Editorial

Nebraska’s first territorial legislature, convened in 1855 in Omaha, reflected the impermanent population that then inhabited the territory. Some of those elected had never been residents of the territory, and most of the rest were transient. Hiram P. Bennet, a member of the first territorial legislative assembly, recalled in an 1896 letter to the Nebraska State Historical Society:

This year marks the sesquicentennial (150th anniversary) of the beginning of the American Civil War on April 12, 1861, the date when Confederate forces opened fire on Fort Sumter in the harbor at Charleston, South Carolina. Nebraska was then a U.S. territory, whose creation in 1854 by the so-called Kansas-Nebraska Act had been a major factor leading up to war. The act gave Southerners the right to take their slaves into new territories located west of the Missouri River, a part of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase where slavery had previously been prohibited. Northern outrage over the prospect that slavery might spread into the West sparked the rise of the new Republican Party, which was determined to resist slavery’s extension. The 1860 election of Republican nominee Abraham Lincoln to the presidency prompted South Carolina, and soon ten other slave-holding states of the Deep South, to leave the Union and form the Confederate States of America.

NEBRASKA STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY P.O. Box 82554 Lincoln, NE 68501-2554 402-471-3270

Nebraska newspapers have been the subject of a number of reminiscences published in Nebraska History by the State Historical Society over the years. The September 1951 issue included the experiences of William H. Smith (1873-1954). His ‘Fitly Years a Country newspaper experiences in Seward: