By Nicole Etcheson
As the Kansas territory lurched toward statehood in the mid to late 1850s, pro-slavery and free-state forces fought each other to try to force the territory to enter the union as a slave or free sate. While Missouri residents crossed the border to vote pro-slavery in territorial elections, northerners came from states far (e.g., Massachusetts) and near (e.g., Illinois) to impose their abolitionist views. As the author shows, Kansas was the "concrete embodiment of the choice facing the nation's future" (p 187).
As the factions duked it out, the nation - and even the world - took note. Rev Henry Ward Beecher sent rifles, packed in a box marked "Bibles", to the free-staters. Lady Byron (Lord Byron's widow) even sent funds "to relieve the suffering in Kansas".
For John Brown and his ally James Montgomery and the young men who followed them, "the experiences in Kansas radicalized them to the point of realizing the link between enslaving blacks and undermining the liberty of whites" (p 190). (And they would go on to wreak more havoc instigating an armed slave revolt in Harper's Ferry.) As militant free-staters, they were the terrorists of the day, as were the "Bushwhackers", confederate guerrillas who were not in the military but instead went about attacking anyone against slavery - whether union soldiers, ordinary citizens, or even families.
In the beginning, there were few blacks and few slaveholders in Kansas but, in the end, Kansas suffered a higher mortality rate in the Civil War than any other Union state.
This is a highly academic study, and not one I would not have picked up to read, but I'm glad a friend from Kansas loaned it to me. I had not been aware of the slave state/free state tug of war over Kansas, and it's easy to think that the interactions in Kansas were a major trigger leading to the US Civil War.
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