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Bleeding Kansas Review Essay Series BLEEDING KANSAS by Gunja SenGupta hat Kansas has had a special character and peculiar destiny most EDITORS’INTRODUCTION of her citizens have always believed,” remarked the distinguished As mentioned in our autumn historian Allan Nevins at a conference held at the University of issue, now, as we approach the Kansas on April 30, 1954, to commemorate the Sunflower State’s sesquicentennial of Kansas’s “Tdramatic conception one hundred years before. According to Nevins, the essential- birth as a territory, is an appropri- ly moral struggle between the “idea of freedom” and the “idea of slavery” that ate time to take stock of our state bloodied the valleys of the Kaw and the Missouri in the 1850s culminated in the tri- and region’s history. And what umph of “the great cause of human advancement” over the desperate machinations better place to start than with the of “an unprincipled group to present Kansas, in defiance of climate, soil and popu- Bleeding Kansas era, an era that lation, . as the sixteenth slave state.” In Nevins’s interpretation, it was this mo- produced our “first histories” and mentous sectional contest over liberty—rather than the cultural significance of the has generated so much historical Turnerian “frontier”—that shaped the peculiar character and destiny of Kansas. literature and debate ever since. While the New England mind that led the contest stamped upon the state’s identi- It was a interesting, controver- ty a western variant of Puritanism, the violence of the territorial era left a legacy of sial, and emotionally charged time, and “No one outside of the “bellicosity” and “extremism” that lived on in the agrarian revolt of the late nine- original thirteen, and perhaps teenth century. Kansas’s part in the national debate over slavery gave the state an 1 Texas and California,” observed inconsistent and ambiguous relationship with the history of American liberalism. Roy F. Nichols in 1957, “has at- Nevins’s perspective on the enduring national and local implications of the tracted more attention, historical Kansas conflict revealed perhaps more about the historiographical niche that or otherwise, than Kansas.” One Bleeding Kansas had come to occupy than it did about the distinctive character of would be ill-advised to take this Kansans. In the consciousness of historians, Bleeding Kansas was—and arguably claim of historiographic signifi- remains—not only inextricably connected with the larger story of sectional con- cance into the early twenty-first flict, with roots firmly entrenched in the historiography of Civil War politics, but century, but as we approach the also a chapter in the history of Puritan reform. Yet Kansas also was part of a cul- 150th anniversary of Kansas Ter- tural process or geographical space that historians starting with Frederick Jackson ritory’s birth, there are promising Turner in the 1890s recognized as distinctive enough to merit a history of its own. signs of a revival of interest. In this outstanding review essay, Professor Gunja SenGup- Gunja SenGupta earned her Ph.D. in history from Tulane University in 1991. She is currently an assis- ta, Department of History, City tant professor at Brooklyn College in New York, specializing in African American history and the Civil War and reconstruction eras. She is the author of For God and Mammon: Evangelicals and Entrepreneurs, Masters and University of New York, exam- Slaves in Territorial Kansas, 1854–1860 (1996). ines the extensive territorial Kansas literature and suggests 1. Allan Nevins, Kansas and the Stream of American Destiny: A Lecture Delivered at the Kansas Cen- tennial Conference at the University [of Kansas] on April 30, 1954 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, directions for future research. 1954), 3, 6, 8. Carl L. Becker emphasized the intellectual influence of Puritanism on the Kansas mind. Her own very important and See Becker, “Kansas,” in What Kansas Means to Me: Twentieth-Century Writers on the Sunflower State, ed. Thomas Fox Averill (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), 20–50. 318 KANSAS HISTORY It is time to re-examine the conflict between proslavery and free-state forces that occurred in Kansas prior to and during the Civil War. BLEEDING KANSAS 319 widely respected work in this area Over the years the historiography of the American West as it is now known has includes “Servants for Freedom: shared an inconsistent relationship with slavery and sectional discord. Dismiss- Christian Abolitionists in Territorial ing the slavery question as a mere “incident” in the stream of U.S. history, Turn- Kansas, 1854-1858,” an autumn er traced the sources of American exceptionalism to the toughening experience of 1993 article in Kansas History, “‘A westward expansion. It was the process of taming successive “frontiers”—“the Model New England State’: North- hither edge(s) of free land”—that transmuted Europeans into individualistic, de- eastern Antislavery in Territorial mocratic, egalitarian, pragmatic Americans. Since the 1960s, on the other hand, it Kansas, 1854–1860,” in Civil War is to slavery expansion—among other things—that some practitioners of a “new History’s March 1993 issue, and western history” have pointed to expose the racialized and gendered nature of For God and Mammon: Evangelicals Turner’s frontier thesis. Yet, the “New West” was by no means defined exclusive- and Entrepreneurs, Masters and ly or even predominantly by slavery or the sectional conflict it generated. The Slaves in Territorial Kansas, New West was a place (rather than a process) where ecology shaped new modes 1854–1860, published by the Uni- of production, where American Indians, Hispanics, and blacks as well a whites versity of Georgia Press in 1996. As SenGupta demonstrates, interacted and clashed over resources, where the challenges of settlement Bleeding Kansas has “legitimate strained but did not necessarily destroy the traditional boundaries of gender roles claims to a place in the histories of and identities, where violence took on an intense and distinctive cast, and where the West as well as the Civil War,” the federal government assumed an unprecedented activist role. To Patricia Lim- but “a review of the literature on erick, the New West embodied the “legacy of conquest.”2 the Kansas conflict for the past century suggests that it was sec- leeding Kansas was, of course, both the West and a signal theater and sym- tional conflict that provided the bol of sectional strife, with legitimate claims to a place in the histories of frame of reference for much of the the West as well as the Civil War. How then did its two historiographical scholarship on the Kansas crisis B identities play out in relation to one another? A review of the literature on the over time.” Kansas conflict for the past century suggests that sectional conflict provided the Nevertheless, Kansas histo- frame of reference for much of the scholarship on the Kansas crisis over time. riography has been influenced Nonetheless, developments in the historiography of the West exercised some in- more and more in recent years by fluence—however oblique or sporadic—over historians’ interpretations of such the emergence of the “new” social and western history. Professor issues as the salience of slavery and race in the politicization of the so-called fron- SenGupta’s essay challenges tier. The present essay begins by showing that for the first century or so after the scholars to continue recent efforts curtain closed on Appomattox, the debate over whether the Civil War was an “ir- to reconcile the “dynamic inter- repressible” struggle over slavery or a “needless war” engineered by a “blunder- play between” these two “seem- ing generation,” colored scholarly interpretations of a host of issues at the heart ingly disparate realms,” and ar- of the Kansas wars: how real was the threat of slavery expansion? Who devised gues, “It is time to reconceptualize the Kansas–Nebraska bill and why? What were the relative roles of New Eng- Bleeding Kansas to arrest its fur- landers, westerners, and Southerners in determining the course and outcome of ther marginalization as a serious the Kansas conflict? What was the true legacy of territorial abolitionists, especial- subject of scholarship. It is time to ly John Brown? What part did a vigorous, fractious, teeming territorial press play break free of the tradition of sim- in fueling the embers of sectionalism? To what extent did frontier-related eco- ply narrating in ever greater detail the sequence of political events that constituted the Kansas con- flict, asking instead, what did these events mean?” 2. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Proceedings of the Forty-First Annual Meeting (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1894), 79–112. On Turner’s view of the historical significance of slavery, see Staughton Lynd, “On Turner, Beard, and _____________ Slavery,” Journal of Negro History 48 (October 1963): 237. On the new western history, see Donald Virgil W. Dean Worster, “New West, True West: Interpreting the Region’s History,” Western Historical Quarterly 18 (April 1987): 141–56; Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the Ameri- Kansas State Historical Society can West (New York: Norton, 1987); see also Wilbur R. Jacobs, On Turner’s Trail: Hundred Years of Writ- Rita G. Napier ing Western History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994); Jon Gjede, The Minds of the West: Eth- University of Kansas nocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830–1917 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 320 KANSAS HISTORY nomic imperatives such as land policy and railroad and town promotion sharpen the violence of territorial conflict, or mediate and muddy the polarities of slavery discourse? The essay goes on to argue that the wide-ranging revolution in the writing of American history prompted in part by the social ferment of the 1960s complexly influenced the historiography of the Kansas conflict.
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