294 The Desk Of A Champion

THE DESK OF A CHAMPION Ernst F. Tonsing

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One of the most poignant of the over hundred remaining letters of Colonel John A. Martin, youthful commander of the Eighth Kansas Volunteers in the Civil War, was the one that he wrote on a battlefield. He is unscathed, but has lost many of his companions. He reassures his little sister and parents that he loves them and will give a full report later. Scribbling in pencil on a scrap of paper, he explains his unsteady penmanship in that he is writing on his knees, surrounded by the dead and dying Throughout most of history, knees have been the "desk" for scribes. Cuneiform tablets of ancient Sumer and papyrus scrolls of the Egyptians were all written on the laps of scribes sitting cross-legged. Jewish and Byzantine writers continued the tradition. Only Romanesque authors in the ninth century began to use a table for anything other than a support for ink, pens and paper. In the years before the war, Martin had a desk at his newspaper in the border town of Atchison, in the Kansas Territory. I have it now. Thefinishhas turned black, but, it is still handsome. The top surface is two and one-half by four feet, and it stands two feet, three and one-half inches high. Four drawers are suspended on the right side. Its turned legs place the manufacture about the mid-nineteenth century. Possibly the desk had been left by Martin's predecessor, who, in 1858, sold the pro-slavery journal that the nineteen year-old editor transformed into the Freedom's Champion. In the 1860's the office was moved from 315 North Terrace to Commercial Street downtown. It served many years as his writing table before the paper changed hands at the end of the century and the desk was brought home. I remember it placed near a window in the northeast corner of the library of grandmother's house. There is a bit of irony here: the plant of the Squatter Sovereign purchased by Martin was located high on the Missouri River's bluffs where this house was later built. The desk now had returned to the site where it had originally stood. When grandmother's house was closed, my aunt Bess saved it for me. As I was still in graduate school, my parents kept it until I was able to bring it to my home in California. I have been reading the words written on this desk and have often wondered how the columns written by the Champion's editor were conceived. Writers don't need desks for their compositions, of course. Words do not germinate or grow on them. They emanate from obscure mental impulses, like meteor showers that appear in faint, startling streaks from distant constellations. Just as amateur astronomers sit on vacant school playgrounds scanning the skies on moonless nights, authors look inward for heavenly insights. They need no props, just patience and lightning-quick reflexes to turn the head and to focus the eyes to recordfleetingtraces of intuition.

Looking over the early issues of Martin's paper, I am amazed at the scope of the news. Items from neighboring territories and states, the distant national capital, and from cities around the world were noted. Copies of other journals, letters and word of mouth from boatmen and arrivals must all have crossed the table, to be selected, edited and printed. The old desk served something like the "Hubble Telescope" circling above us now, scanning and collecting light from distant regions of the galaxy. The editor took widely separated events and pulled them into focus, reporting Garibaldi's battles in Naples, France and Russia agreeing on the partition of Turkey, Spaniards firing on an American mail ship in Cuba, John Brown's hanging in West Virginia, and the capture of Fort Sumpter by the Confederacy. Cosmologists, however, need to make sense of the universe. Galileo, looking through the lens of his invention, not only viewed rings of Saturn and planets of Jupiter, but made deductions that shifted our understanding of the world. Sense, after all, is made as much in the mind as in the eye. Martin, too, not only recorded but analyzed and commented. Like Edwin Hubble, who changed the way we view the universe from static to expanding, so this pioneer editor, writing in the strongest pro-slavery region of the Territory, persuaded his readers to vote free and not slave, to uphold the United States Constitution and not withdraw from the Union, to peer beyond the inevitable conflict to a new, unimpeded prosperity. The editorials written at this table danced a dangerous step in "Bleeding Kansas." Here, contests were fought with a pen for cannon, ideas as gunpowder, and words as missiles. The dents and dips of the old desk are like the scars of a battlefield, and testify to heroic contests. The ancient Sumerian and Egyptian scribes wrote on their knees: this frontier editor wrote on a wood desk. His words transformed human lives, liberated human souls, and created a state in which freedom's flag could wave proudly. The old, battered desk endures. It is the desk of a champion.

Ernst F. Tonsing, Ph.D. Thousand Oaks, CA 91360 May 5, 2000