Democracy in Deep Doo-Doo 💩 (1)
ANNETTE TELLS TALES Chaos, Violence, Voter Fraud and Intimidation, Fears of Losing American Freedoms: Sound Familiar? Welcome to Kansas, 1855!
Note from Annette
Okay, let’s get this out of the way: I'm starting the new year with a bang, with a huuuuuge two-part Annette Tells Tales post, in which I give a great but complicated academic book the NBH treatment! You might remember I promised to write more about abolitionist John Brown (of John Brown’s Body fame) :
So, during the holidays, when not baking or cooking or, indeed, actually being with the family, I hunkered down with a copy of historian Dr. Nicole Etcheson’s Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (2004)
This isn’t a biography of John Brown, but I think it’s actually better than that: Bleeding Kansas helps us understand John Brown and the roots of why Americans set about killing each other in huge numbers in the Civil War. Again, fair warning: I'm riffing on Bleeding Kansas longly in a heavy two-parter, so remember you have the option to skip or—better— read later. This book deserves a proper explanation, and so do you! It’s a good one for the comfy chair treatment, complete with your new NBH coffee mug! And if I got this right 🤞 you're going to feel extra clever going into the New Year.*
*If you don't, that's totally my fault.
Bleeding Kansas brings us an America that is finally stretched from sea to shining sea, when sunny California joined the United States in 1850. Americans also began moving to less exciting places than California, to the last ungrabbed parts of what we now call flyover country, the middle of the US, or at least the bits of it that didn't utterly suck as places to live. In the process, they shoved American Indians into the bits that did utterly suck, but that's a story for another day.
But this isn’t just about people moving West. Moving yourself and your stuff, it turns out, wasn’t just a matter of loading your stuff into a truck and hitting the highway. Moving was also a political move, with serious consequences for you and the entire nation. California had entered the United States as a free state, without slavery. And the settlement of the last unorganized bits of America was also a race to decide whether the United States would be slave, free, or both.
Thing is, back in the colonial era, before the Revolution, slavery had been everywhere in the US, even in Boston. By 1850, the United States has become a nation divided between free states and slave states. This process was much more complicated than slapping “slave” and “free” stickers on a map of the states. California was only allowed to join the US as a free state following anxious negotiations in the US Congress between North and South, resulting in concessions, namely a bundle of laws favoring the proslavery South.
Laws? Try this doozy: The Fugitive Slave Act allowed slaveowners to kidnap any black person they claimed to own, anywhere in America. And slavecatchers weren't always fussy about who they abducted. You could be a sixth generation free person, walking to your job in New York, and still get arrested for being black, and end up in a cotton field in Georgia. Shudder.
Here's the most complicated subject we need to tackle, at the heart of Dr. Etcheson’s book, so let’s get started: While black people were clear that American freedom depended first and foremost on nobody being enslaved or kidnapped, Northern whites and Southern whites had other ideas about what freedom even was.
For white Northerners, freedom was centered on white men having the vote, which kept them free from the rule of tyrants. They had been a bit obsessed with possible tyranny since the American Revolution, even though King George III (a bit dim) maybe isn’t the most convincing poster boy for tyranny.
For white Southerners, however, freedom was more focused on individual rights, and especially the right of white Americans to be free to own black people as property, which was considered more important than, say, free speech or even the right to vote,
That’s a lot to take in at once, but fear not, I got you. In this two-parter, I’ll be leading you through Dr. Etcheson’s explanation of these two very different ideas of freedom in action, including how they led to violence. We at NBH won’t get as far as the American Civil War (although the book does!) But there will be violence in this story, and it will be happening in, of all places, Kansas.
In the chapters of Bleeding Kansas on which I riff, Dr. Etcheson focuses on the exciting mid-1850s, as settlers were moving to Kansas, and Kansas was moving toward becoming a state. If progress toward statehood sounds very boring to you, I understand, but do know that this process wasn't a smooth take-off in first class with music on the headphones, and flutes of champagne fizzing by reclining seats. Nope. More like a pilotless ride through a tornado in super-economy class without seatbelts, while bags from overhead storage land on people’s heads.
Laing, speaking of tornadoes, I can’t picture Kansas, except in The Wizard of Oz.
I could just say “flat, boring”, but we need to give Kansas some context, see what’s around it. Doing big-picture history without having a clue where we are is the fast track to confusion, aka boredom. I used to illustrate this by having my college students label blank maps of the US from memory. You would be amazed how many of them thought Washington, DC was north of Oregon, or that Massachusetts was in Alabama. It certainly explained why they found US history baffling.
So, please, I beg you, do this: Grab an atlas (if you still own such a thing), or else open up Google Maps in your browser, and find Kansas. Now open another browser tab and tap in US Midwest. It won’t hurt to open up a tab for Missouri, too. The US Midwest is full of confusingly squarish states, and many NBH readers who are looking at their maps right now are realizing that what they had thought was Kansas, was actually Iowa. Oops.
Okay, I don’t want to frighten you off, but we’re also delving into political history, especially in Part 1 of this post. Pleeeeeeease don’t go! I promise the serious political/constitutional stuff mostly plays out in funny/violent stories. I'll keep the essential dry stuff as lively and brief as I can, and then we can riff on the fun stuff. Plus you will feel extra-clever.
Speaking of fun stuff, wait till you meet early Kansas settlers! Prim New Englander ladies smuggling rifles in their underwear! A hapless devoutly Christian New England man who argued for racial equality at a Bible study group full of angry white Southerners! A Kansas Governor who escaped Kansas in an adventure worthy of James Bond, complete with a rendezvous with MI5 federal agents!
And then, of course, there's John Brown himself, the demented-looking one-man train wreck ride toward the Civil War, who you’ll see causing trouble in Kansas, just a few years before his ill-fated attack on Harpers Ferry. Whether what Brown did was “good trouble” or bonkers is for you to decide. Just saying that you may not find him as easy to judge as you think.
Kansas: The Land of Not-Oz
Recently, Hoosen, my long-suffering spouse, and I visited Kansas on behalf of Non-Boring History, because we sure as heck didn’t go there for sunshine, beaches, and frosty drinks with little umbrellas. We popped into the small town of Nicodemus, founded in the late 1870s by formerly enslaved African-Americans from the South. These hardy pioneers built a successful community despite being scammed by property-selling grifters, and hemmed in by racist neighbors and politicians determined to undermine them.
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Today is about Kansas a quarter century before Nicodemus is founded, but Dr. Etcheson’s book definitely made more sense of the experiences of the good people of that town. This is Kansas as it was just getting started, even before it officially became one of those square states. The tale of Kansas in the 1850s centers on slavery, and yet it’s a story almost entirely about white people. How can that be? And why should you care, especially if you’re too busy freaking out about the state of things today? Stick around, even if you're still trying to find Kansas on your little map, because I promise this is fascinating.
As a graduate student, historian Nicole Etcheson studied white Southerners who had moved to the Midwestern state of Ohio in the 1850s. She noticed that the subject of Kansas come up again and again in their letters. Why were Southern white people in Ohio so obsessed with Kansas, she wondered? This was a place they didn’t live in, and probably didn’t plan to go to, like anyone with something better to do than visit Kansas, like wash their hair, or stare at a blank wall for hours.*
*The Reader Relations Gnome at Non-Boring House would like to apologize to any reader insulted by the suggestion that Kansas is boring. He encourages any offended reader to send your complaints to him at Non-Boring House, Madison, Wisconsin. He will read your letter carefully before placing it in the special round file. As our thanks to you for sharing your views, he will also enter you in a drawing to win a vacation in Kansas. First prize: Weekend in Kansas. Second prize: Week in Kansas.
Just a few years before the American Civil War (although nobody knew this was coming, because nobody has a crystal ball), Kansas was being settled (invaded, some readers mutter) by (mostly) white people. A big struggle emerged among the people arriving in the territory of Kansas over whether it would become a state where slavery was legal, or one where it was not. Other Americans were paying close attention.
But if the fight in Kansas was over slavery, Dr. Etcheson asked herself, why did most of the antislavery white settlers in Kansas not give a rat’s patootie about enslaved black people? And why were some non-slaveowning Kansas settlers proslavery, even though slavery hurt their own economic interests? And why did all these people end up willing to sabotage their own economic wellbeing to fight each other? So many questions.
Slavery, race, and economics were all important in what was happening in Kansas in the 1850s, Dr. Etcheson tells us. But the biggest issue in 1850s Kansas was white men’s freedom.
How the heck could people arguing over whether Kansas should or should not allow slavery end up focused on white men’s freedom? How?
Even today, when we talk freedom in the US, we are not all talking about the same thing. What freedom is, and whose freedom matters, are questions that have long divided Americans in pretty destructive ways. And Kansas in the 1850s is Exhibit A in that quarrel.
Annette’s Aside: How can freedom mean very different things to different Americans? Think no-smoking laws. You might think anti-smoking forces have won that war. But the conflict continues in —of all things—casinos, which in most states where gambling is allowed, are exempt from anti-smoking laws. Most casinos (and practically all in Las Vegas) still allow smoking.
This is personal: I’m a very low-rolling sometime slots player. My freedom to play slots without inhaling cigarette smoke in any casino, even the few that ban smoking, is contested by some smokers who believe they should be free to smoke anywhere they darn well like because this is America. Hard to negotiate with that. Although, as a fan of diplomacy, even though I’m bad at it myself, I like to think we can find a compromise. Or maybe anti-smoking slots influencer Brian Christopher (of whom I’m a fan, and yes, a slots influencer is a thing) has it right: Smoking hurts not only players but casino staff, and it’s time to ask all the smokers to step outside for a puff.
P.S. You’re probably looking at me agog right now, but I'll have you know that when I was a grad student, I accidentally let slip to one of my historian mentors, the late John Allen Phillips, that I had just come back from a day trip to Vegas. He raised his eyebrows. “What do you play?” he said. I fessed up: Slots. He was shocked. “You don’t make money at slots,” he huffed.Turns out, he was a keen poker player, and he had recently returned from Vegas, where “I got taken to the cleaners by an old lady with no teeth.” So I guess you don’t profit from poker, either. I’m hopeless at card games, so he suggested I play craps, the dice game. Alas, he didn’t understand that the attraction of slots for me is watching pretty shiny things going round and round while my mouth hangs open, and, for once, not having to think. Know, too, that historians’ conferences are sometimes held in Las Vegas and Reno, although historians ask me to tell you that this is a complete coincidence and does not mean that historians spend time sitting at slot machines. Ahem.
Now, back to Kansas!
The Theoretical Suffering of Theoretically Enslaved White People
When historian Nicole Etcheson looked closely at 1850s Kansas Territory, she found white Northern people who didn't want slavery in Kansas, but who were not concerned with the rights of enslaved people. Instead, they were thinking of their own freedom, as white people. This was true even among those white people, mostly from New England (Massachusetts and neighbors), who thought slavery was morally wrong. And they worried about losing their freedom even though white people weren't in any danger of being enslaved, except in theory, and according to their interpretation of what slavery meant.
To explain, let's take Dr. Charles Robinson, medical doctor, New England native, and abolitionist (someone who believed slavery was evil and should be abolished throughout the US). As Kansas got going, Robinson moved to Lawrence, a new town sponsored by Amos Lawrence, a wealthy New England abolitionist, to attract other New Englanders.
Charles Robinson gave a great speech to the Lawrence community picnic on US Independence Day, the Fourth of July, 1855. He blasted the proslavery government of what was then the territory of Kansas. “We must not only see black slavery . . . planted in our midst and against our wishes,” Robinson told everyone, “but we must become slaves ourselves.” No, Robinson wasn’t suggesting that the mostly white picnickers volunteer to become slaves. Let me translate his words: “The territorial government is going to impose black slavery on us. And they will make slaves out of us, too.”
Okay, Laing, hold on. Why were so many Northern white people worried about being enslaved? Had someone seriously suggested this?
No. There were no proposals to enslave white people. They were afraid of losing their freedom. If you didn't have freedom, they thought, that made you a slave. And to most Northern whites, the right to vote for their government representatives was the most important freedom, because it protected their freedom from tyranny. They also believed that US citizens (men, mostly white) should be able to vote for their constitutions, the very structure of their governments at every level, from local to to state to federal (national). The thing is, white Americans didn’t all agree on what freedom was, and white Southerners found this freedom a threat to their freedoms (phew!)
Here’s why. The basis of personal independence for 19th century people was to own land on which you could work for yourself (unless you were a slaveowner, in which case, other people did all the work). Northern whites wanted to be free from having to compete with rich slaveowners for land or with unpaid slave labor for jobs. Southern whites wanted to be free to get rich by owning other people, or, if they couldn't afford slaves, at least benefit from having more personal status and rights than enslaved people, however little that was, however much an illusion, just because they were white, no matter how poor they were. Hey, maybe they would own slaves one day! (Hint: Nah.) Freedom to white Southerners meant keeping others enslaved.
Now, bearing all this in mind, we need a bit of background about what actually happened in Kansas, not on what might theoretically have happened in the US. I hate to do this to Americans who still have PTSD from high school history with Coach Grunt, but we need to jump back another thirty five years, just for a few moments.
Making and Breaking (Com) Promise
Okay, we’re now back in 1820. Most of the North American West belongs to Spain. The US is divided between free states and slave states, PLUS it owns a whacking great bit of land in the middle of the continent that, in 1803, then-President Thomas Jefferson had bought cheap down the pub off a little Frenchman in a funny hat. This land was called the Louisiana Purchase, even though it's a lot bigger than the modern US state of Louisiana (which is a part of it), so people do understandably get confused.
Much of the Louisiana Bargain Purchase had recently become slave states (including state-of-Louisiana). [UPDATE: A reader alerted me that Alabama and Mississippi were NOT part of the Louisiana Purchase. My apologies. Forget I said that. Think Arkansas and Oklahoma instead.] Admitting these slave states to the US, however, threatened the national power and influence of free states, states that didn’t allow slavery. That’s because in the US Constitution, every state gets two US Senators, no matter how small, empty, and pointless (the states, not the senators).
Slave states’ representatives could potentially outvote free state politicians in Congress, and free state people were worried that, if that happened, the next thing they knew, slavery would again be everywhere in the US. Free people would be priced out of owning land by rich slaveowners, unable even to get jobs that paid a living, because they would have to compete with slave labor.
So in 1820, to keep the peace between North and South, Congress passed the Missouri Compromise, a bundle of laws promising that slavery would not be allowed in the remaining bits of the Louisiana Purchase. Look at your map. These remaining bits, including the future Kansas, were north of an imaginary line starting West from the tippy top of Missouri. Look at the map, and imagine the line. Please. It’s so much easier than me trying to explain this in words until one of us dies.
So the Missouri Compromise of 1820 settled everyone’s fears! You would think! Of course it didn’t. Within a generation, things had changed, as history shows us that things do. Mexico had gotten independence from Spain. And then the United States started a war with Mexico, winning huge areas of the West (why else do you think the US declared war on Mexico?)
The formerly Spanish/Mexican West began to be organized into territories, places on the track to statehood, which each would get once it had enough Americans to hold elections and run a government. California quickly got its act together to enter the US as a free state: It was huge and attractive, and less deserty than the rest, plus home to loads of gold. That's why it was overrun with settlers during the Gold Rush, and why developers quickly popped up who were happy to start and run towns and cities while selling land to everyone else at premium prices. The other more deserty bits of the West were sure to catch up with California, and they also seemed likely to be free states.
Slavery’s Southern supporters were alarmed by these developments: Most of the West was poised to turn into free states. This, they believed, was a threat to the power of the South to promote national policies in Congress that favored slavery. They worried this might lead to the complete abolition of slavery in the South. Never mind that the great majority of white Americans didn’t care about abolishing slavery in the South, not in 1850. Not even the Fugitive Slave Act could calm white Southerners’ fears.
Now, a new development: Another area of the Louisiana Purchase was to be opened to white settlement, Natives having mostly been shunted onto reservations there or elsewhere. This area, the future Kansas and Nebraska, was north of the pretendy line of the 1820 Missouri Compromise. Any states that formed would automatically be free states. Kansas would be a free state. Sorted.
Not so fast.
Entering The Land of Oz
In 1854, six years after gold was discovered in California, thousands of Americans were still flocking to the Golden State for land, sunshine, beaches, movie stardom, and, yes, gold. Nobody seemed much interested in moving to America’s flat and boring middle bits, to what would become Kansas and Nebraska, and can we blame them? If you have been to Kansas and Nebraska, you might guess why.
However, a few hundred people who already lived in Kansas now cooked up a brilliant and profitable scheme. They were eager to get Kansas on a path to statehood, to attract new settlers, to whom they planned to sell land. These scheming entrepreneurs were the Wyandot Indians.
Say what, Laing?
Yes, this is the sort of headspinning moment for which NBH is becoming famous! Honestly, though, I cannot take credit. Headspinning is normal for academic history, as my readers know, so big thanks to Dr. Etcheson for this gem.
The Wyandot people had started out as a diverse crew of First Peoples in Canada, survivors of devastating Old World diseases and the conflict that came among Native peoples from European contact and trade. They came together for mutual protection, but were defeated and scattered by their Indian enemies back in 1649. Long story short, by the 1840s, many surviving Wyandots had ended up in what’s now Kansas.
By now, while they still had a strong identity and culture, the Wyandot were embracing modern life, as people do, building churches, schools, and libraries. They were keen to make a place for themselves, to grab a bit of the American pie. Bottom line: The Wyandot intended to make a profit selling land to white settlers, and for that to happen, they needed to set Kansas on the path to statehood. So, in 1852, the Wyandot people hired a lobbyist, a white guy married to a Wyandot woman, and sent him to Washington, DC to push Congress to create a new US territory.
Unlike the Wyandot people, not everyone was excited by a new state of Kansas. Among them? US Senator David Atchison of Missouri (not to be confused with our author, Dr. Atcheson). Sen. Atchison didn’t want a free state opening up next door to Missouri, tempting enslaved people to escape, and, he predicted, soon to be full of troublemaking New England abolitionists trying to end slavery in Missouri and beyond. He wanted to do what he could to prevent free states emerging automatically.
Atchison had support from other Southern politicians, including Claiborne F. Jackson, also from Missouri, who had views on the subject of Kansas:
“If we can’t all go there . . . with all our property of every kind [People. He means people], I say let the Indians have it forever. They are better neighbors than the abolitionists, by a damn sight.”
Anyway, Atchison, a Democrat, took his concerns to his party leader, Senator Stephen Douglas. Forget today’s Democratic Party, and today's Republicans, too. Things were different in 1854.
Sen. Douglas was in an awkward spot. He represented the free northern state of Illinois as a Democrat, at a time when the nation was dividing sharply between North (free) and South (slave), and Democrats were moving toward becoming the party of the slave South (Seriously, forget modern party labels!) However, Atchison successfully persuaded Douglas to draft a law repealing the 1820 Missouri Compromise. This bill would become the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
Pushing the bill, Douglas tried to convince Congress to allow the future states of Kansas and Nebraska to each choose whether to be slave or free—a choice he called popular sovereignty, in other words, power to the people, which sounds really good, doesn’t it? He portrayed popular sovereignty as a fab bit of democracy. It also opened up the possibility of the new states opting for slavery, something the Missouri Compromise did not allow.
Southern politicians were thrilled! Thanks to the 1820 Missouri Compromise, they had long ago written off the region of Kansas and Nebraska as “slavery not happening”. But now they had a chance to create two new slave states! Well, okay, not Nebraska, because that was too far from the South to expect Southerners to move there, but hey, Kansas! It’s right next to the slave state of Missouri! And one is better than none!
Northern politicians were appalled by the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. They didn’t want slavery expanded. This was because of moral objections to slavery, yeah, sure, okay, whatever, but their biggest concern was for the rights of white people. They wrote that the Kansas-Nebraska bill was the tool of
“an atrocious plot to exclude from a vast unoccupied region [they didn’t count Indians] immigrants from the Old World, and free laborers from our own States, and convert it into a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves."
Debate in Congress over the Kansas-Nebraska bill got pretty nasty. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, representing the most abolitionist bit of New England, blasted the Act as a betrayal of the good faith in which the Missouri Compromise had been written.
But Sen. Stephen Douglas was desperate to get the bill through Congress. Remember: He was leader of the increasingly Southern and pro-slavery Democratic party, and he had the political misfortune to live in and represent the anti-slavery North.
Douglas received a petition signed by hundreds of ministers protesting the immorality of slavery, and told them to butt out of the people's business. I guess only white men who liked slavery were considered people under popular sovereignty.
Protests slowed down the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, but didn’t prevent it becoming law. Almost all Southern Democrats supported it. One interesting exception was Sam Houston of Texas, after whom Texas later named the city of Dallas (jk). Sen. Houston worried that the Act stirred up anti-slavery feelings. He wasn’t wrong.
When the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed, Sen. Douglas called it a win for popular sovereignty, for the right of (white) American people to be free to choose, um, other people being enslaved. Cue patriotic music.
In fact, with the Act, Douglas had plopped slavery right in the center of Democratic Party politics, and that was a disaster for him and his party. Northern Democrats were split down the middle on the Act. Douglas didn’t realize what a catastrophe he had unleashed, not at first. He soon found out. When he tried to speak to his own constituents in Chicago, they howled him down, furious at the cancellation of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, Douglas joked grimly, “I could travel from Boston to Chicago by the light of my own effigy.”
And now, the differences between North and South over slavery emerged as the defining issue in US national politics. The opposition Whig Party had never taken a strong position on slavery one way or the other. Now it was instantly irrelevant. A new party popped up to replace the Whigs as the opposition to the Democrats. This was an alliance of unhappy Northern Democrats, former Whigs, and others who did have strong views on slavery.
Meet the Republican Party. It was totally against bringing slavery into the West, including Kansas. The Republicans suspected the South of wanting to expand slavery throughout the US, threatening the livelihoods and freedom of white men. The expansion of slavery, they believed, was a threat to the entire republic. They believed Douglas was a hapless tool, being used by the South to spread slavery. They represented an ever-growing number of Northerners who were abandoning the Democratic Party in droves. Sen. Douglas had swallowed a poisoned pill, personally and on his party’s behalf.
Northerners’ fears about slavery had recently coincided with the height of nativism in the North, with the belief that mass immigration (especially by Irish Catholics) threatened the survival of the republic, by supplying cheap immigrant laborers who voted as the Catholic Church told them to, and thus posed a threat to native-born Americans’ rights. But now the Irish Menace paled in the Northern imagination compared with proslavery Southerners. One nativist wrote:
“Neither the Pope nor the foreigners ever can govern the country or endanger its liberties, but the slavebreeders and the slaveholders do govern it, and threaten to put an end to all government but theirs.”
Here’s a new twist in Dr. Etcheson’s story, though, and this is big, so don’t miss it: Most people who opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act were actually against the increased power of the slave South, not slavery itself. BUT Republican Party politicians expressed abolitionist beliefs, arguing that slavery was a moral wrong, and should be ended throughout the US. Not saying everyone bought this right away: They certainly did not. But it was a beginning.
One such politician, who was still officially a Whig, but soon to become a Republican, condemned the Kansas-Nebraska Act for ignoring moral arguments against slavery in favor of citizens’ “right to choose wrong.” His name? Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was actually prepared to accept the continuation of slavery, because his greatest concern was with the rights of free white men. But Lincoln was under no illusion that slavery was anything better than a necessary evil.
Leading Southern Democrats, meanwhile, were as clueless as Sen. Douglas, their Northern leader, a short man who was shrinking by the day. Southern leaders gloated when the Act was passed. They thought they had won the battle, not just to allow slavery in Kansas, but to promote slavery’s acceptance as a permanent feature of Southern life. They believed that Northern politicians must now respect the South’s right to enslave people. Alexander Stephens of Georgia boasted (wrongly) that only abolitionists were upset about the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and he wrote, “Let them howl on.” Relieved whites in Missouri celebrated, because they were certain Southerners would settle Kansas, and vote for slavery.
Ah, beware people who are sure they know what happens next! Most academic historians aren't keen on making big claims for what history teaches us, but one thing most of us reckon it does get across is that nothing is destined to happen, and much of what does happen is completely unanticipated. In fact, that's one of the things I love about history! Nothing is inevitable, it says. Just when we think everything is tickety-boo, good to go, things can go pear-shaped. Or— more cheerfully— just when we think we're on the edge of catastrophe, things often take an unexpected turn for the better. I mean, look at the US in 1932.
Back in 1854, Senator William Henry Seward of New York was someone who had figured out that Southern celebrations of the Kansas-Nebraska Act were premature. He had noticed that a lot of immigrants who landed in New York City soon moved West, and most of them didn’t like slavery. I mean, why would they? Like native-born Americans, immigrants wanted jobs and land. They certainly didn’t want to compete with rich slaveowners and slave labor.
Seward thought slavery would lose in the end because most people in America knew, or would realize, that slavery didn’t benefit them. So Douglas’s popular sovereignty would benefit freedom, not slavery: Free settlers would vote for Kansas to be free. Sorted!
Um, hold it, Senator Seward. People were not just coming into Kansas from the North. They were coming from the South, from Missouri, the slave state next door, where, like the rest of the South, most white people believed slavery benefited them, even when it didn’t. And most of them had no intention of settling, and every intention of taking charge of Kansas.
Misery in Missouri
Today, we often forget that Missouri was once a slave state, because it didn't join the Confederacy during the Civil War. We think of it as part of the Midwest. But I gotta tell you, when I visited western Missouri in 2018 after 23 years in deepest Georgia, I left in no doubt that I was in a Southern place.
Missouri was right next door to Kansas. And proslavery Missourians, although few planned to move to Kansas, were not prepared to sit quietly while Kansas emerged as a free state. No, sir. Or ma’am. These Missourians would not tolerate a Kansas that was a potential safe haven for their escaped human property. They would not stand by and let random Northerners move into the neighborhood, and threaten their freedom to own people and become rich, however theoretical most Missourians’ wealth was: Few owned slaves, and few slaveowners owned more than a few people. Proslavery Missourians believed their very freedoms as white Americans depended on what happened in Kansas. They realized that, if they moved quickly, they could snap up land in Kansas. So, even if they never moved there, as property owners, they would have a right to vote in Kansas. Indeed, as concerned neighbors, they were free to pop next door and vote on whether Kansas would allow slavery.
Um, actually, no.
What happened next, as Dr. Etcheson shows, was a manure show of corruption. A cluster intercourse of electoral fraud, voter intimidation, and a breeding ground for violence.
Kansas was heading toward an unofficial civil war, and, really, a kind of dress rehearsal for the US Civil War, only more chaotic. This conflict earned the territory the nickname for which Etcheson’s book is titled: Bleeding Kansas. The nickname was not meant in the British sense of bleeding useless (although that fits), but literally people bleeding.
In 1854 this was not clearly Kansas’s fate. But, you will be amazed to know, white Northerners and white Southerners (including Missourians) had very different ideas about the meaning of popular sovereignty. To Northerners, a majority vote would prevent tyranny taking away the people's freedoms. White Southerners didn't agree that a majority vote and that sort of thing necessarily represented freedom. They believed that if a majority voted against the extension of slavery into Kansas, that wasn’t end of the matter. They simply could not accept such an attack on their individual freedom as Americans, and specifically their freedom to own people. As heirs to the American Revolution, they believed they had the right to fight for that freedom by any means necessary.
It gets stickier. The devil of popular sovereignty was in the details of the messy, not-fit-for-purpose voting systems of the mid-19th century. Wow! Imagine that! A messed-up voting system! How lucky we are that this isn’t true in America today!
How would the vote on slavery in Kansas be carried out on the day? Who among the white men who turned up to vote would qualify to vote? How and by whom was voter eligibility decided, when people were arriving in Kansas all the time, and almost nobody had been there for long?
Missourians were now racing into Kansas. All of the men intended to vote on the slavery issue. Not all of them intended to settle in Kansas, or felt they could plan to settle, until the slavery question was decided one way or the other. Some were slaveowners, or planned to be, and so they didn’t want to invest in the place, not until they knew whether it would allow slavery. But they did want to do their bit to make absolutely sure Kansas became a slave state.
You start to see the problem. It's much bigger than Kansas. It's huge. And, as we’ll see next, it’s not all about principles, even ghastly ones, like slaveowners’ rights. It's never a bad idea, when you're trying to figure out what's going on, to follow the money every way you can.
First Dibs on Kansas: The Missourians
The Kansas-Nebraska Act offered people in Missouri a chance to make money in 1854, even if they had no plans to move to Kansas. Unlike other, farther-away Americans, Missourians could take a day trip to Kansas by ferry and horse from western Missouri, claim land, maybe by laying out four logs on the ground in the shape of a cabin, and be home in time for dinner. And they could do that whether they planned to actually settle in Kansas, or just to invest in land speculation, to wait until more settlers showed up, and then sell the land claims to them at a profit.
This is a very American story, people making money from real estate. Before the ink had even dried on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, developers handed out flyers in Missouri, advertising land for sale in new towns in Kansas that they had yet to start building, promising that these would soon be major cities. Quickly, all the land in Kansas within fifteen miles of the Missouri border was claimed. Missourians were snapping up land, including the many who planned to stroll over to Kansas in spring, 1855, once the cold weather had ended, and actually build homes to live in. It looked very clear that Missourians would be the majority in Kansas, and, of course, we can expect that most would vote for slavery. Let me tell you about that. But bear this in mind: Nothing is inevitable. Unexpected developments should always be expected.
In 1854, not even 800 white people lived in Kansas. Within nine months, there were more than 8,000, plus nearly 200 enslaved people. Practically half the white settlers were from Missouri, and a few more were from other Southern states.
Most migrants to Kansas were farming families. Some Missourians brought slaves, but usually only one or two, including children, and most were probably domestic servants. Most people who owned slaves were not fantastically rich, but hoped to be. They hoped to gradually acquire more land in Kansas, and more enslaved people to work it. Enslaved people had a very different experience of all this: Moving to Kansas took them away from family, friends, and community back in Missouri, from the human connections that made life worth living. As Dr, Etcheson writes, popular sovereignty’s “promise of expanded liberty was meaningless” to enslaved people.
Developers and others in Missouri who were promoting Kansas settlement did not, of course, care about the freedom of enslaved people. They spread the (false) idea that Kansas was suitable for plantations, for growing profitable staple crops with slave labor. One Missouri promoter lied cheerfully that Kansas’s climate was “peculiarly healthy to the negro. Nature intended it for a slaveholding state.”
While some people fell for this rubbish, most Missouri slaveowners were not prepared to risk their wealth by moving to Kansas: Nearly 90,000 enslaved people lived in Missouri, mainly growing tobacco. Why risk taking enslaved workers into a place where the the land quality was unknown, into what might yet become a free state? Heck, were enslaved people still enslaved when you moved them into the new territory of Kansas, which didn't yet have laws protecting slavery? If Kansas voters did choose to make this a free state, would farmers lose the money they had invested in people and land? Missouri still offered a lot of cheap land, and unlike Kansas, it was already a slave state. It was a better bet for most slaveowners to stay put.
Want to learn about a slaveowning family on the Missouri-Kansas border, and meet one of the people they enslaved? Hoosen and I visited the surviving estate of one relatively prosperous family.
Some Missouri slaveowners risked a move to Kansas because the majority of early settlers were from Missouri, so it seemed safe to say that they would vote to make Kansas a slave state. But let’s not forget that anyone could turn up to settle in Kansas. And, as we’ll see, the Missourians were about to get competition. Even early on, about thirty percent of new Kansans were from the North, mostly the Midwest or mid-Atlantic states (like New York and Pennsylvania). Proslavery Missourians could breathe easier knowing that only a small number (about 4%) of people in Kansas by 1855 came from the hotbed of abolitionism, the states of New England (Massachusetts and neighbors). But it wasn’t just abolitionists who favored a free state of Kansas. There were even Missourians who planned to vote to keep out slavery.
So you may have wondered why I keep writing “proslavery" (white) Missourians. I mean, what other kind was there? True, there weren’t a lot of abolitionist Missourians. They were almost all proslavery, as in thinking slavery should continue to exist in the South. But a lot of white Missourians settled in Kansas so they wouldn’t have to compete with slavery for land and/or jobs .
These “free-soil” Missourians may have been a majority of the Missouri whites who settled in Kansas. They didn’t just choose Team Mindless Southern Identity, you see. They had their own ideas about what freedom meant for them.
Scary Missourians: Border Ruffians and Blue Lodges
We also have a keep an eye on Missouri whites, mostly poor, who didn’t own slaves, who lived in western Missouri, close to the Kansas border. Soon, they would walk or ride into Kansas, where they had no intention of staying. They had a job to do. Nicknamed “border ruffians”, or “pukes”, they planned to go to Kansas only to interfere in elections, to prevent Kansas from becoming a free state. Why would poor guys do that? Simple: They were paid. Proslavery organizations offered compensation to “border ruffians”: Return ferry fares to Kansas, a booze allowance, and a dollar a day, all for voting. A great deal.
Proslavery groups in Missouri who funded the “border ruffians’” visits to Kansas were known as Blue Lodges, or Self-Defensive Organizations. Dr. Etcheson gives a detailed example of one (if you are hooked, you can read Bleeding Kansas for more details).
The Platte County Self-Defensive Association Lodge was hostile to anyone who seemed to threaten slavery in Missouri, even by merely existing. They hated free blacks, blacks and whites who hung out together, enslaved people who hired themselves out for pay in their spare time, and, of course, abolitionists, whenever they could find them in, um, Missouri.
The Platte County Self-Defensive Association believed that the freedom to own slaves was more important than free speech or the vote itself. They weren’t going to stand by and see slavery threatened by anyone. They arrested a Northerner who was in Missouri on his way to Kansas, whipped him (24 lashes) and forcibly deported him to Iowa. They patrolled Platte County’s black neighborhoods at night. They approached white Missourians to become Association members, and anyone reluctant was terrorized into joining, because if you weren’t with the Association, you must be a Communist abolitionist. They didn’t distinguish between genuine abolitionists (who saw slavery as a moral outrage, and wanted it banned throughout the US), and free-soilers, who were white people who didn’t care about slavery or black people, but didn’t want to compete economically with slavery in Kansas.
Before you assume these vigilantes were riff-raff, know that the Platte County Self-Defensives’ leader was a respected lawyer. He published a pamphlet, Negro Slavery, No Evil, in which he urged white Southerners to stop apologizing for slavery, and instead celebrate it as a good thing for blacks as well as whites. Blue Lodge organizers were among Missouri’s leading citizens.
You know, from the Boston Tea Party on, I'm fascinated by how often “respectable” leaders in American history hide with a glass of sherry while ordinary Americans do their dirty work for them. Yet most whites in Western Missouri supported the Self-Defensives.
Missourian William Phillips, who had been attacked by a scary mob, challenged his fellow Americans: “The [worst] tyrant in Europe dare not exercise so fearful and despotic control over opinion” as Blue Lodges, he wrote. In other words, free speech was not happening in Missouri on the question of slavery. Indeed, it wasn’t happening anywhere in the South. So much for American freedoms.
The Yanks Are Coming
But Northerners were coming to Kansas, and they did include Yankees*, people coming all the way from New England, that faraway hotbed of abolitionism.
*Yankee means New Englander in the North. In the South, it has long meant any white person not from the South, including this Brit who has never lived in the Northeast US. Go figure.
Many “Yankees”* were funded by the New England Emigrant Aid Company (NEEAC) which encouraged and aided New Englanders in moving to Kansas. NEEAC was meant to be a profitable joint-stock company, an early corporation, in which people could invest expecting to profit. But early investors understood that NEEAC was really a charity, a response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act overturning the 1820 Missouri Compromise.
NEEAC was a vehicle to fight the spread of slavery by helping self-sacrificing New Englanders move to Kansas. There, they could take pride in opposing slavery’s spread, and build wealth in land. Cheap NEEAC steamboat tickets helped a thousand people move from New England to Kansas in 1855 alone. Many settled in Lawrence.
Annette’s Aside: Fun fact, and not a coincidence, Lawrence has been home since 1863 to the main campus of the University of Kansas. New Englanders, bless them, read books, and they planted and supported colleges all across the US, dedicated to actual education, not just job training. Some of these are among many of the same colleges that we see closing now, which is alarming to anyone who thinks it’s not a bad idea to learn to read, write, and think for their own sake. But let me not distract you: Most New Englanders came to Kansas to build wealth, just like everyone else. Do-gooding came second.
NEEAC offered resources for all non-slaveowning migrants who settled in Kansas. It built gristmills for farmers to grind grain, sawmills to provide building materials, as well as hotels and newspapers. Oh, and it also supplied New Englanders with guns.
Excuse me?
Yup. I’m not saying that New England had an obsessive gun culture or anything, that people collected guns like stamps or spent cozy family afternoons at the shooting range practicing killing people. But let’s not read back too much from the liberal tint of modern New England. Most early New Englanders hadn’t objected to violence against, say, Indian enemies from the start. Or the British in the Revolutionary War. So yes, these 19th century Northerners came to Kansas armed. And they got more armed within months. But seriously, what’s with the guns?
Things in Kansas were tense from the the get-go. In 1855, both Northern and Missouri settlers camped around the new abolitionist town (i.e. small hut collection) of Lawrence. Arguments quickly blazed over rival land claims, over who owned what. The Missourians didn’t physically assault the Northerners, but they knocked down their tents and burned their cabins, shouting that “the damned Yankees were taking everything they could get.” Northerners soon posted armed guards to protect their property.
The local NEEAC agent in Lawrence was Dr. Charles Robinson, yes, the picnic speech dude we met earlier. Robinson was an interesting guy: He was a medical doctor who had moved to Gold Rush California, where he led riots in Sacramento against developers charging sky-high land prices to arriving settlers. In fact, this leadership experience is what got Robinson hired by NEEAC. Robinson now encouraged NEEAC to help Kansas settlers buy guns. Northern settlers would soon claim to be peaceful victims, but well before Missourians started shooting at them, New Englanders were already armed to the teeth to protect their property. Americans, I know this makes sense to you, but I can picture a lot of Brit readers going “Yikes” at the thought of using deadly violence to defend stuff. Cultural difference is a thing. And so is assuming that only one side is right about everything.
Conspiracy Theories and Contradictions
Proslavery Missourians were worried about NEEAC-sponsored migrants from New England. They thought New England was dumping its poor in Kansas, paying them to vote against slavery in the state. One worried Missourian employed on a steamboat noticed migrants without luggage or farming equipment (did he expect them to pop a horse in a backpack?) and reported that most were men without families, that their conversation was about voting, and that many of them returned home.
New England migrants saw Missourians as poor people who were manipulated into coming to Kansas to vote for slavery in the territory, not to settle.
In other words, each side suspected the other’s motives. Everyone understood that Kansas offered economic opportunity (land) but they also thought the other side was coming there for political reasons, to vote for or against slavery.
In fact, many New Englanders did not stay in Kansas, but not because they hadn't planned to. It was a tough journey west (as I’m writing about in my occasional West With the Wagons series for Nonnies), and many migrants were disappointed with what they found when they got to Kansas: Prices were high, jobs were few, and, as is so often the case, in so many similar situations, the support offered by NEEAC was minimal.
No wonder New Englanders were disappointed with Kansas. People familiar with sophisticated Boston found Lawrence a bit of a dump. The best hotel in town was a sod house (made from turf) with a thatched roof, board beds, and a sawdust carpet. Kansas settlers living in one room log cabins were cold, hungry, and often ill. This was very different from the pretty high standard of life for most in New England. We need not be cynical about their motives for going home, even though proslavery Southerners were.
However, many Northern settlers were determined to stay, to see their settlement as a mission for freedom, and against slavery, even though they were mostly there to make money. Just think of the sacrifice! Privileged New Englanders leaving behind friends, family, and comfy homes, a life of American freedom, to bring freedom to others! I mean, talk about appealing to the Bleeding Heart Liberal Massachusetts Soul!
Yet, as Dr. Etcheson points out, “The Kansas migrants were not so pure that they never calculated earning a profit, and so they were not pure enough for many in the abolitionist movement.”
Ah, I really need to hammer this point home. Being anti-slavery in Kansas, or a “free-soiler”, didn’t necessarily mean being opposed to slavery everywhere in America. It also—ooh, I can’t stress this enough—didn’t necessarily mean giving a toss about black people, even enslaved people. For most Kansas settlers from the North, for most Americans who cared about slavery one way or another, slavery was bad mostly because of what it did to most white people. Slavery forced them to compete economically with very rich people who drove up land prices, and who owned a workforce that could be made to work very long hours for nada, nil, except a little food and shelter.
If white Northerners in Kansas could kid themselves that they cared about slavery as a moral issue, well, then, this made them feel very special and important. Kind of like putting a little Black Lives Matter sign in your yard to show the neighbors the kind of virtuous person you are, when you have never actually had a black person in your home, or when the last black person you invited to your church or club or house never came back because swooning white liberalism, however well meant, gets very, very old, very, very fast.
Proslavery men who lived on the Kansas/Missouri border saw Northern settlers very differently than they saw themselves: No matter their motives, Northern settlers were a threat to the freedom of Americans to practice slavery, and to make a lot of money doing it.
Not shockingly, a few white Southerners rushed to compete with NEEAC by helping proslavery settlers to go to Kansas. Best example by far: A lawyer and veteran in Alabama with one of the most white Southern names ever, Major Jefferson Buford (I mean, you can practically sing Dixie to that name!) Buford offered Southern migrants a better deal than NEEAC: Free transportation to Kansas, a grant to support them for a whole year, AND forty free acres of land! Plus a free set of steak knives! Ok, I made up the knives. Woulda been cool though.
Where did Major Jefferson Buford get the money to do this? Mostly from other people: He asked for donations (Sponsor a pro-slavery Kansas settler for only $50, and get a “Stuff the Yankees” T-shirt as a thank-you gift!) He also sold forty of his own slaves to raise money for the Kansas project. Before you think he made an impressive sacrifice, imagine forty people sold away from wives, husbands, children, parents, siblings, and community, and you’ll see who really paid the price for Buford’s “generosity”.
Buford promised donors that the settlers he sponsored would be the real deal, not just paid to take a day trip to vote in Kansas. They would be “bona fide settlers, able and willing to fight.” His was the most organized effort to settle pro-slavery people in Kansas. One drunk planter philanthropist donated $1,000, explaining, “I’ve just sold a nigger for that, and I reckon it’s about my share towards cleaning out the dog-gauned Yankees.” He sounds nice.
In April, 1856, Major Buford and his group of 400 sponsored migrants, all men, mostly from Alabama, South Carolina, and Georgia, left Montgomery, Alabama, for Kansas. They arrived on May 2, 1856, right in time for a guerrilla war (details later). Many of them did indeed fight, including joining in an attack on Lawrence, the podunk town that was the center of New England settlement. But it was hard for these men both to get settled in Kansas and fight. Not surprisingly, a lot of them went home by the end of the year. Buford kept fundraising, but he lost a lot of money. He went home himself a few months later.
See, Kansas was a hard sell to ambitious young Southern men. Why risk your life for Kansas, when you could quietly settle somewhere land was cheap, and slavery was a done deal, somewhere like Missouri?
And Then Came the Midwesterners
Oh, and, before I forget, not all migration from free states came from the Northeast. Yup! A whopping twenty-two percent of settlers in 1855 came to Kansas from the Midwest, from nearby free states like Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa. By 1860, Midwesterners made up 35% of Kansas settlers. Settlers from the Midwest typically didn’t even know that NEEAC existed. Typically, they came for the usual reasons: They didn’t want to compete with slave labor, and, in fact, didn’t want any contact with black people. Plus they didn’t like being preached at by abolitionists. They wanted land, self-government, and, again, no slavery. Their views were best reflected in one of their favorite politicians, James H. Lane of Indiana, who was a former congressman, a free-soiler, and very, very racist.
White Southerners couldn’t tell the difference, honestly, between New Englanders and Midwesterners, between abolitionists who wanted to get rid of slavery on moral grounds, and free-soilers who didn’t care what happened in Georgia or Alabama, but who didn’t want to live around slavery and enslaved people. To Southerners, including Missourians in Kansas, they were all “Damn Yankees”.
And proslavery Missourians had no tolerance for any of them, or their opinions. A staff member on a steamboat mentioned abolition without being careful to call it “damned abolition”. A proslavery man yelled at him to “shut up” and “respect the wishes of the sovereign people” (i.e. proslavery Southerners). While Northerners believed in the right of Americans to speak freely, white Southerners saw dissent as an attack on freedom— Their freedom to have slavery.
Popular sovereignty implies to us, as it did to most Americans in 1855, that a majority vote would decide if Kansas would be slave or free. But many proslavery men did not think a majority vote was necessarily compatible with freedom, especially if they lost the vote. If slavery was banned in Kansas, even by popular vote, then, they argued, that was against the US Constitution. As Abraham Lincoln observed, while New Englanders rushed into Kansas to decide against slavery by voting, Missourians thought the issue was already decided, because there were slaves present in Kansas. Americans couldn’t even agree on what popular sovereignty meant. How could the issues be decided at the ballot box?
Still, Missourians grasped the significance and danger of Northern migrants arriving and voting. Elections were going to matter. Proslavery Missourians believed they had the right to pop into Kansas and vote, because they lived right next door, and the right to slavery was essential to them. Northern settlers, meanwhile, saw Missourians bringing enslaved people into Kansas, and they knew that Missourians, if they cheated and won the elections for the new territorial legislature, would immediately make slavery official.
In short, Missourians supported popular sovereignty in Kansas from the start. They just didn’t think that popular sovereignty was the same thing as a majority vote.
Voting in a Pickle
We’re in Kansas (where else?). It’s 1854. The Kansas-Nebraska Act just passed. Winter is approaching, and the army of emigrants from the Northeast won’t arrive until spring. Now, proslavery men approach Andrew Reeder, the new governor of the Kansas Territory, who has been appointed by US President Franklin Pierce. They have a dodgy proposition for the Governor: Let’s hold the election for the Kansas Legislature before the Yankees arrive!
Governor Reeder, presumably a little gobsmacked, asks the leader of the group, a guy named Gwinner, if, in fact, he lives in Kansas. Yes! Gwinner says. But Reeder isn’t buying it: “Do you live in a house?”
“Um, no,” says Gwinner. But, he says, he has staked a claim to land in Kansas!
Gov. Reeder confuses his visitors when he announces that he thinks he has Gwinner’s house in his wallet. The Governor pulls a playing card from his pocket, and shows it to the men. It’s a three of diamonds, on which is written “Gwinner’s claim, October 21, 1854”. Gwinner had tacked the card to a tree, where one of Reeder’s staffers had found it while out hunting.
Yes, this was the good old-fashioned American hard work white Missourians were doing to earn free land in Kansas! Tacking playing cards to trees, then popping home to Missouri! In short, the Governor and his visitors all had a good laugh. Then Gov. Reeder told them that only actual settlers could vote, have a nice day, boys.
Thing is, voting in mid-19th century America was a pretty messy business. Oh, yes! Through much of their history, Americans, like the English, had boldly announced their votes out loud in public. While this practice was in steep decline by 1854, it was still the custom in parts of the South, resulting in the election of whichever scary good old boy had the most thuggish supporters standing by the polls wielding knuckledusters. But in most of the US, things had improved by the mid-19th century! You put your paper ballot into the ballot box! Oh, did I mention that the ballot was in your favored party’s color? So, not perfect then.
You also still had to give your name to the voting officer, who marked you off in the poll book, and in the Eastern states, you probably had to register to vote in advance. Both these measures were to prevent people from voting in multiple places on the same day. Oh, and in some states (like Massachusetts and Ohio) you had to have lived there for a year before you could vote in state and federal elections.
These last requirements might seem reasonable to you. Thing is, the connection between voting and residency was getting blurry in the mid-19th century. Americans were moving in huge numbers. That’s where a panel of election judges came in. These were respected local guys who knew a lot of local people, and were prepared to quiz potential voters. Their task was to decide which votes were valid.
Governor Reeder had proclaimed that voters must swear that they lived in Kansas, and promise to keep living there. But in real life, local implementation, um, varied. Proslavery Missourians’ bottom line for popular sovereignty was that if Kansas was not a slave state, their freedom to keep slaves in Missouri, their popular sovereignty in Missouri, was in danger. This was, to them, far more important to voting rights than whether someone claimed to settle in Kansas. As neighbors with a vested interest in slavery in Kansas, Missourians believed it was their business what happened there. So Missourians not only openly admitted they had come to Kansas purely to vote, and resented efforts to stop them, but they intimidated actual Kansas settlers, most of whom were free-soil voters, no matter where they were from. Phew.
Planned Chaos at the Polls
Kansas couldn’t send senators or congressmen to Washington DC until it was a proper state. So Gov. Andrew Reeder’s first order was to hold a vote at the end of November, 1854, to elect a delegate to Congress from the Kansas Territory. The proslavery candidate for delegate was one J.W. Whitfield, nicknamed the “Southern Rights candidate” just to make his position clear.
On election day, thousands of proslavery Missourians crossed the border into Kansas to vote for Whitfield. Armed with knives and guns, they intimidated the free-soil settlers (or sent them packing from the polls) as well as the election judges. They stuffed the ballot boxes, and then went home to Missouri, mission accomplished. Here’s just one account of how this looked on the ground, from a witness:
One free-soil voter, John Lindsay, later described how he got to the ballot box in Leavenworth, a town dominated by proslavery men, and you’ll see why on your map: Leavenworth is right on the Kansas border with Missouri. When Lindsay tried to approach the ballot box, a crowd of proslavery Missourians jostled him, and yanked him back by the coat.
Lindsay didn’t give up. He went round the back of the crowd, and cheered for Whitfield, the proslavery candidate for delegate. His ploy worked. Missourians in the back of the scrum greeted him warmly as a proslavery voter, and lifted him over their heads. Lindsay then crowd-surfed all the way to the ballot box, where he reached down, and popped in his vote. Now the men supporting him saw the color of his ballot, shouted “He is a damned abolitionist!”, and dropped him to the ground. Lindsay had voted, but only with great ingenuity, great hassle, and great courage.
Another witness to this voting debacle, a Midwesterner from Indiana who had settled in Kansas, reported a large group of drunk armed men who climbed into wagons within an hour of voting, and headed home toward Missouri. He “heard them say they had as good a right to come from Missouri and vote there as others who were there and had come from other states.”
And Whitfield’s free-soil rival for congressional delegate, John Wakefield, was told by one Missourian that if he challenged non-resident voters, “You will be badly abused, and probably killed.” Yikes.
Amazingly, the Missourians’ favored candidate, J.W. Whitfield, was elected to represent Kansas in Washington, DC. He won in every district but one: Lawrence. How big a victory did he win in Kansas? Whitfield got 2,258 votes to Wakefield’s 248. A later Congressional investigation found that 1,700 of the votes cast that day were deeply dodgy. But that didn’t matter. It just didn’t. There were more proslavery men visiting Kansas on that day in November, 1854, than there were free-soil settlers. And Gov. Reeder, an utter weenie, did not challenge the election result.
Maybe an election for a territorial legislature a few months later could turn out differently? Voting was scheduled for March 30, 1855, and there was a good chance that many free-soil settlers from the North and Midwest would have arrived in Kansas by then.
Proslavery leaders were convinced that the people expected to arrive soon would be abolitionists, hellbent on the destruction of slavery in America. Here’s Senator David Atchison of Missouri (again, not to be confused with Dr. Etcheson): “The Abolitionists will make great efforts in the Spring to send into Kansas their battalions and regiments for the holy purpose of excluding slaveholders. They should be met by corresponding efforts on our part. We can and must defeat them, and nothing that is fair and honorable should be left undone.” Well, of course, “fair and honorable”, like popular sovereignty, was open to interpretation.
Three weeks before the March 30, 1855 election, free-soilers in Kansas were understandably scared. When three guys from Missouri entered Lawrence, and claimed a young black woman as their property, local whites were worried—but not about truth, and not for her. They had a conspiracy theory: The whole scenario was cooked up by the young black woman and the three white guys from Missouri. They were trying to create a scene, an excuse for masses of proslavery Missourians to invade and vote again. The young woman protested that she “would rather go to hell than go with them men,” but they were allowed to kidnap her. And this was Lawrence, the center of Kansas abolitionism.
There were real conspiracies, of course. Proslavery men in border Missouri were already holding meetings to plan their voting invasion of Kansas. For the three days before the election, the little ferries that crossed the Missouri River each day brought eight hundred would-be voters, armed with knives and guns. In proslavery Leavenworth, five times as many people voted as were registered. And Missourians went as far inland as 120 miles from the border to vote.
Most free-soil settlers didn’t even try to vote in the March 30 election. On the day, election judges who tried to apply the governor’s rule requiring voters to be resident were forced to resign, and replaced by proslavery men. One election judge said Missourians had threatened to hang him if he tried to enforce the residency rule. And this was in Lawrence, the free-soil stronghold.
Things were worse elsewhere in Kansas on polling day. In Bloomington, Missourians attacked the polling place (a hut, like most buildings at the time), with the election judges inside. The mob smashed the windows, then lifted the hut by one corner, and let it drop. One judge ran out clutching the ballot box and cheering for Missouri (I’m sure with a touch of hysteria). The others were given five minutes to resign or die. They chose resignation. Kind of funny, kind of sobering, and surely terrifying for the judges.
There's loads of evidence of voter intimidation and fraudulent voting by Missourians on March 30, 1855. Much of that evidence came from Missourians themselves. They were proud that they were undermining what they saw as a false expression of popular sovereignty (er, voting). They had acted in support of their interpretation of popular sovereignty, managing the election to make sure Americans continued to be free to own slaves. And, they reasoned, theoretically, that many Missourians who voted might want to move to Kansas someday! If they did, they wanted to be free to own slaves! And even if they didn’t, a free Kansas would be an open invitation to their human property in Missouri to escape, and this clearly was a violation of the freedoms of white men in Missouri! Next thing, slavery would be under threat everywhere! A vote against slavery would be the end of freedom in America! (all said in increasingly shrill tones)
I would call the whole thing a fiasco, but it was pretty organized. Many of the Missourians who came to vote arrived by marching in military formation (or as close as they could get to marching while drunk).
Now that a proslavery legislature made up of proslavery Kansans from Missouri had been elected (what a surprise to us all!), its members showed their total commitment to popular sovereignty, as they interpreted it. Yes, they were very total about it. Total-itarians, that was them. They excused every excess because they had a domino theory as elaborate as Harry S Truman’s* after WWII: If Kansas infected Missouri with abolition thinking, slavery in Southern states, would fall, one by one. Which isn’t how these things work.
*Oh, good grief, Harry was a Missourian. Were domino theories part of his culture? I think we should be told.
Free speech was not tolerated in the South on the slavery issue, or anything possibly related to it. When a brave newspaper in Missouri complained about voter fraud and intimidation in Kansas, a crowd of two hundred Missouri guys showed their commitment to popular sovereignty by dropping the newspaper’s printing press in the river, and ordering both publisher and editor to leave Missouri.
Free speech? Even journalists couldn’t be depended upon in Missouri. A free-soil Kansas settler who made his feelings known was given a kangaroo court trial outdoors and threatened with hanging, by a proslavery newspaper publisher (as it happens) and his supporters. They then forced him onto a raft with a humiliating sign identifying him as a Northerner, and a supporter of the Underground Railroad.
Proslavery men, in a great example of the kinds of tactics that still confuse casual news readers today, claimed that they had come to vote to counter the supposedly illegal votes of the “transient” people arriving from the North. NEEAC was surely paying these fraudulent Yankee voters to do their fraudulent thing!
As Dr. Etcheson shows (yes, with loads of footnotes), NEEAC didn’t have that kind of money. No question, though, free-soil settlers were arriving and voting: In fact, up to a hundred showed up in Lawrence on election day. It was hard to prove that they intended to stay. If they didn’t, can we blame them? Complicated, isn’t it? Oh, and it gets better! Dr. Etcheson explains that fraudulent voting was normal in most US elections at the time!
So if this kind of corruption was normal, why were free-soil voters so very shocked by the March 30, 1855, election in Kansas? Many of them came from New England, where, unlike in the Midwest, elections were normally squeaky clean. New Englanders had been holding elections since Puritan days, and were genuinely stunned by the Missourians’ brazen hanky voting panky. One New Englander, a veteran, was furious at Missourian mobs voting fraudulently and intimidating real voters, while standing under a fluttering US flag. The genuine outrage of New Englanders in Kansas at the March 30, 1855 election was a big help to the free-soil side in the propaganda war. Even Americans who were familiar with voter fraud realized that that this amout of blatant fraud wasn’t right. Six thousand men voted in Kansas on March 30, while only 2,905 were registered. “The Missourians,” Dr Etcheson concludes, “had simply gone too far.”
Free soil settlers argued that their rights had been violated. They claimed that the outrages of March 30, 1855, were part of an effort to take away their freedoms as Americans . . .
Hey, Laing, fair enough . . .
. . . and thus (wait for it!) to “enslave” them!
Hoo boy. Wow. None of these people do subtle, do they?
Nope. Not like today, when we are all keen on subtle nuance! Oh, yes!
Part 2 of Democracy in Deep Doo-Doo:
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OK, so I'm only a fraction of the way through this article but I had to comment. When I read, "Free reader? To see how NBH posts connect, upgrade from free today" my head went straight to the Fugitive Slave Act, but using today's vernacular.
Bounty hunters nab random black guy off the streets of New York. A witness protests, saying, "That's Mr. Williams! He's a 6th generation freeman!" To which the bounty hunter replies, "It's OK. He's being upgraded from free today!"
"In short, Missourians supported popular sovereignty in Kansas from the start. They just didn’t think that popular sovereignty was the same thing as a majority vote."
How many on Trump's team are direct descendants of that crowd - by blood or philosophy?