Civil War History

Civil War History 48.1 (2002) 60-81

"The Crime against Missouri":
Slavery, Kansas, and the Cant of Southernness in the Border West

Christopher Phillips

Scholars have long recognized the Kansas conflict as a rehearsal for the Civil War. As both a source of national debate over slavery's extension and the scene of violence that laid bare the fiction of popular sovereignty, the story of "Bleeding Kansas," has provided historians with essential material for broad studies of America's antebellum political implosion. Contemporaries, too, recognized Kansas as a national political watershed; indeed, when Lincoln and Douglas squared off in their famed senatorial duel on the Illinois prairie during the hot summer of 1858 , the Kansas issue formed the core topic of their "Great Debates." ¹ Despite this attention, a gap exists in the scholarly coverage of the Kansas struggle. In focusing solely upon either the violence in Kansas or the territorial conflict in the national political arena, historians have offered an unbalanced--and thus incomplete--portrayal. Furthermore, by concentrating on antislavery Kansans, they have largely ignored the perceptions of Missourians, who formed the largest portion of the Kansas population until well into 1855 , other than their near blanket denigration as "border ruffians" or "pukes," undemocratic savages who ravaged a virgin Kansas to perpetuate slavery in the West. Though recent studies have begun to correct the oversight, scholars continue to employ Daniel Crofts's Reluctant Confederates as the modern standard on the secession crisis in the Border South, though the book omits from its interpretive scope the slave states that did not secede from the Union. ² [End Page 60]

By casting Missourians as uniformly proslavery and thus by default as Southern, historians have oversimplified not only Missourians' motives and actions but also, more important, the social and ideological evolution of the very border region they occupied. Historians have interpreted Southernness through a number of lenses, including: a lingering frontier experience and the violent culture associated with it; a humid climate capable of sustaining cash crops (and thus the prevalence of slavery); a predominantly rural, agrarian population (without cities and industry); white cultural homogeneity derived largely from the absence of European immigration in the nineteenth century and the presence of a large African American population (which produced a form of herrenvolk democracy and an attendant virulent racism); a militant opposition to reform that included education; and a potent evangelical tradition that instilled a strong conservatism and resistance to change. ³ Like much of the region that would come to be known as the Border South, Missouri's experience through the mid-nineteenth century embodies a number of these theories but directly contradicts others. If anything, the story of the Border (with Missouri being especially instructive) offers a window into the complex process by which the South and West became separate entities despite their shared cultural past.

While the process itself was fluid, with distinctions between Southern and Western blurring during the antebellum struggle over slavery's expansion, for residents of the Border region (described aptly in 1861 by one Northern observer as "North of South"), Southernness was itself only the end product of a complicated process driven less by culture than by the politics surrounding the institution of slavery. Ironically, the competing definitions of democracy in the West--and slavery's place within them--that rent the nation and sent tremors across the West's political landscape precipitated in large sections of Missouri a transformation of its residents' collective identity from one predominantly Western to self-consciously Southern. For Missourians especially, the Kansas conflict was a cardinal component of the process through which this identity shifted. Through Kansas, itself a capstone of [End Page 61] the national struggle over slavery's extension into the West, Missourians tied sympathetic strands (including conceptions of slavery, the federal government, and the West itself) that had bound them loosely to the South into a new political identity. Though Northerners first characterized slaveholding Missourians as Southerners (an appellation they initially resisted), the Kansas experience caused many white Missourians to...