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The Burden of Western History: Kansas, Collective Memory, and The Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) Summer 9-1-2014 The urB den of Western History: Kansas, Collective Memory, and the Reunification of the American Empire, 1854-1913 Matthew Gordon Stewart Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd Recommended Citation Stewart, Matthew Gordon, "The urB den of Western History: Kansas, Collective Memory, and the Reunification of the American Empire, 1854-1913" (2014). All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). 1352. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd/1352 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS Department of History Dissertation Examination Committee: Iver Bernstein, Chair Elizabeth Borgwardt Peter Kastor Angela Miller Lori Watt The Burden of Western History: Bleeding Kansas, Collective Memory, and the Reunification of the American Empire, 1854-1913 by Matthew G. Stewart A dissertation presented to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2014 St. Louis, Missouri © Matthew G. Stewart, 2014 CONTENTS List of Figures iii Acknowledgements iv Introduction: Making, Unmaking, and Remaking the Nation in Kansas 1 Chapter 1: The Multifaceted Traumas of Bleeding Kansas 26 Chapter 2: Bleeding Kansas Begets a National Blood Sacrifice in Pursuit of Homes 73 Chapter 3: The Kansas Spirit of the American Reunion 111 Chapter 4: Who Owns the Kansas Spirit? 152 Chapter 5: Kansas as a Way of Empire 173 Conclusion: Bringing it all Back Home: Embodiment through Memory 198 Bibliography 208 ii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Map of modern Kansas showing land reserved for Native groups in 1846 Figure 2: 1857 Map of Territorial Kansas Figure 3: Daniel R. Anthony Figure 4: Artist’s rendering of the Marais des Cygnes Massacre Figure 5: John Brown, Jr. Figure 6: Flag of the First Colored Kansas Infantry Figure 7: Map showing location of Honey Springs and Poison Springs battle sites Figure 8: Artist’s depiction of Quantrill’s attack on Lawrence Figure 9: 1860 Map of Missouri and Kansas Figure 10: The Kansas and Colorado Building at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition Figure 11: Preparing to fire the Topeka and Leavenworth cannon Figure 12: Theodore Roosevelt at Osawatomie Figure 13: William Tecumseh Vernon Figure 14: USS Kansas launching party Figure 15: Mary A. Prescott Horton iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank many people who have generously helped me in this dissertation writing process, starting with my committee. Iver Bernstein, my adviser and committee chair, has given me endless encouragement and spent countless hours revising drafts of each chapter. Peter Kastor helped introduce me to the rigors of graduate work during his Lewis and Clark seminar during my first semester and has been a close supporter and collaborator throughout this work. Elizabeth Borgwardt and Lori Watt have been valuable resources as well, providing commentary on drafts and models of excellent teaching. Angela Miller team taught the seminar “The American Trauma” with Professor Bernstein that gave me the inspiration for the subject matter of this project. My interest in collective memory was deepened by a Mellon Summer seminar at Washington University on that topic. Summer research trips to the University of North Carolina and the Kansas State Historical Society were funded by generous grants from the Washington University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Extended stays in Topeka, Kansas were facilitated by the Pittman-Lui family, as well as Helen and Dan Crow. Other key contributors to this project include many friends who shared this graduate experience with me, including Scott Morris, Steven Schrum, Aaron Akins, John Aerni-Flessner, Jacon Labendz, and Benjamin Dyer. I would also like to thank my parents, Paul and Judy, as well as my sister, Leslie, for fostering my love of education, and for their continuing love, support, and good humor. iv Introduction: Making, Unmaking, and Remaking the Nation in Kansas “Why Osawatomie? This is where it started!” So read the declaration of editor Kevin Gray in a December 7, 2011 opinion piece for the Osawatomie (Kansas) Journal in response to the previous day’s visit and speech on the nation’s economy by President Barack Obama. By choosing Osawatomie, President Obama invoked the memory of Theodore Roosevelt, who on August 31, 1910 announced his plan for an insurgent “New Nationalism” to protect ordinary citizens from what he characterized as excessively influential corporate interests. Obama’s explicit purpose for choosing Osawatomie may have been to evoke Roosevelt’s connection to average Americans. But the symbolic weight of Osawatomie, as Gray pointed out, ran much deeper. The town had briefly been the home of John Brown, the radical abolitionist so closely tied to the extralegal violence of the territorial era known as “Bleeding Kansas” and so polarizing for the nation as a rehearsal for, or indeed, preliminary outbreak of the Civil War. 1 The goal of this dissertation is to explain the origins and significance of Civil War memory in Kansas. Of course, the Civil War in Kansas began in 1854 with the bloody, remorseless clashes between proslavery and free soil settlers—what was known as Bleeding Kansas—and continued through the end of America’s Civil War in 1865. This project explains the unlikely and ironic development that transformed the place where the United States so violently and painfully fell apart into a premier symbol for national unification in the decades after the Civil War. After nearly ninety years of American imperial growth under the federal republic that ultimately failed to create unity among its disparate peoples, Kansas became a laboratory for managing the politics of difference for two generations after the Civil War. At the heart of this transformation were the challenges of expanding and maintaining a U.S. imperial state. Kansas was a cockpit of imperial conflict; it was where the antebellum empire of Manifest Destiny broke down. Kansas was a site that manifested not “destiny,” but the tensions that all empires face. Here is the definition of empire: an expansionary state that must undertake a simultaneous project of incorporation and differentiation. At once, leaders of empires seek to create and impose unity among the various peoples living under their control and seek to amplify differences that justify their continued, “natural” rule. This tension between the need for unification and necessity of differentiation was the contradiction that bedevils all imperial states. 1 From this perspective, the U.S. was an imperial state from the founding of the republic, and the long 19th century was an era of ebbing and flowing challenges and rebellions of various kinds to that imperial state. The early federal and antebellum state was able to survive and expand through often difficult compromises, shared local and national autonomy over legislative matters and law enforcement, and a territorial system that incorporated new white 1 Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 5-9. 2 populations and preexisting sovereignties into a unified polity that at the same time excluded Native Americans and subjugated black slaves. Indeed, this dissertation joins two historiographies, those of the Civil War and American empire, by treating the Civil War as the most dramatic moment of many involving the evolution and devolution of the American imperial state. A sketch of this process of imperial evolution and devolution might look as follows. In the first two decades of the 19th century, Louisiana had been a successful test case for incorporating a demographically disparate region into the United States polity.2 The territorial ordinances that incorporated the “old Northwest,” including the states of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois successfully limited the growth of slavery in a manner that failed during the 1819-1821 debate over the legal status of slavery in Missouri.3 Although slavery was prevented from spreading to the North and West, territorial incorporation beyond the Appalachians also began a decades-long process of unequal treaties, displacement, and imperial wars against Native groups who were not given the benefits of American citizenship. The crucial years of 1845-1848 brought new territorial gains west of the Mississippi River and similar incorporative challenges and even crises for the United States as it added Texas, the Mexican 2 Peter J. Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 4. Kastor argues, “And in the end, the laboratory of Louisiana validated nationhood itself. The chaos that seemed everywhere in 1803 gave way to signs of regional stability, racial supremacy, and political integration by 1820. Louisiana was hardly calm, of course, for political and racial unrest remained a feature of daily life in the decades that followed. Yet in comparison to the white resentment, nonwhite violence, foreign intervention, and
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