This is the story of how the Reverend Ephraim Nute Jr., a young, upright Unitarian minister from New England and my great-great-grandfather, attained a national presence in the 1850s as an abolitionist missionary to the Kansas Territory. His life was a dynamic thread in the tapestry of the fledgling Unitarian movement, pioneer emigration, the Underground Railroad, the Civil War, the soldiers’ homes of the Sanitary Commissions, the birth and growth of frontier newspapers, and the origins of higher education in the West.
The years of Nute’s active ministry called on Unitarianism’s highest moral aspirations and theologies but also revealed turmoil within the American Unitarian Association. While the AUA was forged in the pure values of liberal Christianity, the denomination was divided in its support of abolition. Some of its wealth stemmed from industries that depended on slavery. As a result, Nute was forced to fight for the financial support his denomination had promised him and his church when he set out as a missionary.
By the time of his old age, Ephraim Nute—whose name was a household word in the 1850s and whose adventures had been reported in newspapers all over the United States, Canada, and Europe—was remanded to near obscurity. Despite these obstacles, my family’s research, begun for the same reasons any other family explores its genealogy, has turned up substantial writings from Nute’s own hands, supported by the writings of contemporaries who knew him. In the correspondence and journals recording Nute’s day-to-day life, we find the stuff of legend: a young idealist who was shot at, imprisoned, attacked, and almost lynched as he stood by his parishioners in Kansas. He performed pioneer weddings in cabins with dirt floors. He stood by graves and preached the funeral sermons of family and friends who had been murdered by Border Ruffians. He rode horses across the prairie at night to lead runaway slaves to safety. He opened the foundations of his unfinished church to be used as a fort by men armed to protect the town of Lawrence, Kansas, and their families from attack. Nute’s dear friend Edward Everett Hale later wrote of him that he “was a good fighter when the fight was on.”