DASTARDLY DADS FROM THE ARCHIVES (Kansas Territory - 1860)

The abusive father, JAMES PECK (a/k/a JAMES DIAMOND), had absconded with the children from New England to Kansas territory. The mother was determined to get custody of the children back--not an easy task in 1860, when fathers had nearly automatic custody rights. But with the help of a dedicated Kansas ally, the mother prevailed.

Passage from Diane Eickhorn, Revolutionary Heart: The Life of Clarina Nichols and the Pioneering Crusade for Women's Rights (2006).

In 1860 I was arrested with several of my neighbors, among them a Congregational clergyman and his wife, his deacon and wife, a Notary Public, and an ex-Probate judge, for kidnapping neighbor D's children. As a matter of fact, we had aided the mother in recovering her little ones from the clutch of a husband who had lived for years on the earnings of her needle, beaten her to insensibility, and thrust her out of doors, throwing her clothes after her.

The whole tale was absurd, outrageous, and tragic, which is probably why she loved to tell it. On the eve of the Civil War, one of the most respected women in Kansas Territory , a New England expatriate of excellent pedigree, a newspaper editor, and one of the country's best-known lecturers--Clarina I. H. Nichols--had been hauled into court to answer charges filed by a known wife beater and one of the town's leading scoundrels.

Her crime, it seemed, was befriending a young woman whom she had met on her daily stroll through Quidaro, a frontier outpost on the west bank of the Missouri River.....

Lydia Peck had been through too much to be discouraged by the dismal sight that greeted her as she stepped off the steamboat and started up the road to the town hotel. Since her marriage to James Peck, she had known little but hardship. For years she had supported her family, earning a modest living through diligent sewing and clever handiwork. But James was an abusive and a vengeful husband. When she asked him for a divorce, he threw her out of the house, converted their assets into cash, and fled with the children, Alma and Liberty , to parts unknown. Not knowing where they had gone, lacking the means to find them, Lydia sought work in a New England cotton mill where she skimped and saved until she had $400 in gold. Then she set out, determined to find her children and take them home with her.

The trail led to Quindaro, where James Peck was said to be living under an assumed name. Within hours, Lydia had chanced upon the one person in town best prepared to help her. Clarina Nichols recognized the man Lydia was describing to her. He was none other than James Diamond-- "neighbor D," as she would refer to him in newspaper accounts--a ne'er do well who lived with two young children in a rundown shack just down the road.

Nichols quickly assembled a circle of allies from among the leading citizens of Quindaro. On hearing of Lydia 's plight, they were ready to dispense with the law and take immediate action. "The gentlemen advised that I with several other women should go with the mother and take the children by force, as they would go with and protect us from violence," she would later write.

Her instincts, however, told her to avoid a confrontation with James Peck , a man known for his vile temper. It had also occurred to Nichols that Lydia's plight could serve a larger purpose. For the husband's actions, while extreme, were not illegal. Domestic abuse was not a crime in 1860, and his absconding with Alma and Liberty was tolerated as well, since the ordinary legal assumption of the day was that they were his children, not hers.

Laws making spousal abuse a crime were still years away from passage, but in progressive states across the Union , legislatures had started to level the field in custody cases. Nichols herself had recently lobbied the territorial legislature in Kansas , and at her urging it had passed a bill that, in theory at least, ended the automatic right of fathers to their children in a divorce. "Neighbor D," Nichols realized, could serve as an ideal test of the new law. After all, this father's idea of guardianship was known throughout Quindaro. Nichols and others had seen Alma and Liberty begging scraps of food from neighbors, and the home he provided them was, in Nichols 's words, "a hovel." Challenging James Peck in court had something else in its favor: it would be the easiest way to wrest these children from their father who did not strike anyone as being the negotiating kind.

After some discussion, the group agreed that Nichols should travel to the territorial capital and seek a divorce, with full custody rights, for Lydia Peck. Packing "her knitting work and reputation," Nichols headed for the legislature.

For a month she stayed on, finding work as a legislative clerk to support her efforts as she helped the divorce bill wend its way through subcommittees and both houses. While this was going on, several of the lawmakers asked her educate them as to why a woman might need protection from her own husband, and Nichols helped enlarge their understanding. Though James Peck's attorneys challenged the bill, they could not prevail on the lawmakers. The divorce was signed by the territorial governor on February 27, 1860, winning freedom for Lydia and stripping James of custody of the children.

That should have been the end of the matter, but Clarina Nichols knew that things were not always as they seemed in Kansas Territory . At that time in history, the territory was, in her words, "intensely political in every fibre." In that uncharted wilderness, the personal, the political and criminal intersected as they rarely have in United States history. Large numbers of fugitive slaves were crossing from Missouri , where slavery was legal, into Kansas Territory , where it was not. Some living in the border towns were ready to aid escaping slaves, but others were just as ready to hunt them down and sell them back to their Missouri masters for one hundred dollars a head.

Nichols felt contempt for "conspiring Kansas officials" who actively aided the bounty hunters. She also knew that if they felt no pangs of consciousness about profiteering from the fugitive slave trade, they would scoff at Kansas law granting Lydia Peck custody of her children. They would surely aid her ex-husband instead.

But with the law firmly on her side, Nichols was ready to take the direct action she had been reluctant to try earlier. She recruited a friend with a fast horse to race back to Quindaro and tell the local sheriff to be on the lookout for James Peck making a run for the border. Sure enough, he was soon spotted with a rifle on his shoulder and his children in tow, trying to sneak out of town after being served the divorce papers. The sheriff arrested and detained him, and Alma and Liberty were put in the care of a neighbor. This gave Nichols the opportunity she needed to recover the children without having to deal with their ill-tempered father.

The children, however, were almost as much trouble. It turned out that James Peck had told them that the reason he had taken them from their mother was that she was trying to poison them. Nichols wrote that the younsters had to be dragged from the neighbor's house "screaming, biting, and scratching their captors." Finally around midnight, Mrs. Peck , Alma , and Liberty were spirited out of Quindaro using escape routes of the local Underground Railroad.

The next day, Nichols began staging an elaborate charade to convince James Peck that his children were hidden somewhere in the village. For three days she and her co-conspirators darted about Quindaro, meeting in the shadows, exchanging notes, looking for all the world like they were up to something. By the time Peck realized he had been tricked, his former family was halfway across the country. Not willing to let the matter go, he convinced (or paid) local officials to have Nichols and several others arrested. They were charged with "willfully, maliciously, forcibly, and fraudulently enticing, leading, carrying away and detaining" Peck's children.

Throughout the weeks that followed, Nichols kept the newspaper readers of northeastern Kansas entertained by her accounts of the courtroom shenanigans. Writing under the pen name "Quindaro" for the Lawrence Republican, she described the case as though writing a drama review, with each update serving as a new scene. "The curtain is about to rise on scene fifth," she wrote as the case was nearing conclusion. She recalled how, earlier, Peck's lawyers had entered the courtroom with a "flourish of trumpets," parading their "wonderful legal acumen" before the grand jury. But the prosecution's case had quickly unravelled, and now there was nothing to sustain it but the claims of James Peck . The judge threw the case out, and afterwards, Nichols joked, Peck's lawyers beat such a hasty retreat that "it is not known entirely whether they are alive."

But then she had received a letter from Lydia Peck, who was back in New England , beginning a new chapter in her life. Nichols reported that each night Lydia went to bed with "a sunny little head on each arm because neither [child] was willing to be separated from her.