No Man So Likely: Everett Peabody, Part II
By 1851 Peabody had moved to Missouri and would spend most of the remainder of his life in this, his new home. He would find ready employment helping to build railroads, where he would quickly win a reputation as an excellent civil engineer. His reputation became such that one admirer went so far as to call Peabody "the best field engineer in the West."
For the most part, the young New Englander found life and work on the rugged frontier much to his liking. The powerful locomotives especially impressed him. "What a great thing a locomotive is," he wrote to his sister in 1858, "a sort of Daniel Webster reproduced in iron. I always feel like taking off my hat, when I see one come elbowing up."
Yet life along the frontier, so far from his boyhood home, could sometimes bring on a reflective longing for the socially outgoing Peabody:
But after all, vague reminiscences come back to me of ancient sleigh-rides, of pretty faces snuggling close to your side, of muffs held up before faces to keep off the wind, and gentle words...Naught of that in this Western land...There is fun enough, and wit and nonsense enough, out here; but, after all, it is hard and angular, and lacks entirely the refining influence which womankind infuses into man's life.
The refining influence of womankind would infuse its way into Everett's life soon enough. In March of 1858, twenty-seven-year-old Everett Peabody married twenty-one-year-old Missouri native Amanda Ratliff, bringing an end to his life as a frontier bachelor. The couple would eventually settle in St. Joseph, across the Missouri River from Kansas.
Separation and War
Perhaps no state found itself as badly torn over the secession crisis of 1860/61 as Missouri. In contrast to some of the firebrands in the Upper North and Deep South, the majority of citizens in border-state Missouri wished for nothing so much as compromise.
Despite his New England upbringing and staunch pro-Union views, Peabody had come to share the opinion of his Missouri neighbors on the issue of slavery. A near decade of life in the border-state region had had its influence. As a result, Peabody felt that if a compromise on the subject was necessary to avert secession and war, then so be it.
His willingness to compromise did not translate into a willingness to go along with the secession of his adopted state, which he very much opposed. "We have been fighting a gallant battle here for the Union, and have whipped our opponents at every point," he wrote home during the height of Missouri's secession crisis in March of 1861.
Latest Articles