Meet The Historian! Nicole Etcheson and Bleeding Kansas
Annette Chats with Dr. Nicole Etcheson about Bleeding Kansas, and predicting the future with history (or not)
Note from Annette
Today, I'm thrilled to bring you my recent chat with the author of a riveting book on which I based one of my most popular long posts at NBH, Democracy in Deep Doo-Doo (link below)
First, though, a big thanks to the Nonnies (paid subscribers) who so enthusiastically embraced Paint Your Wagon!
Seeing the West from a Rented Honda Covered Wagon!
Paint Your Wagon is my armchair adventure via Zoom about how Hoosen, my long-suffering spouse, and I crossed America in 2018 on the trail of the covered wagons going West. Sure, Hoosen only agreed to it because there might be scenery, but this trip hooked him on the history thing! Our journey inspired the ongoing West With The Wagons series at NBH, a retelling of the Gold Rush migration based on historians’ insights, the trip, and migrants’ accounts. Like my talks, West With The Wagons is a thank-you bonus for Nonnies, my paid subscribers.
Paint Your Wagon was supposed to be an hour on Zoom and done, but it turned out that I had a lot to say and show with pictures and video. The coolest part of this journey is in the details that film and TV, even college classes, skip because of . . .um… time.
When we only got as far as the Western end of the Great Plains before I ran out of time, I was terrified this talk was turning into “Annette's Deadly Vacation Slideshow”. I was beyond reluctant to suggest we come back later for a sequel.
Well, my Nonnie audience insisted (they sent emails, EMAILS!) and they did indeed return for Part 2! And since we STILL didn't make it to California, Part 3 will happen in the coming weeks (TBA ASAP, please bear with me!)
Missed Paint Your Wagon? No worries! Join us for Part 3, when we’ll head from eastern Nevada to Sacramento, California. Plus I'll do the whole series live again on Zoom at some point, as the West With The Wagons series bumps slowly across America. 😀
Annette Meets Nicole Etcheson
. . . and chats about everything from Bleeding Kansas to historians’ predictions of the future, to cola preferences (Coke or Pepsi?)
Today, I'd like you to meet the awesome Dr. Nicole Etcheson, author of Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era. This great book about dodgy elections, odd people at odds with each other, and clashing ideas about freedom as Americans rushed to grab land in Kansas in the 1850s and tumbled headlong toward civil war, may sound eerily familiar to Americans in 2024.
But is it? (dramatic music…)
I riffed on Dr. Etcheson's book in Democracy in Deep Doo-Doo, my popular Annette Tells Tales post here at Non-Boring History. If you haven't read it, I've brought it out for a limited time from behind the paywall at the NBH site, where it lives with more than 400 of its friends.
Wait, Laing, there are four hundred NBH posts awaiting my reading pleasure?
Yup, and still fresh, and ready to roll whenever you are. This is a fully searchable collection, too, so if you suddenly wonder if I've had anything to say about the Wright Brothers or W.E.B. Du Bois (I have) or if I have ever visited New York City (actually, I haven't), you can find out.
And yes, you get access to all my posts (and lots more) when you're a paid annual or monthly subscriber to NBH! Plus the pride in knowing you're partnering with me in the unique* outreach that is Non-Boring History!
*and sometimes uniquely bizarre
Here's my chat with Nicole Etcheson. Transcript below for readers who prefer!
TRANSCRIPT (edited for clarity)
Introducing Nicole Etcheson!
ANNETTE LAING: Hello, everybody, it's Annette Laing, at Non-Boring History, and today I welcome Dr. Nicole Etcheson!
Dr. Etcheson is the Alexander M. Bracken Distinguished Professor of History at Ball State University in Indiana, where she teaches 19th century history. She earned her bachelor's degree from Grinnell College and her PhD from the University of Indiana. In 2018. Dr. Etcheson received the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for Lifetime Contributions in Midwestern History from the Midwestern History Association.
Dr. Etcheson is author of A Generation of War: The Civil War Era in a Northern Community, which won awards including the Avery O. Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians for most original book on non-military aspects of the Civil War era.
She is also the author of Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era which came out 20 years ago, but it's like it was written yesterday. This book, Bleeding Kansas, was the subject of my two-part interpretation for Non-Boring History, which I titled Democracy in Deep Doo-Doo.
So welcome, Nicole! When you started the Ph.D program in history, did you imagine yourself writing about Bleeding Kansas?
NICOLE ETCHESON No, absolutely not.
I'm afraid I have to say, Annette, all of us Hoosiers [Indiana folk] know that it is never University of Indiana. It's always Indiana University.
ANNETTE Right! [laughs sheepishly. I knew that, of course. I was just testing. Ahem. 😁]
NICOLE So for some reason, it’s the University of Idaho, Iowa, or Montana, but we Hoosiers, we have to be different. We're Indiana University.
How The Book Got Started
NICOLE So when I was working on my PhD at IU, I actually worked on Southern settlers in the Midwest, all those Kentuckians, and Virginians, and North Carolinians, who came up and settled in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and I did not get to Kansas until a long time later.
I wrote that first book, my dissertation, and I published it as The Emerging Midwest. It was about the political culture of the Lower Midwest, because it was so heavily Southern influenced. But when I was researching my dissertation and that first book, I found that in the 1850s, there were a lot of Hoosiers [people from Indiana] who went out to Kansas, while those who stayed behind were very interested in what was happening in Kansas territory. This was a big political issue that everybody was really engrossed in for years.
When I was thinking about a second book project, I realized that the books that had been done about Bleeding Kansas [had been written a long time ago]-- Alice Nichols had written a book in 1954 called Bleeding Kansas, and then James Rawley had written a book in the late 1960s. By the time I started working on Bleeding Kansas in the 1990s, there hadn't been anything [written on the subject] for about a generation. So I thought, okay, this looks interesting. I want to go see what everybody was so excited about in the 1850s.
ANNETTE I think it's news to a lot of my readers, and I'm gently trying to break it to everybody, that historians don't all agree with each other, and that history gets rewritten, not because we're making it up [laughter] but because we come to it with new questions and perhaps with new evidence.
A New Take on Bleeding Kansas
So your take on Bleeding Kansas came out of this previous research you'd done on Midwesterners, how they're responding to what happened. So how has your book Bleeding Kansas affected how historians, professional historians, academics, think about the events of what we call Bleeding Kansas?
NICOLE I think the Alice Nichols book from the 1950s had really not taken the territorial Kansans very seriously. You can see how that would happen, because there were a lot of very eccentric people out there running around Kansas territory. Of course, we all know John Brown, he's the famous one, but Jim Lane, who was from Indiana and settled out in Kansas, was a very weird person. All this stuff is very dramatic and overblown, and I felt like some of the earlier works [of history] had not taken these people seriously. It was easy to dismiss them: These guys are weirdos, we can't really put a lot of faith in what they say, or take them seriously as historical actors.
And then there were old interpretations. Paul Gates had argued that what really got them fighting each other were squabbles over land. And he's not wrong: There were indeed squabbles over land. But what a lot of historians do, what I do, is you read the background literature, you read the interpretations, what other historians have said about this, and then you go into the primary sources [original documents like letters and diaries], and it's like, so what do I see here?
And I did see a lot of very eccentric people, and I did see a lot of squabbles about land, and I did see, and this was [historian] Jim Rawley's contribution, a lot of talk about enslavement.
But what I also saw was you had a lot of whites who didn't care about slavery.
They were racist. They wanted land. They didn't want to have to deal with the slavery issue. But when they came out to Kansas under this idea that the voters were going to decide whether or not there should be slavery, the Midwesterners and a lot of the New Englanders found out there wasn't a fair vote. The Missourians were stacking the election.
Kansas Shakes Up Americans
NICOLE There was a lot of voter fraud. We can talk about the nature of that fraud, and what it meant in the 1800's, but essentially you get a lot of white people who become radicalized in the mid-1850s on the subject of slavery.
So I'll just quote Jim Lane, who was as racist as they come, and then becomes a radical republican and a champion of African-American rights, and he's one of the very first, if not the first, to recruit black soldiers in the Civil War armies. And Jim Lane will say in the 1860s that it was in Kansas that we found out that the slave power is a threat to whites.
ANNETTE That's something I don't think that I made enough of in my interpretation of your work, was that impact that really readied people to think about Civil War, not just as a matter of states' rights versus the Union, but a matter of a very, very serious moral issue, which was slavery.
Racist Yet Anti-Slavery (It's Complicated)
ANNETTE It's interesting you brought up Jim Lane, because what I saw is, here's someone who's a very pragmatic politician. Also, I think a lot of us expect all the New Englanders to be these very noble abolitionists, but you showed that even the New Englanders were actually very complicated in the 1850s in their response to what was happening around them. Did that surprise you?
NICOLE: No, I don't think so. I think it goes back to what [historian] David Hackett Fischer used to talk about, historians’ fallacies, that we tend to think there's one cause, we want to simplify to this one thing. So we tend to forget that people don't have one motivating factor.
So if you were looking for noble abolitionism in Bleeding Kansas, you would find it in Lawrence, in the New England settlement. You would find it among the New Englanders. But even the New Englanders in the 1850s were looking for land. They're looking for a better life.
There was one New England settler, out in Manhattan, Kansas, who could not get his wife to come with him. She stayed back in Massachusetts. And so he writes letters to her saying, you know, I came here to make a better living for you. But she just doesn't want to go out on the uncivilized frontier where there are all these hardships.
So, no, it's not surprising to me that people have these layers They were anti-slavery and they were willing to embrace that cause. But they also had other concerns: Even abolitionists have to make a living, you know.
ANNETTE One thing that came across was this idea that these people who were against slavery didn't give a damn about African-Americans, or enslaved people. So you said that Jim Lane eventually becomes very much a serious advocate against slavery itself, but I missed this, did he really care about what happened to enslaved people?
NICOLE It's always hard to know with Jim Lane. You said he was pragmatic, which is a nice way to put it. People at the time thought he was opportunistic. They thought he was everything we think about politicians today, that they don't really believe anything they say, that they just go with whatever is going to work with people.
It's really hard to know how sincere Lane's conversion was. But I think, getting away from that particular person of Jim Lane, it is the case that, yes, you've got lots of people from Illinois and Indiana and Iowa who have come for the land.
Those Midwestern states by the 1850s are starting to fill up: The last government land is basically being handed out in the 1850s, so it was time to move to the frontier. These settlers are, I always say, anti-slavery because they don't like slavery. But they don't necessarily embrace Black rights, and they don't like slavery because they feel like whites who are enslavers have greater economic power. [Enslavers] are wealthier, and they use that power against the non-slave owning farmers in states like Kentucky and Tennessee.
Whites in the Midwest don't want to compete with these white enslavers, and they don't want to compete with African-Americans, either. All these states in the Free State movement will pass anti-black laws, including prohibiting African-Americans from migrating into Kansas. Ohio had those laws. Indiana had them. Illinois had them. They were very common in the Midwest.
Voter Fraud aka We've Always Done It That Way
ANNETTE I guess they see that the slave power is really a threat to everybody, that the sheer existence of slavery is the biggest problem, fair?
NICOLE Yeah. So what happens is that Kansas is opened to settlement on the political premise that there's no prohibition of slavery, that the settlers will get to decide whether they want to have it. So people come.
But the Missourians come over the river too, and we get these fraudulent votes with the first big election in the territorial legislature in March of 1855. The vote totals are three times the actual number of voters in the territory, and clearly there was fraud. The vote totals that the pro-slavery candidates racked up, majorities of five or six thousand votes when the territorial census has said there are less than 3,000 eligible voters in the territory, clearly this is fraud.
This is what pushes the Midwesterners who at least thought they'd get a fair vote to believing, oh, the slave power is not going to let us vote against slavery. And as I said, this is part of the radicalization process. I do want to say, because I say this in the book, that for the Missourians who cross over and vote, there are no residency requirements. There are no registration requirements in the 1800s.
And residency was very fluid on the frontier. So you could be in Ohio in frontier days, and somebody moves in and has only just arrived in the settlement, but the idea is he's going to stay there, and so yeah, we let him vote. So the Missourians are playing with that, like, "I intend to move over to Kansas, but I haven't done it yet. So I'm going to go across the river on Election Day and vote, even though I don't legally reside in the territory."
There is, I think, I haven't studied this in depth, a lot of fraud in 19th century elections. There's violence. And clearly that's true in the Midwest and in the Upper South, like Kentucky. The Missourians will say yeah, sure, I brought my Bowie knife to the polls, and I threatened people, and people were drunk, and there were these things going on, but we did that back in Kentucky, so what's the big deal?
The New Englanders do a very good job of being sanctimoniously outraged: Who can believe there should be these things going on at the elections?
I can't quite tell whether the elections were a lot purer in New England. I think they might have been. But I think the New Englanders are kind of putting on a certain amount of outrage to really blow this up. I tend to think that the Missourians are correct when they say, well, we didn't do anything that we didn't do back in Kentucky. But when you do it while the whole country is watching to see how this Popular Sovereignty thing is going to work out, and when you do it so well that you get twice as many votes as there are actually voters, that did not go well for them.
ANNETTE Kansas was such a fluid part of an increasingly fluid country. I'm wondering about the New Englanders, who from the beginning [in the 17th century] really were focused on the idea of community. Yes, they're interested in making money and having land and all the rest of it, but they wanted to do these things to a greater or lesser degree together, as communities. They may or may not have been talking about the reality of elections back in Massachusetts, but they certainly thought they were. That's the impression that I get, I mean perception versus reality.
[What happens in Kansas] seems to really focus people on assumptions that everybody had made about elections, some of them going back quite deep into British history. The idea that you [announce] your vote, if you are indeed lucky enough to have one, in person. Eighteenth century British politics was not characterized at the Parliamentary level by lot of disagreement. It was pretty much one class divided into two different parties.
But suddenly, [in Kansas] people are thinking about what voter fraud is. Who does get to vote when everyone is new? And that really caught the attention of NBH readers. I think that voter fraud, slimy politicians, are the sorts of things that resonate with us in 2024.
About Now
Even though you wrote this book twenty years ago, you did not write it with an eye on 2024, which is one of the things I absolutely love about how history works. But some of my readers were wanting to use your book as a template for understanding where we are in 2024. What do you think of that?
NICOLE I grew up in the era where we didn't have really close elections, particularly presidential elections, or, growing up in Indiana, in state elections. Republicans controlled Indiana. You pretty much knew who was going to win the governorship or senators and so forth, and at the presidential level you had, you know, the Reagan landslides. So until about 2000, when I was working on the book, I think our sense was that elections are pretty clearcut: You go, you vote and the result is the result, and there isn't a whole lot of dispute about the result.
In 2000, we kind of entered the era that we have [since] been in, of these very, very thin election results, particularly the presidential race, with our wonderful system of the popular vote and the electoral college vote.
I told students that the era we are in now is very much like the late 19th century, because you have a lot of times in the late 19th century where one person won the popular vote, but somebody else won the electoral vote, and became president. And for a long time that wasn't true. The electoral vote, the popular vote, matched. But since about 2000, there have been these cases where they don't, and where the margins are very thin.
In the 1888 election, Benjamin Harrison, who's from Indiana, wins the presidency by a very slim margin in New York state, and that's what carries the election. Now [in 2024] when we look at what's going to happen with Wisconsin. or Michigan, one state can really have a super impact, because it's so close, and we know one candidate is going to get Texas and one's going to get California. So yeah, none of that was really on my radar when I was writing.
What I did discover when I was working on territorial Kansas was, yes, we Americans put this great faith in our elections. That's what Stephen Douglas did when he [advocated] popular sovereignty, saying we'll let the voters decide, that is the essence of American democracy with a small D. It's Abraham Lincoln who says, well, how is this actually going to to work, how are the nuts and bolts going to work? There are Missourians saying they're going to cross the river [to vote], what about that?
So Americans like to have this big picture: The elections are so important. But the nuts and bolts of how those elections are carried out are really, really important. And that's what I think became clear in Kansas, and has become clearer and clearer and more divisive in American society in the last twenty-some years.
Historians As Psychics
ANNETTE I think a lot of people now are convinced that historians have a crystal ball into the future, and that we can read the entrails of the past and all the tea leaves, whatever your preferred metaphor of fortune telling, and figure out what's going to happen in the future. What do you think of that?
NICOLE I don't think so. I don't think that we have any kind of a crystal ball. I certainly don't, and I think we always have to be careful. Let me put it this way. Students, we are told, always like relevance. They always like to explain the present day in the terms of the past. How's this old stuff to do with what's happening right at at this minute? And I think sometimes, if we know the history really well, we can do that. We can point to the historical antecedents of whatever is going on. We can draw parallels.
But any particular given policy position, or issue that's going on in the world, has such complex deep historical roots. You know, I think about something like the war in Ukraine, the conflict in Gaza, healthcare policy. These are all things that are really, really important. If you are an expert in medical history, and policy history, you know, maybe you have some crystal ball on that issue. But otherwise it gets too easy to make facile connections, oversimplified connections, that can be as dangerous as they are helpful. I don't know if that answers your question.
ANNETTE It does, it does. I mean this is, as I like to say at Non-Boring History ,why historians don't get invited to parties [laughter], and there's some truth to that.
Annette Rants to Nicole About History Education 🙄
ANNETTE One of the things that I'm trying to get across [at Non-Boring History] is that when Americans go to school, they get taught a US History survey, from Columbus to Clinton, in elementary school. Then they get it again in middle school. And then again in high school. And by the time we get them [in college] they're like, oh, God, not again. Of course, professors are trying to say, actually, just forget most of the history you took at school. Let's start this again.
But the idea of drilling down and studying something very specific, as we did in the UK, is not something that most Americans have experience of, and even if they go to college, increasingly, they are very unlikely to get a tenure [or tenure-track] published academic teaching them. I mean, I've met high school teachers who moonlight as college professors, and that's such a different culture.
I don't mean to insult all my teacher supporters out there, but there's is just a very different understanding of what history is, including the whole idea of social studies [UK readers: Social studies is a mish-mash of history, geography, political science and economics, plus social justice advocacy taught in schools, that's practiced n in schools, but is not a university discipline, except maybe colleges of education, which makes it a bit dubious, since they're experts in…education] versus history.
So I know I'm ranting at you about this, Nicole. I'm sure this was meant to be a question. But I'm just trying to get people to just sort of pause, and before they start basing current actions on what they think history is, consider that even [historians] have, you know, not only great modesty, but great doubts about whether we're getting it right. Fair?
Historians’ Crystal Balls*
(UK Readers: Ooh, Matron! Sorry, couldn’t resist. You’re welcome)
NICOLE Yes. Over the last holidays when my son came home. . . Well, let me put it this way. I've been teaching the Civil War class for decades now, and the first day I always ask students why they are taking this class. Up until very recently. I always got "My dad dragged me all my all the battlefields." Or "My boyfriend's really into the Civil War, so I want to know what he's talking about." And then I started getting this: "I think we're headed for another civil war and I want to understand how we got into the first one."
And that has not changed how I teach it at all. I've just kind of gone, "Oh, my, that's disturbing that they're worried about this." But I keep teaching what I've been teaching.
On the issue of the crystal ball, my son and I had this big debate, is there is going to be another civil war, and arguing this back and forth. He doesn't know as much history as I do, but, you know, drawing on what we know about the history and the parallels to today. And I don't know which of one of us is right about what the future is. So I don't think we can each make our private predictions based on our understanding of the past, and our understanding of the present. But I think it's important to remember that people take the same information, and reach different conclusions.
So one of the skills that you try to get the students to learn is how to analyze those arguments, to look for the weaknesses in the arguments. Which part of this do you buy? Which part of it do you not?
ANNETTE [Students learn that] in a good history class [laughter]. And I think what I'm hearing from my readers is they didn't really get that. They got lots of memorizing and whatnot. Obviously, if you're a history major you can have a very different experience, but we have fewer and fewer people who are history majors and that is obviously very, very concerning.
What direction have you pursued in your research since Bleeding Kansas? Because that was well received, so what kinds of questions did you find yourself tackling next?
Personal Angle, and How Fast Things Change
NICOLE Well, actually, I went back to something when I was working on my PhD at Indiana University. I read in the Indiana newspapers, the Indianapolis newspapers, in the spring of 1861. There were these notices coming out of Putnam County, Indiana, which is Western Indiana, which is where the Etchesons are originally from, so that caught my eye, the ancestral stomping grounds.
After Lincoln's election, there were Union meetings all over the North. At the one in Greencastle, Indiana, in Putnam County, Daniel Voorhees, who was the newly elected Congressman for that district of Indiana, gives this very famous, and to some people infamous, speech, that Hoosiers are not going to fight against our brothers in the South. Not one man. not one dollar, to fight against our brothers in the South. So this becomes a very famous speech.
And then, in April 1861, with the firing on Fort Sumter, there's a notice in the newspaper that young men are, like, mobbing to join the Army in Putnam County. I knew that western Indiana and parts of Indiana were Copperhead territory, anti-war territory. But also Indiana was a Union state, and Indiana supplied hundreds of thousands of young men who fought in the Union Army. So I thought, someday, when I finish the Kansas stuff, I want to go back and look at that phenomenon, and see what had happened there.
So that's what I did in my last book A Generation at War, which was a microhistory of Putnam County from 1850 to 1880, looking at how the war changed politics and society in that county.
New York Ain't Typical
NICOLE I make the argument that most of what we know about the Civil War home front in the north comes from the big cities. We have a book on Boston and a book on Chicago, and a book on Philadelphia: Matt Gallman's book on Philadelphia [Mastering Wartime: A Social History of Philadelphia during the Civil War] is very good. We have books on New York City, because that's easy. You know, you go to New York City and you go to the archives, and there's all this information.
But those cities are not, I would argue, particularly representative of the North. So I thought that if we looked at a rural community in a place like Indiana, that gives a much better idea of how the war changes the average Northern community.
ANNETTE I'm struck by your description of your work. One is that in the end, there's always a personal element to what historians do, even if it's not obvious to everybody else. That's just an aside. But something else is just how quickly things can change, so that when we are thinking about either great things or terrible things happening in the future, sometimes we're taken aback when events take a completely different turn.
Soda War
So one last question, a very serious one: Coke or Pepsi?
NICOLE Oh, Coke. Diet Coke.
ANNETTE Ah, but does Indiana tend to be a Pepsi place or a Coke place?
NICOLE I don't know. You know, the universities have contracts with one vendor. So Ball State University is a Pepsi location.
ANNETTE Oh, wow.
NICOLE Yeah. I mean I can drink it, but I mostly drink Diet Coke.
ANNETTE Well, there you have it! Thank you for tolerating the silly question.
NICOLE No problem!
ANNETTE I asked Peter Mancall at the University of Southern California for the best hamburger in LA, and he voted for In N’ Out, which will probably, you know, get us angry letters from fans of independent food places.
NICOLE: I do not speak for the state of Indiana on the Coke or Pepsi issue. 😂
ANNETTE Or the University, or all the other disclaimers we have to make these days. 😂
It was a pleasure to chat with you. You know how many historians there are and how many subjects we cover, it's just massive. It's much more than people realize. But I hope to cycle back to you to talk about more of your work in future.
NICOLE Sure, that would be fabulous. And thank you for all your kind words about the Bleeding Kansas book
ANNETTE They weren't kind! I did enjoy it, and if I didn't, believe me, you would notice. So thank you very much, Nicole Etcheson.
Non-Boring History is written by historian Dr. Annette Laing, a Brit in the US, with the sort-of assistance of a crack team of Gnomes who live in the basement of Non-Boring House. Her goal? To show you entertainingly the joys and usefulness of thinking like an academic historian, by taking you on a joyful and unpredictable tour of historians’ work in US and UK history and beyond, museums ranging from brilliant to mediocre to insane, and so much more.