Nicole Etcheson, "Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era"
Posted on 11/21/2015 11:35:55 AM PST by Homer_J_Simpson
Before when free-soil men invoked the right of revolution in defense of their political rights, proslavery men condemned them for defying the legitimate government. But proslavery men feared the loss of their right to own slaves as much as free soilers feared the loss of the right to exclude slavery.
At Hickory Point, [Kansas] a squabble over land claims ignited these political quarrels. A settler named Franklin M. Coleman had been squatting on land abandoned by some Hoosiers, who subsequently sold the claim to Jacob Branson, another Hoosier. In late 1854, when Branson informed Coleman of his legal claim and attempted to move into Coleman’s house, Coleman held him off with a gun. A group of arbitrators later awarded part of the claim to Branson, but the boundaries between his land and Coleman’s were not determined. Branson invited in other men, including a young Ohioan named Charles W. Dow. Branson belonged to the free-state militia, a connection he used to intimidate Coleman, although Branson later testified that there had been no problems between Dow and Coleman – until the day of Dow’s murder.
On the morning of November 21, 1855, Dow went to the blacksmith shop at Hickory Point to have a wagon skein and lynchpin mended. While there he argued with one of Coleman’s friends, but left unharmed. As he walked away, he passed Coleman on the road. Coleman snapped a cap at him. When Dow turned around, he received a charge of buckshot in the chest and died immediately. His body lay in the road until Branson recovered it four hours later. Coleman claimed that Dow had threateningly raised the wagon skein (a two-foot piece of iron) as they argued over their claim dispute, forcing him to act in self-defense. Fearing that he could not get fair treatment at the free-state settlement of Hickory Point, Coleman and his family fled to Missouri.
Nicole Etcheson, “Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Eraâ€
Amen to that. Thanks.
Thanks very much for your hard work. Please include me on your new list.
Nicole Etcheson, "Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era"
Thanks, and yes there will be a vocabulary learning curve as we go through the civil war.
How to escalate a local dispute into a Constitutional crisis.
Despite my criticism of Gov. Shannon, I will also offer an apologia. Sheriff Jones represented the lawful authority in his county, and was being openly defied by a large and growing number of armed men. Sounds like an insurrection to me, and it was the governor’s duty to suppress same. The toxic mixture of slave and free-state politics was hijacking a local problem, and was merely an example of the toxic mix that was consuming the country at large.
I’m not sure under the circumstances what Gov. Shannon was supposed to do differently. To ignore the Sheriff’s plea was to permit an insurrection against lawful authority and would have been a dereliction of his duty as Territorial Governor.
I have come to the conclusion from studying the flawed compromises that put our original Constitution together that once Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin and gave new life to the institution of slavery, the Civil War was inevitable. I throw up my hands like Hillary Clinton and ask “What difference does it make?”
Based on my meager studies I agree and would add that allowing establishment of the peculiar institution in the new nation based on the precepts outlined in the Declaration of Independence was a basic factor in the ensuing trouble. The hopes of Lincoln and other supporters of the rule of law who hoped to see slavery die out on its own were defeated by Whitney's invention. I have come to understand that the battle between pro- and anti-slavery parties for control of the destiny of Kansas was fought so desperately because that is where the question would be answered. It would either be the beginning of the end of slavery or slavery would become ineradicable.
Wait till we get to Dred Scott v. Sanford, the decision that Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney thought would settle the question of slavery once and for all. To the kids in the “We The People” class, I make the point that in America, we tend to look down on violence as a means of promoting social change. Instead, when we have a beef, we go to Court. No other county sues as much as we do, but no other country has less of a history of organized civil violence. I offer as proof the argument that the only time we had a civil war, it was because the legal system failed to avert it in the Dred Scott case.
Maybe it’s a stretch, because the Civil War was inevitable, but it was probably the last chance to avert the Civil War, and instead of averting it, the decision helped bring it about.
So Chief Justice Taney did settle the question of slavery once and for all. But not in the way he intended.
We’ll get into that more later.
Excellent Homer, thank you for doing this. Come visit me at gettysburg whenever you are in central south pa. I live in hanover about 12 miles from there. Next Saturday im taking the battlefield test. An excellent source for the years before and during the civil war is a multi volume work by Allen Nevins.. Ordeal of the Union (1848-1860) and War for the Union (1861-65)
Thanks! Much appreciated.
It’s amazing the way things can blow up into a major armed engagement just because men are ready for a little excitement.
I recall reading a book about the Lincoln County War (the land dispute in New Mexico that featured Billy the Kid), in which the author emphasized how much alcohol all the participants drank on a regular basis.
Local Kansas politics reflected the national Big Picture in 1855.
The Big Picture: In 1855 slavery in the Deep South was growing and prospering like never before, thanks to the insatiable world-wide demand for the King of Crops: cotton.
Slave prices were doubling and slave numbers were growing at least as fast as the overall population.
The biggest problem was: there weren't enough slaves, and importing slaves from Africa was outlawed.
So huge numbers of slaves were being "exported" from Southern Border states (Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri) where, absent cotton, slavery was weaker, even dying out.
So, ironically, the very prosperity which made slavery so strong in the Deep South, made it weaker and unattractive in Southern Border States.
At the same time, floods of anti-slavery European immigrants were landing in Northern states and spreading across the country, including those Southern Border states, where slavery was already weakening.
So anti-slavery Northerners were a growing majority in officially slave Missouri, and would eventually prevent Missouri from joining the Confederacy.
These are the men who are flooding across the border into the Kansas territory, and disrupting politics there.
Nationally, in 1855, the Southern Slave-Power (which is to say, the Democrat Party) had dominated all of Washington from it's beginning, with no serious interruptions, and was nearing the election of another Dough-Faced Northern Democrat President, James Buchanan, in 1856.
Opposition to Democrats then (as, sadly, now) was weak and ineffective.
John Adams' old Federalists had evaporated in a scandal over threats of secession during the War of 1812, and even Adams' own son, John Quincy, had joined Jefferson's party.
The new Whigs did manage to elect two presidents (Harrison & Taylor), but they were both slave-holders, and soon died in office.
So, in 1855, there had never been an anti-slavery political party, or an anti-slavery government in Washington.
Many people today say, "slavery was America's original sin", but no, that misunderstands the basic situation.
From the US beginnings, slavery was a precondition for Union -- without slavery there would be, could be no union.
And the constitutionally protected Slave-Power dominated Washington politics.
So Kansas in 1855 was a northern territory, ruled over by Slave-Power appointees, but being flooded by anti-slavery northerners.
That's the Big Picture, playing out in Homer's news articles of the day.
Ineptitude precipitated
Kinda like today..........................
Yours is the second recommendation for Nevins' volumes. I guess I should check them out. My reading list is growing by the day.
Very nice summary. Yes, it wasn’t the Connecticut Compromise that created the Constitution of 1789 (lower house representation based on populuation, upper house representation based on statehood). Instead, it was the Three-Fifths Compromise that gave southern slave states 3/5 representation for their slave population for the purposes of the electoral college and for Congressional Representation. That clause enabled the racist democrats (who remain racist to this day) to dominate national politics.
But the forces that prompted the southern states to push for the Three-Fifths Compromise, the growing industrialization and population of the North, where overwhelming the effect of the compromise. Looking at your shifting maps, you can see that trend of the national electorate was swinging away from slavery and would never come back. The line drawn by the Missouri Compromise made that apparent. By the time Chief Justice Taney declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional in Dred Scott v. Sanford, it was too.
The money, industry and people were in the north. And with it would come political power. Matching the industrialization of the north was an impossibility in 1855, and the south would not really industrialize until the advent of air conditioning a century later.
Perceptive southerners realized that Secession was the only way they could maintain their political and social system, and the window of opportunity was closing.
Gettysburg is the mecca of civil war sites
Before the slave was the indentured servant. This all speaks to the nature of man.
https://www.teachervision.com/slavery-us/resource/3848.html
Indentured Servants’ Experiences 1600-1700
BEFORE THE JOURNEY: “Many of the spirits [people who recruited indentured servants] haunted the London slums and those of Bristol and other seaports. It was not difficult to find hungry and thirsty victims who, over a dinner and much liquor, would sign anything before them. The spirit would then hustle his prey to his headquarters to be added to a waiting company of others, safely kept where they could not escape until a ship was ready for them. An easier way was to pick up a sleeping drunk from the gutter and put him aboard a vessel for America, where, with no indenture, he could be sold to his own disadvantage and with the American planter’s gain. Children were valuable and could be enticed with candy to come along with a spirit. Sometimes they, and older people too, were seized by force.”
The legal evolution:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/awhhtml/awlaw3/slavery.html
Virginia was one of the first states to acknowledge slavery in its laws, initially enacting such a law in 1661.36 The following year, Virginia passed two laws that pertained solely to women who were slaves or indentured servants and to their illegitimate children. Women servants who produced children by their masters could be punished by having to do two years of servitude with the churchwardens after the expiration of the term with their masters. The law reads, “that each woman servant gott with child by her master shall after her time by indenture or custome is expired be by the churchwardens of the parish where she lived when she was brought to bed of such bastard, sold for two years. . . .â€37
The second law, which concerned the birthright of children born of “Negro†or mulatto women, would have a profound effect on the continuance of slavery, especially after the slave trade was abolished—and on the future descendants of these women. Great Britain had a very structured primogeniture system, under which children always claimed lineage through the father, even those born without the legitimacy of marriage. Virginia was one of the first colonies to legislate a change:
The social/business/political beginnings:
http://www.ushistory.org/us/5b.asp
Virginia and Maryland operated under what was known as the “headright system.” The leaders of each colony knew that labor was essential for economic survival, so they provided incentives for planters to import workers. For each laborer brought across the Atlantic, the master was rewarded with 50 acres of land. This system was used by wealthy plantation aristocrats to increase their land holdings dramatically. In addition, of course, they received the services of the workers for the duration of the indenture.
At least indentured servitude had a time limit, and at the end of it the servant had an open Continent to stake a claim. All he had to do was clear land and farm it.
Sounds to me that the “spirits” did most of these people a favor.
Republican Party born, Jackson, Michigan
We need to know the history and get back to the original ideas. we are all slaves of the govt now. Scripted attacks by rats?
http://www.ushistory.org/gop/origins.htm
we think some simple name like ‘Republican’ would more fitly designate those who had united to restore the Union to its true mission of champion and promulgator of Liberty rather than propagandist of slavery.”
On the floor of the Senate Democratic representatives Preston Brooks and Lawrence Keitt (South Carolina) brutally attacked Charles Sumner with a cane after Sumner gave a passionate anti-slavery speech which Brooks took offense (he was related to the main antagonist of Sumner’s speech, South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler). Both representatives resigned from Congress with severe indignation over their ouster, but were returned to Congress by South Carolina voters in the next year. Sumner was not able to return to the Congressional halls for four years after the attack. Brooks was heard boasting “Next time I will have to kill him,” as he left the Senate floor after the attack.
On the same day as the attack came the news of the armed attack in Lawrence, Kansas. As a direct outgrowth of the “settler sovereignty” of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, an armed band of men from Missouri and Nebraska sacked the town of Lawrence and arrested the leaders of the free state. The anti-abolitionists had made it clear that “settler sovereignty” meant pro-slavery. Labeled only as “ruffians” by Southern politicians, Horace Greeley was quick to decry both events as plots of the pro-slavery South. “Failing to silence the North by threats. . .the South now resorts to actual violence.” The first rumblings of the Civil War had begun. The stage was set for the 1856 election, one which held the future of the Union in its grasp.
Free-stater Charles Dow killed by proslavery supporter Franklin Coleman; “Wakarusa War.â€
Fortunately global cooled slowed down the civil war.........
http://www.civilwaronthewesternborder.org/content/wakarusa-war
Fortunately, Shannon’s negotiations and the bitter temperatures cooled both sides. A peace treaty signed on December 8 provided a temporary halt in what would grow into a 10-year ordeal. Future Kansas senator James Lane and future Kansas governor Charles Robinson signed the agreement for the Free-State supporters, while Atchison and other proslavery leaders acknowledged the agreement for the proslavery element.
With a minimal level of actual violence, the Wakarusa War was not a war by traditional definitions. The necessary ingredients for war were certainly present, but Shannon’s timely negotiations, the weather, and perhaps a rational fear of what might happen if a battle occurred led to a non-violent, albeit temporary, resolution of the conflict between Free-Staters and proslavery supporters.
MY BONDAGE and MY FREEDOM
By Frederick Douglass
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/202/202-h/202-h.htm
Just a few thoughts of my own. I hope others with take the time to read it and give their thoughts also. I would recommend letting one’s lips move while reading for better comprehension.
1) I wonder if this book changed many in their thinking. Anti slavery would read it to support the their position. Slavery proponents would disregard it?
2) Intro: worth reading a few times. It establishes his position. Would be hard not to make it a personal issues but he seems to be a man of principle. His thoughts better than the intro by the editor.
DEAR FRIEND: I have long entertained, as you very well know, a somewhat positive repugnance to writing or speaking anything for the public, which could, with any degree of plausibilty, make me liable to the imputation of seeking personal notoriety, for its own sake. Entertaining that feeling very sincerely, and permitting its control, perhaps, quite unreasonably, I have often[2] refused to narrate my personal experience in public anti-slavery meetings, and in sympathizing circles, when urged to do so by friends, with whose views and wishes, ordinarily, it were a pleasure to comply. In my letters and speeches, I have generally aimed to discuss the question of Slavery in the light of fundamental principles, and upon facts, notorious and open to all; making, I trust, no more of the fact of my own former enslavement, than circumstances seemed absolutely to require. I have never placed my opposition to slavery on a basis so narrow as my own enslavement, but rather upon the indestructible and unchangeable laws of human nature, every one of which is perpetually and flagrantly violated by the slave system. I have also felt that it was best for those having histories worth the writing—or supposed to be so—to commit such work to hands other than their own. To write of one’s self, in such a manner as not to incur the imputation of weakness, vanity, and egotism, is a work within the ability of but few; and I have little reason to believe that I belong to that fortunate few.
These considerations caused me to hesitate, when first you kindly urged me to prepare for publication a full account of my life as a slave, and my life as a freeman.
Nevertheless, I see, with you, many reasons for regarding my autobiography as exceptional in its character, and as being, in some sense, naturally beyond the reach of those reproaches which honorable and sensitive minds dislike to incur. It is not to illustrate any heroic achievements of a man, but to vindicate a just and beneficent principle, in its application to the whole human family, by letting in the light of truth upon a system, esteemed by some as a blessing, and by others as a curse and a crime. I agree with you, that this system is now at the bar of public opinion—not only of this country, but of the whole civilized world—for judgment. Its friends have made for it the usual plea—”not guilty;” the case must, therefore, proceed. Any facts, either from slaves, slaveholders, or by-standers, calculated to enlighten the public mind, by revealing the true nature, character, and tendency of the slave system, are in order, and can scarcely be innocently withheld.
I see, too, that there are special reasons why I should write my own biography, in preference to employing another to do it. Not only is slavery on trial, but unfortunately, the enslaved people are also on trial. It is alleged, that they are, naturally, inferior; that they are so low in the scale of humanity, and so utterly stupid, that they are unconscious of their wrongs, and do not apprehend their rights. Looking, then, at your request, from this stand-point, and wishing everything of which you think me capable to go to the benefit of my afflicted people, I part with my doubts and hesitation, and proceed to furnish you the desired manuscript; hoping that you may be able to make such arrangements for its publication as shall be best adapted to accomplish that good which you so enthusiastically anticipate.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
3) The early chapters have an strong emphasis on loss of family life. In some respects very close to what blacks experience today? But family life has taken a beating in most situations today.
4) “..we should be relieved of the d—d niggers.”
wow have times changed. niggers is forbidden but the spelling of dammed is not a problem.
5) Gods providence is something all should reflect on.
Divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough hew them as we will.
I was not the only boy on the plantation that might have been sent to live in Baltimore. There was a wide margin from which to select. There were boys younger, boys older, and boys of the same age, belonging to my old master some at his own house, and some at his farm—but the high privilege fell to my lot.
I may be deemed superstitious and egotistical, in regarding this event as a special interposition of Divine Providence in my favor; but the thought is a part of my history, and I should be false to the earliest and most cherished sentiments of my soul, if I suppressed, or hesitated to avow that opinion, although it may be characterized as irrational by the wise, and ridiculous by the scoffer. From my earliest recollections of serious matters, I date the entertainment of something like an ineffaceable conviction, that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace; and this conviction, like a word of living faith, strengthened me through the darkest trials of my lot. This good spirit was from God; and to him I offer thanksgiving and praise.
6) The conclusion. I wish there was much more discussion of character on all sides of the issue
Believing that one of the best means of emancipating the slaves of the south is to improve and elevate the character of the free colored people of the north I shall labor in the future, as I have labored in the past, to promote the moral, social, religious, and intellectual elevation of the free colored people; never forgetting my own humble orgin(sic), nor refusing, while Heaven lends me ability, to use my voice, my pen, or my vote, to advocate the great and primary work of the universal and unconditional emancipation of my entire race.
7) A summary of his speeches are at the end of the book and worth reading.
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