Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era
Sign in to keep track of books you’ve read and want to read.
Few people would have expected bloodshed in Kansas Territory. After all, it had few slaves and showed few signs that slavery would even flourish. But civil war tore this territory apart in the 1850s and 60s, and "Bleeding Kansas" became a forbidding symbol for the nationwide clash over slavery that followed.
Read more
Many free-state Kansans seemed to care little about slaves, and many proslavery Kansans owned not a single slave. But the failed promise of the Kansas-Nebraska Act-when fraud in local elections subverted the settlers' right to choose whether Kansas would be a slave or free state-fanned the flames of war. While other writers have cited slavery or economics as the cause of unrest, Nicole Etcheson seeks to revise our understanding of this era by focusing on whites' concerns over their political liberties. The first comprehensive account of "Bleeding Kansas" in more than thirty years, her study re-examines the debate over slavery expansion to emphasize issues of popular sovereignty rather than slavery's moral or economic dimensions.
The free-state movement was a coalition of settlers who favored black rights and others who wanted the territory only for whites, but all were united by the conviction that their political rights were violated by nonresident voting and by Democratic presidents' heavy-handed administration of the territories. Etcheson argues that participants on both sides of the Kansas conflict believed they fought to preserve the liberties secured by the American Revolution and that violence erupted because each side feared the loss of meaningful self-governance.
Bleeding Kansasis a gripping account of events and people-rabble-rousing Jim Lane, zealot John Brown, Sheriff Sam Jones, and others-that examines the social milieu of the settlers along with the political ideas they developed. Covering the period from the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act to the 1879 Exoduster Migration, it traces the complex interactions among groups inside and outside the territory, creating a comprehensive political, social, and intellectual history of this tumultuous period in the state's history.
As Etcheson demonstrates, the struggle over the political liberties of whites may have heightened the turmoil but led eventually to a broadening of the definition of freedom to include blacks. Her insightful re-examination sheds new light on this era and is essential reading for anyone interested in the ideological origins of the Civil War.
Liked Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era? Here’s where I’d start.
These suit anyone who liked Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.
-
1858: Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant and the War They Failed to See Shares civil war, American history, history -
Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877 Shares civil war, American history, history -
Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment Shares civil war, history, American history -
Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln's Opponents in the North Shares civil war, American history, history
“If you want more of the same (history about american history), start with these.”
- Madness Rules the Hour: Charleston, 1860, and the Mania for War
-
The Devil's Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America
-
The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War, 1848-1861
-
A Year in the South: 1865: The True Story of Four Ordinary People Who Lived Through the Most Tumultuous Twelve Months in American History
