‘The Defenders, Protectors and Builders of Our State’: The Colonial Legacy of Union Civil War Commemorations in Kansas, 1870s–1910s

Abstract

This article examines how white Kansan Union veterans and their families commemorated the American Civil War throughout the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Kansans’ post-war narratives, including a monument erected to Gen. James B. McPherson in 1917, constructed a legacy of the war that asserted the Union war effort preserved the trans-Mississippi West for free-labour and celebrated veteran-pioneers for fulfilling the promise of a free-labour American empire by migrating to Kansas post-war. Distinct from their eastern counterparts, Kansan Union veterans and their families wielded collective memories of the Civil War as a tool of colonisation in the American West.