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

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.