Our “get the story right” thread spurred by Washington Post journalist E. J. Dionne’s warning not to “spin the civil war” takes us to Kansas in this post. Most students of the war know that the “popular sovereignty” doctrine that anchored the 1854 Kansas–Nebraska Act opened both territories to settlement with the understanding that instead of Congress, the settlers themselves would decide whether their respective territories would come into the Union as slave-free or not.
Unfortunately trouble lay around the corner. Popular history readily identifies Missouri “border ruffians” as the villains who crossed over to stuff the ballot boxes on 29 November 1854, throwing the territorial election in favor of a proslavery governor and legislature. Kansas free-staters, in defiance of this “Bogus Legislature” as they termed it, convened their own “people’s assembly” in Topeka on 23 October 1855. Electing abolitionist and former Indiana Democratic congressman James Henry Lane as President, the mixed convention of thirteen delegates from southern states, eight from the old Northwest, four from New England, ten from Pennsylvania and New York, and two from foreign countries, ratified their own free-state constitution on 15 December 1855. “There shall be no slavery in this State,” they decried.
President and New Hampshire native Franklin Pierce promptly condemned this Topeka Convention as an act of rebellion. The following summer, despite the United States House of Representatives voting to admit Kansas as a state on 3 July 1856, the United States Senate blocked it, fueling what would become “Bloody Kansas,” precursor to civil war.
Today, popular history paints the free-staters as the good guys. After all, the Topeka Constitution banned slavery and invalidated all indentures of blacks from other states. But as the late Paul Harvey would caution, we need to hear “the rest of the story.”
It seemed the Topeka Constitution also declared that no free blacks could serve in the Kansas state militia. In fact, many free-staters, led by this fervent and often violent Jim Lane Kansans would elect as their first Senator in 1861, insisted that Kansas should not only be free of all slaves … but free of all blacks.
To hammer home this “Negro Exclusion” clause, Topeka Convention delegates had decided this matter best be submitted to a popular vote. Thus on 15 December 1855 as stated above, free-state voters ratified their Topeka Constitution, but rarely reported or commented on today, the record also shows that by a three-to-one margin these same white male, free-state voters bequeathed an ironic double entendre to their free-state intentions: the new state of Kansas was not only to be slave-free, but black free.
It would ultimately take three more “state conventions” before Congress admitted Kansas into the Union in 1861, a wartime vote now facilitated by the absence of all Senators from the South. Senator James H. Lane would survive the war, but just barely. Frustrated, depressed, and some say deranged, he shot himself in July of 1866.
Years later, from another tragic perspective, a widow spoke of her late husband’s yearning to “get to a free state where there would be no slave labor to hinder white men from making a fair day’s wage.” Her husband always said, she recalled, “that slavery was ruinous to white labor.” Yet what her husband, native Tennessean James P. Doyle, never anticipated was that he would be murdered along Pottawatomie Creek by emancipationist zealots and insurrectionists led by one John Brown six months after the ratification of the free-staters’ Topeka Constitution.[1]
Obviously simplistic explanations will not suffice when we discuss what brought on this terrible war. Yet for those who remain unconvinced, next time we will close this thread on the civil war’s ironic causes with the words of the man most Americans recognize as the ultimate source.
Sources consulted:
Fehrenbacher, Don E. Sectional Crisis and Southern Constitutionalism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995.
Rawley, James A. Race and Politics: "Bleeding Kansas" and the Coming of the Civil War.Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1969.
[1] Edward J. Renehan, Jr., The Secret Six, (New York: Crown Publishers, 1995), 82-3, 95.
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