Nicole Etcheson

This is a single scholarly study, as opposed to Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri, which was a collection of essays. (Bleeding Kansas author Nicole Etcheson was the author of one of those essays). The story’s covered chronologically from the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 to the 1880s. It’s mostly a political history – complicated enough, you have to keep track of the Topeka Constitution, the Lecompton Constitution, the Leavenworth Constitution, and the Wyandotte Constitution, plus the Whigs, the Know-Nothings, the free-state Democrats, the slavery Democrats, the Radical Republicans, the Liberal Republicans, and the Extremely Silly Party (well, OK, not that last. But it could have been). There is some resonance to modern times; if you’re concerned about election fraud, in Kansas some districts had more votes than there were registered voters in the whole territory and an election judge confiscated ballots and hid them in a box under his woodpile. Intimidation at the polls by clipboard-wielding men in suits and ties? Both sides showed up at Kansas polls festooned with revolvers and Bowie knives – and in several cases, brought a cannon. Amidst the blood and gore, there was some progress – the original “free staters” wanted a state free of black people, whether they were slaves or not; by the end there were proposals for black suffrage (they didn’t pass, but the Wyandotte Constitution -which was the one eventually accepted when Kansas joined the Union - did allow women to own property and vote in school elections).

It would be interesting to figure out what changed people’s minds (well, what changed white people’s minds). My personal guess – I have no scholarly documentation, it’s just an opinion – was encounters with black people as they fled from Missouri before the Civil War, then more exposure during the war itself. The first black troops were enrolled in Kansas (unofficially; as state militia - the First Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry). Kansas had more Civil War mortality per capita than any Union state, so they had plenty of opportunity, so w troops had plenty of opportunity to notice that that a black man could stop a Minie bullet just as well as a white man and that the blood that came out of the wound was the same color as theirs.

Well documented – the references are about a quarter of the book. I would have appreciated some tables to keep track of the various constitutions and what they contained, but I’m something of a freak about that. Photographs and engravings of the interested parties and locations. Not a quick or easy read but the subject is complicated. For more, see the reference above, Civil War on the Western Border and The Civil War in Kansas.… (más)

This monograph examines the conflicts in the Kansas territory during the 1850s through the prism of political activism. Essentially, Etcheson's goal is to analyse what the rhetoric of "popular sovereignty" meant in practice, and how it could not be a universal solvent for the dichotomy between the traditional rights of slaveholders and the rights of the "Free State" partisans who mostly wanted to be free of the presence of African-Americans; the irony being that said conflict helped grease the path to black emancipation. Note that this book emphasizes political maneuvering as much as violent social conflict; though there's more than enough of the second documented.… (más)