Kansas

This is Part 34 of 50 in a randomly updated, sporadic series. They're just flying by now

 

When I started this "Origin of States" thing, there were certain states I really looked forward to tackling. Not so much because I liked these states more than the others, but because the entry of these states into the Union signaled a shift. Kentucky was the beginning of westward expansion. Louisiana took that expansionist idea to a level previously unimagined. Missouri exemplified both the benefit and folly of compromise. Iowa kicked off our Manifest Destiny dream, and California showed just how far that dream would take us.

 

But now, with this state and the state that comes after, we've finally reached the biggest turning point in all United States history. (So far.) We've finally made it to Bloody Kansas.

 

Kansas is one of those states that pundits like to use to imagine what average, generic America looks like. Historically, I think there's some appropriateness to that, though not necessarily for the reasons the pundits think. I think if you ask any American with a capacity for self-reflection to name the two greatest sins the United States ever committed, they'll likely land on two things: Indian removal and slavery. Kansas was born in violence from the bloody debris of both.

 

Dust in the Wind

 

People have been in Kansas as long as they've been in North America, but Kansas has never had the kind of climate to encourage longterm stays for people who haven't invented centrifugal pumps. You start getting into the dry lands of North America when you hit eastern Kansas, and it just gets drier the farther west you go. The Mississippian Mound builders never came this far west, and the Ancestral Puebloans never came this far east. The indigenous people who lived in Kansas were nomadic types who followed the great bison herds around the grasslands. By the time the Europeans started wandering this way, these groups had become the plains people we know, like the Wichita or the Pawnee.

 

Kansas is way out in the middle of the continent, though, so those Europeans came in a trickle. In 1541, Spanish conquistador Francisco Vázquez de Coronado wandered from Mexico way up into the middle of Kansas. He was looking for the mystical Cities of Cíbola, seven cities of gold that indigenous Mexican people promised were just over some hill to the north. But there was never any gold in Kansas, and all he found was an unusually large village of plains people living on the Great Bend of the Arkansas River. He called the place Quivira and promised to return, but he never did, and nobody ever found the place again.

 

But Coronado had a lasting impact on the native people he'd met in Kansas. None of them had ever seen horses before, and riding a horse seemed like a far better method to chase down a buffalo than running on foot. So somewhere in the decades afterward, plains people like the Pawnee and the Osage and the Kansa picked up some misplaced Spanish horses and learned how to ride. The next time some Spaniard came wandering over a hill, the plains people would meet him on horseback.

 

That didn't happen until 1720, when a Spanish military expedition led by Lieutenant-General Pedro de Villasur came up from Mexico looking to capture any Frenchmen who might be intruding on Spanish territorial claims. Villasur didn't find any Frenchmen, but he did tick off a bunch of Pawnee enough that they attacked and killed 47 Spanish soldiers. But they waited until Villasur got to Nebraska for that, so that's more of a Nebraska story.

 

Heartland of America

 

That's pretty much it for the story of European exploration in Kansas. Spain had claimed Kansas in its big 16th century collection of "We Own Everything" treaties, and France claimed it as part of their Louisiana Territory, but neither side ever did anything out here. They passed it back and forth in 1763 and 1801, and in 1803, Napoleon sold it and everything around it to the Americans, sight unseen.

 

And so, the Americans. Those guys weren't as likely to just stand around and let Kansas be Kansas. Now 300 years into the European colonization project, the wave of white people was finally ready to show up.

 

It started in 1804, when the Lewis and Clark Expedition camped for three days at the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers, in present-day Kansas City. I'll be talking about Lewis and Clark a lot a few states down the road.

 

In 1806, Zebulon Pike passed through Kansas on an expedition to find the source of the Arkansas River. Pike found a dry and unforgiving land of yellow grass and dust, and in his notes, he described Kansas and eastern Colorado as "the Great American Desert." This phrase would stick in the American mind and inform political thinking on Kansas for decades.

 

In 1812, the political mapmakers in Washington officially rolled Kansas into the Missouri Territory. When Henry Clay pushed through his 1820 compromise that made Missouri a state, Kansas was broken off into an unorganized space that nobody wanted to do anything with just yet. And that gave somebody an idea.

 

Indian Territory

 

An underlying theme of the history of the United States so far has been the tendency of people from "back East" -- which might mean England or Virginia or Ohio or some other place, depending on the era -- to come into a land and act like they own it, ignoring the fact that there are always people already living there. "Doesn't matter," the new settlers would say. "Most of 'em'll die of the measles, and whoever don't, we'll kill off or sell into slavery or push off the land to someplace else." Usually, that "someplace else" would be someplace farther west, and that would be fine until the children of those settlers would push onto that land and say, "Doesn't matter."

 

In Kansas, that process would start to be formalized, thanks in large part to the efforts of President Andrew Jackson.

 

I've already talked about Jackson a couple of times in this series and in other places. He was a Tennessee man who'd made himself famous as a heroic military general in the War of 1812 by holding off a particularly misguided British army at New Orleans. After that, he'd led the army through a vicious series of wars against various Native people through Alabama and Georgia and Florida. Then he went political and got himself elected President in 1828, and one of the top items on his agenda was cleaning up the rest of that Indian problem he'd been handling in the Southeast. His solution was simple. Everything east of the Mississippi should be given over to white men and women (and, where applicable, their African slaves). All the Indians should be pushed west across the Mississippi. And when Jackson looked at someplace west of the Mississippi, he and all his political buddies saw that vast, still unused land in the old Louisiana Territory that Zebulon Pike had called the Great American Desert. Nobody useful's going to want to live in a desert, Jackson said, so let's put all the Indians there. In 1830, Jackson talked Congress into passing the Indian Removal Acts, making his scheme law.

 

This act officially established the Indian Territory in Kansas and the rest of the Louisiana Purchase -- minus the states of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, and part of future Minnesota, which was at that time in its Michigan Territory phase. Over the next decade or so, an assortment of treaties and forced removals would pluck every Native group from the East and shove it onto the Plains, whether they wanted to go or not. This required a lot of shuffling to fit everybody in -- a bunch of tribes that already lived in Kansas were forced down into Oklahoma so that tribes from, say, Wisconsin could be given the old Kansas tribe's spot. But once all this was done, people said, the Indian Problem would be solved. The Indians would finally have a space of their own, and white settlers would have more than enough room to spread out wherever they wanted.

 

Except that's not how any of this works at all. Even before the forced removals were done, white settlers started slipping over the line from Missouri into the Indian Territory and squatting illegally on Indian land. And of course, the United States wasn't going to do anything about this other than build a bunch of forts to protect the squatters from Indian attacks. And in 1854, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which carved two official territories from what was supposed to be Indian space. And everybody in Washington said, "Doesn't matter. We'll just push'em all south. Problem solved."

 

But solving that problem created another. And here we are, talking about that slavery thing again.

 

Bloody Kansas

 

You'll recall that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was a deal Kentucky Representative Henry Clay came up with to avoid civil war by keeping the balance of power between the slave states and the free states equal. Slave-holding Missouri would join the union at the same time as freedom-loving Maine, and everything would be as perfectly balanced as a see-saw. At the same time, the feds would draw a line west of Missouri through the unorganized lands at 36.5° N latitude. Any new states south of that line would allow slavery while new states north of the line would be free.

 

And that all worked fine for a while, as new states happened to come into the Union in balanced pairs of slave and free. But then the Mexican War added a bunch of new territory and changed all that, and California joined the Union in 1850 as a free state. Free Minnesota and free Oregon followed, and all of the sudden the slavers were at a three-state disadvantage. And now here we are with Kansas and Nebraska both north of 36.5° N latitude and, according to Clay's compromise, destined to be free. The slavers were starting to get really itchy. Something had to be done.

 

The first thing to do was stop the Kansas-Nebraska Act. And they were successful at keeping it from passing on its first attempt. They managed to add a catch to the second go-round. In this version of the act, passed in 1854, the Missouri Compromise would be repealed. 36.5° N latitude no longer mattered. All new states could decide for themselves whether they wanted slavery.

 

The second thing to do was to make damn sure Kansas decided it wanted slavery. And the way to do that was to move as many slavers into the Kansas Territory as they could. Slaver squatters poured over the border from Missouri and streamed up from Arkansas and Mississippi and Alabama. Abolitionists responded by sending squatters of their own from New England and Illinois and Wisconsin. Kansas turned into a sort of arms race of settlement, where the weapons were homestead cabins.

 

In 1855, the weapons became weapons.

 

It started in March with the election of the first territorial legislature. A bunch of Missouri people -- collectively, Missourians became known as the Border Ruffians -- sauntered over the border and voted in Kansas voting booths, stuffing the ballot boxes with pro-slavery votes that elected an overwhelmingly pro-slavery legislature. Abolitionist Kansans weren't going to have that, and bands of them gathered together into little militias called Jayhawkers that went after the Border Ruffians.

 

History refers to the next three years as the "Border Wars" or "Bleeding Kansas" or "Bloody Kansas." The territory fell into an escalating cycle of violent raids pitting Jayhawkers against Ruffians that sometimes turned into actual pitched battles. History records dozens of incidents: the Wakarusa War, the Sacking of Lawrence, the Battle of Osawatomie. Sometimes the Ruffians were the aggressors. Sometimes it was the Jayhawkers. Maybe given a chance, President James Buchanan might have said there were good people on both sides -- really, he was the type -- but it would have been damned hard to find any.

 

The most famous of these Bloody Kansas incidents is the Pottawatomie massacre. On May 22, 1856, an abolitionist wild man named John Brown was heading toward the Free State stronghold town of Lawrence with a large group of Jayhawkers when they heard a pro-slavery gang had attacked and looted the town and burned down the Free State Hotel. This enraged Brown, so he and four other guys struck off by themselves to nearby Pottawatomie Creek and raided five cabins in the middle of the night. Brown knew pro-slavery settlers lived in these cabins, and he and his buddies forced them all from their beds, lined them up in the dark, and hacked five of them to death with broadswords. Brown left the territory soon after this and was never brought to justice for what he'd done there. But that's only because he was brought to justice for something else he'd do in a few months. That's a story for next time.

 

Carry on My Wayward Son

 

In the middle of the violence of Bloody Kansas, various collections of Kansans kept trying to call themselves a legislature and work out a state constitution, but nobody was on the same page with any of this, so different factions wrote different constitutions.

 

There were four.

 

The Topeka Constitution was a Free State document that the Kansas legislature sent to the U.S. Congress in December of 1855, but pro-slavery senators blocked it.

 

The Lecompton Constitution was a document written by a pro-slavery legislative convention in November of 1857. This constitution dictated that the people of Kansas would vote on whether to accept slavery -- probably, it was assumed, with Missouri help -- but every time they tried, one side or the other boycotted the vote. The U.S. Congress rejected the document because they couldn't establish its legitimacy.

 

The Leavenworth Constitution was written by a Free State convention in April of 1858. It also was put to a vote with results similar to the Lecompton Constitution, and the two constitutions wound up tangled with each other in Congress.

 

The Wyandotte Constitution was the one that finally took. It was adopted by the Kansas legislature in July of 1859, and the people of Kansas voted to accept it that October. That constitution banned slavery, but people were so tired of constitutions by this point that it did almost nothing else. But nobody cared. They had their constitution, and they sent it to the U.S. Congress for approval. It got bogged down in Washington for a year, but it finally passed on January 29, 1861, and Kansas became the 34th state of the Union. The abolitionists won.

 

So the final tally, then is 19 free states and 15 slave states. And that's the last of these tallies we'll see, because this was the moment the dam broke. Maybe it was Kansas, or maybe it was that abolitionist from Illinois who'd just squeaked by to win the Presidential Election of 1860. Either way, shots had already been fired and blood had already been spilled on Kansas ground. And while those shots aren't considered the first shots of the Civil War, they made it just that much easier for the guys in that fort in South Carolina to fire a few shots of their own a few months later. The next time I revisit this series, I'll be writing about the middle of a war.

Done