a biography, The Forgotten Senator: The Life and Character of Preston B. Plumb.]