January 29 · This Day in America
Kansas becomes the 34th state, and it is no ordinary admission. For seven years "Bleeding Kansas" had been a rehearsal for the war the country was about to fight — armed settlers, pro-slavery and free-soil, burning each other's towns over the single question of whether a new state would hold human beings as property. Now the answer is law. The South's senators have walked out of Congress as their states secede; with them gone, the votes are finally there. President Buchanan signs Kansas in as free soil, eleven weeks before the guns open on Fort Sumter. A territory soaked in blood over slavery enters the United States having decided against it. The argument did not end here. But on this day, on the prairie, the country chose, and a free Kansas would send tens of thousands of men to make the choice stick.
Source: www.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1963
Robert Frost — four-time Pulitzer winner, the plainspoken bard of stone walls and snowy woods — dies in Boston at 88. Two years earlier he had stood in the January glare at John Kennedy's inauguration, the first poet ever asked to speak at one. The sun whited out the page he had written for the day, so the old man simply recited "The Gift Outright" from memory — a whole history of the country in sixteen lines, given back to it as a gift.
Source: www.jfklibrary.org
“The land was ours before we were the land's.”Robert Frost, "The Gift Outright," 1942