Here is the text of a paper offered by Bill Cecil-Fronsman at the
recent OAH in Atlanta, GA.
This paper has a place in the H-CivWar archive, where it may be
retrieved by anyone who knows the secret command (which is):
GET PROSLAVE KANSAS H-CIVWAR
This command and all others should be sent to:
Listserv@uicvm.uic.edu
Bill Cecil-Fronsman, the editorial board of H-CivWar, and myself all
urge you to take advantage of this and other resources in the H-CivWar
archive. Anyone with papers to place should feel free to contact me.
Robert Harris, bb05196@bingvmb
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PROSLAVE KANSAS
by Bill Cecil-Fronsman
Washburn University, Kansas
Talk delivered at the OAH, Atlanta GA, 1994
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THE PROSLAVERY IDEOLOGY ON THE PLAINS OF KANSAS
Delivered to the 1994 meeting of the Organization of American Historians.
Not to be copied or cited without the author's permission.
By the spring of 1856 the clashes between proslavery and
antislavery Kansans had escalated to the point that armed bands
of men were searching each other out. "The abolition societies
at the North," announced Leavenworth's Kansas Weekly Herald,
"have imported a set of outlaws. . . for the purpose of carrying
on their unholy and hellish design of abolitionizing this
Territory." The most virulent voice of proslavery opinion,
Atchison's Squatter Sovereign proclaimed: "The abolitionists
shoot down our men without provocation, wherever they meet them.
LET US RETALIATE IN THE SAME MANNER. . . . DEATH TO ALL YANKEES/
AND TRAITORS IN KANSAS."
The Free-State movement and its leaders have received their
share of historical studies. Not only were they promoting a more
attractive cause than their proslavery opposition, but they
remained in Kansas long after their adversaries had left. Their
diaries, letter collections, and memoirs filled the vaults of the
State Historical Society and the pages of its publications. The
result is that the proslavery side has been virtually ignored and
historians have little understanding of why it acted as it did.
The proslavery ideology in Kansas grew out of the culture
and experiences of the small planters and common whites who
migrated from the Southern borderlands. This paper will argue
that proslavery Kansans defended slavery less as a paternalistic
way to uplift savage Africans and more as an institution that
guaranteed a republican equality among white men. They argued
that it was the North, not the South, that was the land of class
divisions. Armed with the wealth of their moneyed masters, the
scum of the North had been sent to Kansas. These impoverished
Northerners were a dishonorable body with no legitimate purpose
in the territory. Hence proslavery Kansans had every right to
organize and drive them out.
At times proslavery Kansans employed a conservative defense
that stressed slavery's benefits to the slaves and the humanity
of the institution. Such appeals might have soothed the
consciences of slaveholders, but they were unlikely to excite the
kinds of people proslavery Kansans needed to mobilize. The bulk
of proslavery settlers were common whites from Missouri who had
practiced small-scale agriculture and participated only
marginally in the cash economies of the state. Proslavery
advocates would have to mobilize common whites by appealing to
their values, not the values of a planter aristocracy.
One can understand the proslavery position only within the
context of the emerging debate on slavery. Although several
decades of abolitionist critics had condemned slavery as an
institution which cruelly abused slaves, these assaults had not
generated a broad political consensus among a racist northern
population. The real debate concerned itself less with the
impact of slavery on the slaves than with the impact slavery had
on whites. Far more pervasive was the free labor critique which
emphasized that slavery degraded labor and created a backward and
stagnant society. Unlike the North, which had an egalitarian,
fluid social order, the free labor critique saw the South as a
two-class society: a slaveholding aristocracy and a mass of
impoverished, degraded, and socially immobile whites. Racist
whites, who might have little concern with redressing the horrors
which abolitionists described, could see a moral imperative with
ending slavery or at least containing its advance.
The proslavery ideology in Kansas met this critique head on.
The Kansas Weekly Herald called free labor, "humbug." It
described the "hordes of the suffering wretches who hang upon the
outskirts of northern society; starving, ragged, and steeped in
crime and pollution. . . . Free labor means nothing more than a
subjugation of the laboring to the interests of the rich
capitalists." As for the vaunted egalitarianism and social
mobility of the North, the paper proclaimed that "a greater chasm
exists between the society of the employer and employee in the
North than in the South. . . and that it is easier to surmount
the barriers of social castes in India than to overcome the same
in the Northern States."
Kansas proslavery advocates stood the free labor critique on
its head. The South, not the North, was the land of genuine
equality for whites. The Leavenworth Journal asserted: "In
southern society, color makes caste. The poor white man is an
aristocrat. He scorns menial occupations; he is, and feels
himself to be, the peer of his rich neighbor, and is treated by
him as his equal, in the Southern States." Benjamin F.
Stringfellow claimed that in a free society "of necessity money
must distinguish the classes--mark the master, separate the
servant." In contrast, in a slave society, "color, not money
marks the class: black is the badge of slavery; white the color
of the free man, and the white man, however poor [and] whatever
his occupation, feels himself a sovereign." Unlike the urban
North, in the rural South "there be no excessive wealth, there is
no poverty."
The Kansas proslavery argument claimed that slavery provided
the basis for a republican society. The relative economic
equality was critical because, as Stringfellow claimed, excessive
wealth "creates an improper distinction, corrupts the morals of
the people." A republican society's wealth needs to be "fairly
distributed so that each of its members, easy and independent in
his property, shall feel himself practically equal to his
fellows." This social equality among whites created the basis
for republican government. The white man in a slave society
"looks upon liberty as the privilege of his color, the government
peculiarly his own, himself its sovereign. He watches it with
the jealous eye of a monarch." He is "proud of his freedom" and
"jealous of his privilege" and "will resist every attempt to rob
him of his dominion." Slavery was thus seen as a way to preserve
a society of autonomous producers who were each other's social
equals, in sharp contrast to the degraded slaves in the South and
the presumed propertyless masses in the North.
This kind of proslavery defense appealed to Southern common
whites' egalitarian ethos. Although wide social and economic
gaps existed among Southern whites, the common whites' culture
rejected any claims of social superiority based upon wealth.
They aggressively defended their rights to be treated as
political peers and as equals in numerous social settings.
Slavery protected their positions by creating an unbridgeable
gulf between them and the degraded slaves.
The image of the North as a land of impoverished masses
shaped the Kansas proslavery ideology. Although proslavery
Kansans frequently lumped all Northerners into a single despised
group, they sometimes drew harsh distinctions between Midwestern
farmers and emigrants from the Eastern cities. "There are two
classes of people who come from the free States," wrote a
correspondent to the Squatter Sovereign, "the independent and
dependent." The first group, Midwestern farmers, would support
slavery "if they find the country better suited to slave labor."
The other class, however, were dependent Northerners, "the
subjects of the 'emigration Aid Society,' who come without means
and with Utopian anticipations and are sadly disappointed and
curse the men who sent them hither."
Nothing brought such universal condemnation by proslavery
Kansans as the activities of the various emigrant aid societies.
The most famous, the New England Emigrant Aid Company, was
founded by Eli Thayer in 1854. Massachusetts chartered the
company and authorized it to issue $5 million in capital stock.
An enthusiastic Horace Greeley published in his New York Tribune
an account of Thayer's "Plan of Operations" which called for
assisting 20,000 emigrants and taking over the territory.
Proslavery Kansans' assumptions about the nature of Northern
society gave them a lens through which to view this proposed
influx of thousands of Eastern emigrants. Before any Emigrant
Aid Company settlers had arrived, William Walker, provisional
governor of Nebraska Territory, from which Kansas Territory was
formed, warned of the "host of the Lazarroni from the Eastern
States and Cities and paupers from Europe that will be thrown
into the country." Kansas was about to be made "the unwilling
reciptacle [sic] of the filth and scum and off scouring of the
East and Europe." In September of 1855 Joseph C. Anderson told a
proslavery barbecue in Fort Scott how "the hosts of paupers and
convicts from the hotbeds of vice and crime, began to pour like
an inundation, upon the unpolluted soil of our beautiful
Territory."
Given the proslavery faction's assumptions that the North
was a land populated by impoverished masses, it made sense that
there was a pool of men ready to be sent as the hired agents of
the Emigrant Aid Company. It mattered little that most Free-
State supporters came independently of any emigrant aid company,
that aid companies provided only marginal assistance to
prospective emigrants, and that Southern states created
organizations to help proslavery emigrants settle. Proslavery
Kansans assumed that their enemies had been "purchased, marked[,]
shipped, landed, and stored." They were "not free men but
paupers, who have sold themselves to Eli Thayer & Co., to do
their master's bidding."
Men such as these were not legitimate settlers into Kansas.
The Lecompton Union condemned the aid companies for sending in
"their hordes of hired paupers. . . who were completely under
the control of a few leaders, and would do their bidding let that
be what it might." The Squatter Sovereign added: "No one can
fail to distinguish between an honest, bona fide emigration,
prompted by choice or necessity, and an organized colonization
with offensive purpose upon the institutions of the country
proposed to be settled."
Proslavery Kansans drew up a republican ideology which
warned of the dangers posed by the less-than-independent poor.
Not only were these men incapable of supporting themselves and
contributing to the community, they were likely targets for
unscrupulous demagogues who might employ the poor in their
efforts to subvert public liberty for their own purposes. "We
are not contending against the honest but mistaken Free-Soiler,"
announced the Squatter Sovereign, "but with the scum and filth of
the Northern cities; sent here as hired servants, to do the will
of others; not to give their own free suffrage." The Doniphan
Constitutionalist described the Emigrant Aid Company men as the
"off-scourings of their cities" and added: "These men have not
had the independence or mind to entertain an idea of their own--
hence they have been swayed in Lawrence by the demagogues, and
done their dirty work." Such men had to be stopped!
The wealthy abolitionists of the North had the means to hire
a mob of voters to come in and take control of the elections.
The Kansas Weekly Herald, charged that aboltionists had sent
"hordes of men--voters--imported into the Territory for no
purpose other than to control the election here." These imported
voters did not even have to stay long in order to fulfill their
mission. C. R. Mobley of Fort Riley claimed that the Pawnee Town
Association paid men twenty-five dollars to come in and vote,
although "They commenced leaving the next day, and continued to
leave as fast as they could get their carpet-sacks and get away."
Central to the proslavery defense was the belief that their
Free-State opponents were without honor. Southern whites
believed that honor required that an individual possess an
independent position in society, or as Bertram Wyatt-Brown
writes, they viewed "republicanism, property, and personal honor
as mutually supportive." Proslavery Kansans came from cultures
that defined men's status by their race, personal courage,
generosity, and honesty. These were all means through which they
maintained their honor as free and independent men. The Yankees
possessed none of these qualities.
Although the abolitionists were presumably white men,
proslavery Kansans made invidious comparisons between them and
blacks. The Doniphan Constitutionalist referred to the "blue-
nosed, cat-fish mouthed, crack-brain Yankees" of Boston who "did
not stand on a level with the negroes of that town, and they have
many a time been courting the same white girl that some negro
was[,] and the girl would take the black man as a husband before
she would take the deluded tools." Clearly men like these were
not the equals of white Southerners.
Southern culture held that the ability to fight was a
critical way that men defended their honor and asserted a
prestigious place among their fellows. The proslavery faction
assumed that its ability to fight was proof of its moral
superiority over its cowardly opponents. Robert H. Williams, a
former Border Ruffian, participated in an attack on the Free-
State town of Lawrence. His opponents did not fight back because
they "were not very keen on fighting, being the riff-raff of the
Northern towns enlisted by the Emigrants' Aid Society and most of
them quite unused to bear arms of any kind." The Kansas Weekly
Herald scoffed at Horace Greeley's suggestion that Lawrence be
visited yearly, as patriots visit Bunker Hill: "The patriots of
Bunker Hill fought like brave men, but the Lawrenceites, with
their leaders, fled like cowards."
Yankee stinginess further demonstrated their lack of honor.
When the antislavery Kansas Herald of Freedom urged a boycott of
the proslavery town of Parkville, the Squatter Sovereign laughed
the threat off. "We predict that for every skin-flint yankee who
may withdraw his patronage from Parkville, twenty liberal
Missourians, who can buy without 'jewing' and pay without
'grumbling' will take his place." Accounts of Yankee parsimony
further demonstrated how far removed their opponents were from
accepted codes of honor.
As men without honor, the Yankees emerge as motivated solely
by financial gain. "Everything with these rascals is a question
of dollars and cents," exclaimed a correspondent. "An
Abolitionist would sell his soul, and his country any time for
dollars and cents, and if it were possible for him to have an
interest in heaven he would dispose of that too, for the same
consideration." Charges like these called into question the
Yankees' commitments to antislavery. The Squatter Sovereign
charged: "Abolition philanthropy is about the cheapest commodity
the market affords. An Abolitionist will be the most humane,
benevolent kind hearted fellow in the world, if it isn't likely
to cost him anything. But just ask him to fork over half a
dollar to buy a beef-stake [sic] for one of the negroes he
professes to pity so much, and he'll squeak out like a cart-wheel
that hasn't seen tar for a month." If the slave trade were re-
opened, claimed the Squatter Sovereign, "abolitionists would give
us no further troubles, they would as did their fathers, become
slave-catchers, would cease to hate slave-owners; would forget
their mock love of the negro in their real love of money."
Proslavery Kansans' political culture warned of conspiracies
designed to deprive hard-working, independent producers of their
birth-rights. Territorial land agent and one of the leaders of
the proslavery faction, John Calhoun, (no relation to the famous
South Carolina statesman) claimed that although the Emigrant Aid
Society had kept its "political objects" clearly in view, "the
'Almighty Dollar' was never lost sight of. They had large
schemes of speculation in view, by making expenditures in
abolitionizing this Territory. They would become large land
holders, through these very emigrants who are sent out here, and
in this way they expect a remuneration for their outfits." The
Leavenworth Journal agreed. Abolitionists "want all the public
lands, not for poor white men, but for millionaire speculators of
New England and New York." The Lecompton Union warned buyers at
a land sale that "Northern speculators" were coming. "Tis bad
enough for one to pay twice for his home, without having that
home purchased over his head by imported abolition speculators."
These charges confirmed proslavery Kansans' assumptions that
the presence of the Emigrant Aid Company men was illegitimate.
Those with enough money could find a pool of men ready to come to
Kansas and do their bidding. The Kansas Weekly Herald charged
that "part of the floating population of the free States" had
been "bought up by the Emigrant Aid Society, for the double
purpose of Abolitionism and land speculation." All of the talk
about Border Ruffian invasions was, according to the Squatter
Sovereign, "merely got up to hide the cold-blooded speculation of
[former governor Andrew] Reeder's land company. . . or of the New
England Settlement Company to which the Boston and New York
abolition papers are partners." In sum, the Free-State element
was an illegitimate outside force, transported to Kansas, to
further the interests of fanatical abolitionists and speculators.
Proslavery Kansans considered themselves justified in
resorting to extra-legal efforts to prevent this element from
taking over territory that they considered to be their own.
Theoretically, the Missouri Compromise had kept slavery out of
Kansas before 1854. But Missourians along the border knew all
too well that the reality was somewhat different. A number of
Indian tribes kept slaves as did a number of Indian agents and
missionaries. Missourians had every reason to believe that the
land was theirs.
The influx of antislavery Northerners could only be seen as
an invasion by dishonorable outsiders. Missourians had faced
similar invasions before. In May of 1836 two hundred men, armed
with pistols, dirks, and clubs evicted abolitionist David Nelson
who had set up an integrated college in the state. The attack on
abolitionists during the 1830s was minor when compared with
Missourians' efforts to rid the state of another despised outside
element -- Mormons. In 1833 Jackson County vigilantes attacked
Mormon leaders, drove them and their 1200 followers from their
homes, and destroyed Mormon property. Missourians temporarily
avoided further confrontations by allowing Mormons to set up
control in Caldwell County. But in early 1838 a new wave of
attacks, supported by State authorities, drove out the 10,000
Mormons who were residing in Missouri.
Western Missourians' experiences with extra-legal attacks
against a foreign, illegitimate element shaped their response to
the influx of Northerners. In September of 1854 Missouri Senator
David Rice Atchison urged his neighbors "to give a horse thief,
robber, or homicide a fair trial, but to hang a Negro thief and
Abolitionist, without Judge or Jury." He told his college
classmate and Senate colleague, Jefferson Davis: "we will be
compeled [sic], to shoot, burn & hang, but the thing will be soon
over, we intend to 'Mormonize' the abolitionists." Atchison knew
exactly what his words suggested. He had been an active
participant in the Mormon War. When the Mormons first arrived,
Atchison had served them as an attorney. He had opposed unlawful
violence against them, and even urged that they defend
themselves. But when forced to choose, he sided with the
vigilantes and commanded state troops against his former clients.
Atchison was not the only one to recognize that the tactics used
against Mormons might be used to combat Northerners. According
to William B. Napton, the population of western Missouri was
appalled by the onslaught of abolitionists and that they "liken
it to the Mormon invasion of Jackson County and they are right."
Proslavery Kansans came from cultures that accepted a
community's right to mobilize and drive away or punish those who
deviated from accepted codes of conduct. Southern communities
were small, face-to-face gatherings of people who considered it
their birth-right to enforce standards of behavior on their
fellow members. Even those who were considered "insiders" might
be subject to mob sanctions if they deviated too strongly.
Outsiders were treated with even more suspicion. Their attacks
on the institutions of the community would not be tolerated under
any circumstances. Mob attacks might be preceded by claims like
that of the Squatter Sovereign: "We as a general thing,
disapprove of lynch law, and are the last to justify people in
taking the law into their own hands." But these protestations
were generally followed with something like: "But there are
certain cases in which a community are justifiable in resorting
to any means to protect themselves and punish offenders--they are
in cases where the law makes no provisions for such punishment."
The Kansas proslavery ideology led its followers to look
upon the organized Free-State emigration as a foreign invasion,
to be met by a community-wide response. They had fended off
abolitionists and Mormons before. They were not about to permit
a band of illegitimate interlopers to take control of a territory
they saw as their own. In the weeks leading up to the 1855
territorial election, the election which the proslavery faction
took over, the Kansas Weekly Herald egged on its followers:
We soon learn that these men came from the north-east. That
their only "earthly object" is to keep the western and
southern pioneer from enjoying his rights of property in
Kansas Territory. Yes, fellow citizens, these men urged on
by capital in New England, are here to deprive you of those
rights bought by the blood of your fathers.
The God-fearing and order-loving southern people have borne
much. But the sons of the West will never see their birth-
right snatched from them by foreign hands, and thus made the
heritage of hireling paupers and slaves, sent from every
part of the world.
Proslavery Kansans had no choice but to respond.
=======================BY=====================================
Bill Cecil-Fronsman zzceci@acc.wuacc.edu
Department of History Office: (913) 231-1010 x1317
Washburn University Fax: (913) 231-1084
Topeka, KS 66621