How Petaluma’s Founder Saved Abraham Lincoln

On April 12, 1861, five weeks after moving into the White House, Abraham Lincoln found himself stranded in the nation’s capital. Railroad tracks leading into the city had been torn up, bridges burned, telegraph lines severed. Across the Potomac River, a seditious mob gathered to either kidnap him or hang him from a tree on the South Lawn.

Army units protecting the capital had been dispatched to the western frontier by the previous administration, just before Lincoln’s arrival. What military remained consisted of clerks, ceremonial guards, and a military band, none of whom had fighting experience.

When news reached the capital that day that Confederates had fired upon Fort Sumter in South Carolina, the Union residents of D.C., surrounded by the slave states of Virginia and Maryland and anticipating an imminent siege, began fleeing the city.

In desperation, Lincoln turned to a group of battle-experienced office seekers staying at the Willard Hotel a block from the White House. Among them was Petaluma’s founder, George Horine Keller.  

Keller and Lincoln had met the previous year, when Keller helped escort Lincoln during his five-day visit to Leavenworth, Kansas, the city Keller co-founded shortly after establishing Petaluma.

Like Lincoln, Keller was born in Kentucky. At age 12, he enlisted to fight in the War of 1812, but was rejected because of his youth. After operating an inn in Indiana, he settled down for 15 years with his family on a farm in Weston, Missouri, before catching gold rush fever and setting off in 1850 for California.

Striking out in the gold mines, Keller found his way to a meat hunters’ encampment at the headwaters of the Petaluma Creek, where he opened a makeshift store and overnight lodge for disappointed miners like himself. Many came searching for land to homestead, only to be thwarted by California’s Mexican land grants.

In the fall of 1851, a group of frustrated settlers encouraged Keller to illegally claim 158 acres at the northern tip of a 13,000-acre land grant known as the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio. Hiring a surveyor, he platted and subdivided 40 acres of his claim into a town he called Petaluma, selling off the lots to land-hungry settlers.

In 1853, Keller returned to Weston, Missouri, leaving behind a town built on fraudulent land deeds, which, along with a protracted court battle over the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio land grant, would leave Petaluma on shaky legal ground for the next 20 years.

When Kansas Territory opened for settlement in 1854, Keller and a handful of partners from Weston formed a development company to create Leavenworth, the territory’s first town, along the Missouri River.

As was the case in Petaluma, Keller and company squatted on land they didn’t own—in this case, land held by the Delaware Indian tribe—with plans to subdivide it, reap the rewards, and address the legal consequences down the road (which they eventually did, settling with the Delawares).

Two days before the Leavenworth Town Company began auctioning off town lots, Keller and his son-in-law A.T. Kyle opened the town’s first hotel, The Leavenworth House, to a full house of land buyers.

Or so they thought. It quickly became clear most of their guests were activists from Missouri, more interested in establishing residency for voting purposes in Leavenworth than actually living there.

The seeds of the influx were planted in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which left it to territory residents to determine whether to eventually become a free or a slave territory.

Authored by Stephen Douglas, a Democratic senator from Illinois looking to boost his presidential prospects, the act overturned the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which banned slavery above the latitude of Missouri’s southern border.

Enraged by the act, abolitionists formed the Republican Party to stop the further spread of slavery. Lincoln, who had returned to legal practice after serving a term in the U.S. House of Representatives, was so incensed he decided to reenter politics to run against Douglas in the next senate election.

Leavenworth rapidly turned into a hotbed of electoral fraud, assaults, and murders, in a violent struggle between pro- and anti-slavery factions known as “Bleeding Kansas.”

An abolitionist, Keller turned his hotel into a popular gathering place for militant “Free-Staters” known as “Jayhawkers,” as well as part of the network providing refuge to escaped slaves on the Underground Railroad, making him a target of the “Border Ruffians,” a pro-slave militia openly assaulting Free-Staters on the streets, in their homes, and at public meetings.

Shortly after fending off 20 armed Border Ruffians one night at his hotel, Keller was taken prisoner and confined to a blockhouse in Weston, before eventually escaping to safety in Nebraska Territory.

In 1856, after most of the partisan violence had been quelled, Keller returned to Leavenworth to find Border Ruffians had taken over his hotel. He quickly built a new hotel, the Mansion House. Dubbed “Abolition Hill” by pro-slavers, it soon became the local Free-Staters headquarters.

Among his allies in town, the amiable Keller acquired the fond moniker “Uncle George” for resourcefulness and generosity—“the husband of all the widows and the father of all the orphans.” In 1857, he was elected to the first Kansas Territorial Legislature, which created a constitution establishing Kansas as a free territory.

Their request for statehood was blocked by Southern legislators in Congress until January 1861, when enough Southern states seceded from the Union to override the blockage. On April 4, 1861, Kansans elected James H. Lane as one of their first U.S. senators.

A lawyer known for electrifying oration, the daring and flamboyant Lane was a close colleague of Keller. He was also a Mexican War hero, and had commanded the Free State militia during “Bleeding Kansas,” ruthlessly and cunningly out maneuvering much larger pro-slaver forces.

Lane befriended Lincoln during Lincoln’s visit to Leavenworth in 1859, a year after his senate race against Douglas. Despite Lincoln’s defeat, his debates with Douglas—in which Lincoln argued that the fundamental rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness triumphed over Douglas’ advocacy of states’ rights for institutions like slavery—elevated him to the national stage.

By the time of Lincoln’s visit, Leavenworth had grown to 10,000 residents, making it the largest city between St. Louis and San Francisco. Lincoln used the city as a focus group for a speech he was planning to deliver two months later at the Cooper Union in New York City, an event that would launch his campaign for the presidency.

After Lane’s election to the senate, Keller accompanied him and dozens of former Free State militia veterans to Washington to lobby President Lincoln for commissions in the Union army or federal appointments back home. Most of them checked into the Willard Hotel, just down the street from the White House.

On April 17, 1861, five days after the attack on Fort Sumter, Lincoln received reliable intelligence that Confederates across the Potomac River in Virginia were preparing to march on Washington. He immediately summoned Senator Lane to the Oval Office, and asked him to assemble an armed militia of his Kansas colleagues to defend the White House.

Back at the Willard, Lane formed the Frontier Guard of Kansas, ultimately comprising of 115 members of his former militia, including Keller. They marched in formation down the street to the White House, where they set up camp in the East Room, arming themselves with crates of pistols, rifles, bayonets, and ammunition.

Mounting a propaganda campaign, Lane spread rumors throughout D.C. that the Frontier Guard was more than 1,000-men strong and planning a counter attack on the Confederate stronghold across the river. For ten tenuous days, the Frontier Guard defended Lincoln in the White House until Union troops were able to break through the Confederate blockade.  

Lincoln thanked each of the guard members personally for having saved the government from overthrow. The guard returned to Kansas, where they formed the nucleus of two Union companies during the Civil War.

Keller assumed command of Leavenworth’s “Old Guard,” protecting the city from Confederate forces. A year after the war ended, the Kansas governor rewarded him for his service by appointing him the first warden of the Kansas State Penitentiary.

Keller died on his farm outside Leavenworth in 1876, two years after the legal battle over the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio land grant, on which he had founded Petaluma, was finally settled.

*****

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier

SOURCES:

Books, Magazines, Journals

Samuel Cassiday, Pen Pictures From the Garden of the World, An Illustrated History of Sonoma County (The Lewis Publishing Co., Chicago, 1889), pp. 109-114.

William Connelley, editor, A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans, Volume 14 (Chicago: Lewis, 1918), pp. 1209-1210; Frank M. Gable, “The Kansas Penitentiary,” p. 379.

Jelani Cobb, “How Parties Die,” New Yorker, March 15, 2020.

William G. Cutler, History of the State of Kansas (Chicago: A.T. Andreas, 1883).

Adair Heig, History of Petaluma: A California River Town (Petaluma, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1982), p. 29.

David Hornbeck, “The Patenting of California’s Private Land Claims, 1851-1885,” Geographical Review, Vol. 69, No. 4 (Oct., 1979), pp. 434-448.

Jesse A. Hall and Leroy T. Hand, History of Leavenworth County, Kansas (Topeka, Kansas: Historical Publishing Company,1921), pp. 116-123.

George W. Martin, editor, “Territorial Legislature of 1857-58: George Horine Keller,” Kansas Historical Society Collection, Vol. 10, 1907-1908, p. 211.

James McClure, editor, Abraham Lincoln’s Stories and Speeches (Chicago: Rhodes & McClure Publishing Company, 1908), p. 111.

Henry Miles Moore, “Sketches of the Early Settlement of the City and County of Leavenworth,” Western Life (Leavenworth, KS), August 3, 1900.

Henry Miles Moore, Early History of Leavenworth, City and County (Samuel Dodsworth Book Co., Leavenworth, KS, 1906), pgs. 21, 24, 56, 86, 103, 123-127, 147, 161, 171.

James P. Muehlberger, The 116: The True Story of Abraham Lincoln’s Lost Guard (Ankerwycke, 2015). 

J.P. Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County (San Francisco: Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880), p. 131, pp. 259-262.

Donald J. Pisani, “Squatter Law in California, 1850-1858,” Western Historical Quarterly, Autumn, 1994, Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 277-310.

Robert Allan Thompson, Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, California (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co., 1877), pp. 53-54.

Websites

“Guarding the White House,” The White House Historical Association, whitehousehistory.org
https://www.whitehousehistory.org/press-room/press-timelines/guarding-the-white-house

“1851, March 3 – 09 Stat. 631, Act to Settle Private Land Claims in California,” US Government Legislation and Statutes. https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/hornbeck_usa_2_d/7

Newspapers

Leavenworth Bulletin: “The Flag Still Waves (Election results),” November 4, 1863; “Lane Pays His Own Expenses,” August 3, 1864.

Leavenworth Times: “The Old Guard,” July 31, 1861; “Official Vote of Leavenworth County,” November 10, 1861;”Kyle’s Reminiscence of Early Border Life,” January 11, 1902; “The Planters House Is a Monument to Exciting Past,” February 25, 1940; “Lincoln’s Visit to the First City of Kansas,” February 14, 2018.

National Republican (D.C): “The Military Movements Yesterday,” April 20, 1861; “Gen. James H. Lane’s Company,” April 24, 1861; “The Frontier Guard,” April 27, 1861; “Visit to the Capital,” April 29, 1861.