"Driven Out on the Old Charge of Being a Rebel": White-on-White Sectional Violence and the "Long" Bleeding Kansas

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• "Driven Out on the Old Charge of Being a Rebel"White-on-White Sectional Violence and the "Long" Bleeding Kansas
• Brent M. S. Campney (bio)

"Desperado Hung," blared the Emporia News on February 8, 1867, after white townspeople in nearby Council Grove hanged Jack McDowell, a fellow white man whom they accused of having been a bushwhacker during the American Civil War. To justify their actions, they claimed McDowell had been part of the guerrilla band that, under the leadership of William Clarke Quantrill, had burned Lawrence, Kansas, in 1863 and killed a minimum of 150 men and boys. They based their justification on thin evidence, including the following: "When being brought down from Omaha [he] begged not to be brought through Lawrence, as he would be recognized there and hung. This circumstance seems to establish the general suspicion that he was a member of the Quantrell gang." Although the News professed to regret mob violence, it accepted the result: "From the best evidence that could be procured this McDowell was a thief of long standing, and one of the old Missouri bushwhackers, and if hanging by the people could ever be excused[,] it could in this case."¹

The lynching of an accused pro-Confederate bushwhacker by a unionist mob in Kansas early in Reconstruction reveals a violent dynamic rarely investigated—violence perpetrated by white Northerners against white Southerners in Bleeding Kansas during the 1850s and 1860s. In the historiography of [End Page 27] the Kansas Territory, historians tend to examine the intimidation by proslavery Missourians against the antislavery settlers from the Northeast and Midwest and the responses of the latter. In the historiography on Civil War violence on the Kansas-Missouri border, they tend to emphasize Missouri, where endemic guerrilla violence and neighbor-on-neighbor partisan strife raged. In the historiography on Kansas, they investigate attacks within the state by pro-Confederate guerrillas invading from Missouri. Responding to these biases, and focusing on the Civil War years and early Reconstruction, this study shifts the focus away from the intimidation of the proslavery forces and onto that perpetrated by free staters, away from Missouri and onto Kansas itself, and within Kansas onto the internecine struggle among white Kansans themselves.²

Although this essay incorporates the better-known story of the violence perpetrated by white Southerners against white Northerners, it focuses on the under-investigated story of mob violence by white Northerners against their white Southern counterparts or against those suspected of working in cahoots with them. Covering a seven-year period at the backend of what it calls the "long" Bleeding Kansas, the study examines an eventful time between 1861 and 1867 when white Northerners jockeyed for power with white Southerners amid rapidly and profoundly shifting state and national debates—and ultimately war. It also examines how white Northerners first of necessity made an uneasy alliance with the free and fugitive Blacks from Missouri primarily, and then, once they had prevailed over their white adversaries, turned against their erstwhile Black allies with a campaign of white supremacist violence.

When Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, it reversed the 1820 Missouri Compromise, which had arrested the expansion of slavery in the territories north of 36º 30^′ and left the status of slavery in Kansas to those white citizens who settled the state. In so doing, it aggravated the sectional and ideological tensions over the westward extension of slavery during the 1850s and precipitated the fevered migration of partisans on both sides. Proslavery settlers, many of them from the adjacent slave state of Missouri, others from [End Page 28] Kentucky and Tennessee, and some from the Deep South, moved into the state to establish their right to move the Peculiar Institution westward. Some of the Missourians simply crossed the border to intimidate free state settlers, perpetrate voter fraud, and cast ballots for the proslavery ticket. In so doing, they ensured that the first territorial government of Kansas would establish a slave code aimed at punishing harshly anyone convicted of undermining the system of enslavement.

Simultaneously, Northern white settlers migrated westward. In 1854, ardent abolitionists and capitalists alike from New England and New York moved west to make Kansas a...