Ho! For the Kansas plains

An illustrated sheet music cover for an antislavery song, dedicated to abolitionist spokesman Henry Ward Beecher. The illustration features a roundel illustration of the burning of the Free State Hotel in Lawrence, Kansas, by a proslavery mob in May 1856. The roundel is flanked by a standing Indian (left) and a settler, seated and holding a musket and Bible. The settler is probably meant to represent one of the emigrants recruited by associations like the New England Emigrant Aid Company to settle in Kansas in hopes of insuring its emergence as a free state.
A variant copy (cover only, with slightly different image) is in P&P LOT 10615-11; LC-USZ62-53600.
Boston. Published by Oliver Ditson Washington St.
Designed and engraved by Greene & Walker Boston.
Entered . . . 1856 by O. Ditson.
Title appears as it is written on the item.
Published in: American political prints, 1766-1876 / Bernard F. Reilly. Boston : G.K. Hall, 1991, entry 1856-10.