| Sesquicentennial
Moments
Occasional Notes for the Virginia Commission
on the
Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War
Kansas…The
Shooting Begins
Richard
E. Hickman
April 29, 2008
One hundred and fifty years ago, in the spring of
1858, the Congress of the United States was in the midst
of a heated national debate which split the national
Democratic Party over a bill to bring Kansas into the
Union as a slave state. That measure ultimately failed,
and Kansas would remain a territory until it became
the 34th State in the Union in January 1861. Kansas
was a key battleground between North and South in the
1850’s and became a symbol of the growing conflict
over the extension of slavery into the western territories.
Five and a half years before Fort Sumter,
the shooting began with a series of incidents in the
Kansas territory, which had just been opened to settlement
in 1854. A Free Soil man was killed in November 1855
by a pro-slavery man in a dispute over a land claim.
Free Soilers retaliated and quickly the tensions escalated.
Many of the Free-Soil settlers from the Northeastern
and Midwestern states and pro-slavery settlers from
the slaveholding states were armed and ready to fight
– and violence was bound to break out.
When attempted arrests of the Free Soilers were resisted
some 1,500 “Border Ruffians” marched over
from Missouri, determined to enforce law and order –
in their view. A heavy winter stormed intervened, cooling
the hotheads on all sides as the year 1855 ended. By
spring, however, the violence returned, and in one incredible
week a small war erupted in Kansas as slave-holding
and Free Soil partisans and militias squared off.1
In
May 1856, a federal marshal returned to Lawrence (the
center of Free Soil activism) with indictments against
three of the Free Soil men for defying the laws of the
territory and organizing insurgent military forces,
which was an act of treason. There were also indictments
against the local newspaper and hotel for aiding and
abetting the insurrection. Along with arrest warrants
and 500 armed men, the marshal entered the town only
to find the Free State leaders had fled. The marshal
then dismissed his men, but the local sheriff called
them back as a posse and stormed the town on May 21,
1856. The news of “The Sack of Lawrence”
flashed across the nation.2
 On
the very next day, Congressman Preston Brooks of South
Carolina entered the chamber of the United States Senate
and beat Senator Charles Sumner (of Massachusetts) furiously
with a cane, knocking him to the floor.
A few days earlier, Sumner had delivered a scathing
oration entitled “The Crime Against Kansas,”
an abolitionist, anti-slavery speech which included
insulting remarks about Brooks’ relative, Senator
Andrew Butler of South Carolina. After the caning, Sumner
did not return to the Senate for over two years.3
But this incredible week was not yet over. Two days
after the caning of Senator Sumner, a fiery, 56-year
old abolitionist named John Brown, recently  arrived
in Kansas from Ohio, took several men, including four
of his sons, to attack the pro-slavery settlers along
Pottawatomie Creek. On the night of May 24, 1856, Brown
and his men brutally massacred five innocent settlers.
The victims were all loosely connected with the pro-slavery
party and may have been prepared to testify against
the treasonable actions of the killers.4
Despite the clear facts in the case, the northern abolitionist
press, as well as a Congressional investigating committee,
downplayed the atrocities and reported the event as
a two-sided fight – handing a major victory to
the abolitionists in what was in effect a national propaganda
war.5
How did the nation reach this point, with escalating
violence from Kansas to Washington, D.C. foretelling
the coming of the Civil War five years later? One important
starting point is the aftermath of the Mexican War,
when the country gained new territories (including California
and New Mexico) and once again was forced to address
the question of whether slavery should be allowed to
expand.6 The Missouri
Compromise of 1820 had supposedly settled that issue,
with slavery banned north of the southern boundary of
Missouri (360 30’), but with Missouri admitted
as a slave state and Maine as a free state.
The
Compromise of 1850, proposed by Senator Henry Clay of
Kentucky and backed by Senator Stephen A. Douglas of
Illinois, brought in California as a free state but
created the territory of New Mexico without a specific
prohibition of slavery. The compromise also banned the
slave trade in Washington, D.C. and included a fugitive
slave law. That settled the argument for a few years,
more or less, until Senator Douglas proposed the  Kansas-Nebraska
Act in 1854. The debate over Kansas-Nebraska doomed
the Compromise of 1850. Douglas, no doubt interested
in gaining support for the transcontinental railroad
as well as his campaign for the Presidency, proposed
“Popular Sovereignty” – the right
of free white male settlers to determine the question
of slavery in each territory.7
This re-ignited the politically-charged debate over
the expansion of slavery into the territories. Partisans
on both sides encouraged their own settlers (Free Soil
and pro-slavery) to settle in Kansas, which was opened
for land claims at the end of May 1854. And, both sides
were increasingly well-armed. Rev. Henry Ward Beecher,
for example, shipped crates of Sharps repeating rifles,
known as “Beecher’s Bibles,” from
his abolitionist congregation in New York.8
Slavery,
however, was probably not the foremost issue on the
minds of the settlers themselves. Their biggest concern,
aside from surviving the harsh prairie winters, was
securing their land claims.9
Still, violent conflict between the two sides was inevitable,
and Kansas played heavily in the national press as a
conflict of “right” versus “rights”
– doing the “right” thing to restrict
the expansion of slavery, versus the “rights”
of Southerners to protect their domestic institutions
and to carry their property into the territories.10
By 1855, there were enough Free Soil men in Kansas to
elect a territorial legislature favorable to their position,
but large numbers of “One-Day Kansans” slipped
over the border from Missouri on Election Day to tip
the election to the pro-slavery candidates.11
The Free-Soilers then organized their own convention
in Topeka, and by early 1856 there were two governments.
The pro-slavery legislature in the territorial capital
of Lecompton was officially recognized in Washington,
but the Free Soilers had an unofficial body in Topeka,
which represented a majority of the people who actually
lived in Kansas.12
The pro-slavery legislature called a convention in Lecompton
to draft a new state constitution in September 1857.
The new charter would have to be adopted soon because
with the increasing ranks of Free Soil settlers there
would likely be an anti-slavery majority in the next
legislature, to be elected that fall. In October, the
convention agreed on a new charter, with a referendum
to be held in December – but only on Article Seven,
which authorized slavery. The Free Soilers (expecting
voting fraud) stayed home on the day of the referendum
so the pro-slavery Lecompton constitution passed. The
Free Soilers then held their own referendum in January
1858, and actually obtained more votes against the pro-slavery
charter than the pro-Article Seven forces had gained
for it.13
Now the issue moved to Washington and the national Democratic
Party split wide open over the issue of whether to admit
Kansas as a slave state. Under pressure from powerful
Southerners in his cabinet, President James Buchanan
(a border-state Pennsylvania Democrat) supported the
Lecompton constitution in order to maintain his Southern
Democratic base, while Senator Douglas, with his Northern
and Midwestern Democratic base, made a very public break
with the President. Douglas either had to adapt the
Democratic Party to the growing anti-slavery sentiment
in the North, or accept that he would lose the Presidency
in 1860 – not to mention his Senate seat to Abraham
Lincoln in the fall of 1858.14
In
the winter of 1857-58, there was a great debate in the
Congress over the Lecompton constitution and the Buchanan
administration pulled out all the stops to gain its
approval. The bill passed the Senate on March 23, but
in the House of Representatives fist fights broke out
late one night between Congressmen from Pennsylvania
and South Carolina over which committee to refer the
bill.
On
April 1, 1858, after the bill failed in the House, a
compromise measure (known as the Crittenden substitute,
originally proposed in the Senate by John J. Crittendon
of Kentucky) was brought up and narrowly passed the
House. The vote was 120-112 (with 92 Republicans, 22
anti-Lecompton Democrats, and six Know-Nothings voting
in favor of the substitute). The substitute admitted
Kansas, but only on the condition that the Lecompton
constitution be submitted to the voters in its entirety.
If it failed, a new convention would be convened. This,
of course, was completely unacceptable to the South
and to the Buchanan administration so the Senate promptly
rejected the House substitute and requested a committee
of conference. The House reluctantly agreed (by a vote
of 109-108) and a conference committee was convened
to work out a compromise.15
The
Administration forces tried to put the best possible
face on what was obviously a major defeat, so they devised
a bill that allowed for Kansas statehood, but only with
a greatly reduced federal land grant – which was
 actually
more in line with the grants of federal lands made to
other new states as they had entered the Union. This
compromise passed both Houses of Congress on April 30,
1858, but the referendum on the land grant was rejected
by the voters in Kansas later in August. Kansas went
on to elect a Republican legislature and finally came
into the Union as a free state in January 1861.16
Both Free Soil and pro-slavery settlers contributed
to the violence in the Kansas territory in the mid-1850’s
– a small war over the extension of slavery. Both
North and South seized upon Kansas as a political issue
and the resulting propaganda war contributed to growing
sectional tensions. This was a struggle of “right”
versus “rights,” a clash of Northern moral
concerns over the extension of slavery and Southern
demands to protect states rights. The violent upheaval
in Kansas – and the resulting breakdown in the
democratic process – led the nation swiftly towards
Civil War.
| This
“Sesquicentennial Moments”
was prepared by Richard E. Hickman, Deputy
Staff Director of the Virginia Senate Finance
Committee, and is intended to be the first
in a series of brief historical notes for
the Virginia Commission on the Sesquicentennial
of the American Civil War. This paper has
not been adopted or endorsed by the Commission.
The author is solely responsible for its contents. |
|
End Notes
1.
McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, pp. 148-149; and,
Nevins, Ordeal of the Union: A House Dividing: 1852-1857,
pp. 408-411.
2. Potter, The Impending Crisis, pp. 206-209; Freehling,
Secessionists Triumphant, p. 79; and, Nevins, op. cit.,
pp. 434-437.
3. Potter; op. cit., pp. 209-211; Craven, Growth of
Southern Nationalism, pp. 223-228; and, Nevins, op.
cit., pp. 437-446.
4. Potter, op. cit., pp. 211-213; and, Nevins, op. cit.,
pp. 472-476.
5. Potter, op. cit., pp. 221-224.
6. Howe, What Hath God Wrought, p. 828; and, Craven,
op. cit., p. 36.
7. Craven, op. cit., pp. 70-72, 172; Freehling, op.
cit., pp. 130-133; Potter, op. cit., pp. 170-176; and,
Nevins, op. cit., pp. 136-150.
8. McPherson, op. cit., p. 148; and, Potter, op. cit.,
pp. 206-207.
9. Potter, op. cit., pp 201-203.
10. Potter, op. cit., pp. 220-221; McPherson, op. cit.,
p. 149; Nevins, op. cit., pp. 476-480; and, Craven,
op. cit., pp. 209-221.
11. Potter, op. cit., pp. 201-202.
12. McPherson, op. cit., p. 148.
13. Freehling, op. cit., pp. 130-135; and, Potter, op.
cit., pp. 318.
14. Freehling, op. cit., pp. 134-140; Potter, op. cit.,
pp. 318-327; Craven, op. cit., pp. 288-300.
15. Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln: Douglas, Buchanan,
and Party Chaos: 1857-1859, pp. 281-301; and, Freehling,
op. cit., pp. 140-141.
16. Nevins, op. cit., pp. 296-301; Freehling, op. cit.,
p. 142; Potter, op. cit., pp. 324-325; and, McPherson,
op. cit., pp. 168-169.
References
Craven,
Avery O. The Growth of Southern Nationalism: 1848-1861.
(A History of the South, Volume VI). Louisiana State
University Press. 1953.
Freehling,
William W. The Road to Disunion, Volume II. Secessionists
Triumphant: 1854-1861. New York, Oxford University Press.
2007.
Howe,
Daniel Walker. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation
of America: 1815-1848. (The Oxford History of the United
States.) New York, Oxford University Press. 2007.
McPherson,
James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. (The
Oxford History of the United States.) New York, Oxford
University Press. 1988.
Nevins,
Allan. Ordeal of the Union: A House Dividing: 1852-1857.
New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1947.
Nevins,
Allan. The Emergence of Lincoln: Douglas, Buchanan,
and Party Chaos: 1857-1859. New York, Charles Scribner’s
Sons. 1950.
Potter,
David M. The Impending Crisis: 1848-1861. (The New American
Nation Series.) New York, Harper and Row, Publishers,
1976.
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