“In the summer of 1854, the western bank of the Missouri River swarmed with land surveyors staking out streets for dozens of towns in the three-hundred-mile stretch of river north of Kansas City. ” The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 propelled this rush into the territories. The Act repealed the Missouri Compromise and left the determination of whether the territories should be slave or free to popular sovereignty. It opened the land to idealists and capitalists—to settlement companies and politicians with slavery and abolitionist goals, to entrepreneurs who saw the potential of the west for market development, to transients, speculators and fortune hunters as well as to those seeking a permanent place to settle.

When the territorial borders opened in 1854, the non-Native American population in Kansas consisted of only a few traders, missionaries and Indian. agents. There were no towns and few communities. Abolitionist societies immediately began populating the area, establishing settlements and importing residents along the Kansas River to support the Free-soil agenda.

Pro-slavery groups moved with equal dispatch. Along the Missouri River, approximately twenty towns developed in support of their cause. Atchison was among them, and to many, the town appeared as “...the gateway through which a powerful champion of the pro-slavery clases expected to advance his forces and finally take possession of the state of Kansas in the name of his institution,”according to Kansas historian, William Cutler.

David Atchison, acting vice-president of the United States and senator from Missouri, was the powerful champion to whom William Cutler referred. Atchison was vehemently pro-slavery, and control of Kansas was requisite to his agenda. On the Fourth of July, 1854, he founded and dedicated the town named for him. But where Atchison sought political and ideological opportunity, five of the new town's residents emphasized economic opportunity. Within two weeks, these men left Atchison's original site and resituated the town at its current location envisioning their settlement as a gateway to reap the financial benefits of western trade along the Missouri River.

In Atchison, for three years after its founding, “The currents of feeling and the strange actions of men, which stirred the whole county during the pioneer days, eddied and centered around the town...” Pro-slavery principles governed politics and development until 1857 when

Pragmatism ousted a failing ideology. According to Cutler's account of the early battles between pro-slavery and Free-soil forces to control Atchison,“...the brains of the Pro-slavery party gave] up the fight, and the fortunate possessors thereof fraternized with any one who would come in to help build up the town, now striving against other new and flourishing places around it.”