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  • Bleeding Borders: Race, Gender, and Violence in Pre–Civil War Kansas
  • Brian Craig Miller
Bleeding Borders: Race, Gender, and Violence in Pre–Civil War Kansas. By Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009. Pp. 198. Cloth, $32.50.)

The events known as "Bleeding Kansas" have fascinated historians for generations. The blood spilled in the name of slavery has served as an illusionary precursor to the horrific years ahead. In recent years, historians such as [End Page 427] Michael Morrison, Gunja SenGupta, Nicole Etcheson, and David Reynolds have thoroughly explored many of the political, cultural, and military developments in the border region between Kansas and Missouri. Yet, many of these recent studies have not addressed the dynamics of race (especially Native Americans and miscegenation) and gender and how those elements transformed the border region into a hotbed of identity formation.

In her insightful new study grounded in primary research, Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel reexamines Kansas prior to the Civil War and focuses on the experiences of women, African Americans, and Native Americans. She argues that white settlers in Kansas worried about the loss of their own racial superiority, which she sees as "the justification for their superiority and power" (5). However, the settlers engaged in maintaining white hegemony had their hands full, as Indians, blacks, and white abolitionists battled to keep slavery contained and actively questioned the appropriateness of a homogenous state rooted in white dominance.

Oertel notes that historians have long ignored the contributions of Indians and explores the middle ground in Kansas that emerged between Indians and missionaries. Missions, designed to civilize the Indians by providing them with Christianity and training in domestic and agricultural pursuits, were only the first step. Some believed that Indian women needed to marry and reproduce with white men to fully transition to a civilized state. The Indians found themselves divided like many of their white counterparts, as some captured fugitive slaves on behalf of slaveholders, while others housed and fed the antislavery settlers across the frontier.

Oertel next turns to gender and argues that women who advocated for Kansas to be a free state underwent the biggest shift in gender ideology. Free women bucked the traditional spheres of womanhood, as women fought with their husbands and brothers on the battlefields, gave speeches, wrote editorials, and violently defended the abolitionist cause. Women also worked as conductors on the Underground Railroad through Kansas and provided aid to the families who faced disease and poverty. Proslavery forces tried to counter the political activism of women by painting them as weak and submissive, but the rhetoric failed to diminish the vital contributions of women in maintaining Kansas as a free state.

The nontraditional definitions of women in Kansas prompted men to question their own manhood, especially if they had defined their masculine identity through control of women. Oertel argues that northern and southern conceptions of manhood clashed in Kansas, as nonviolent northern men [End Page 428] reluctantly and sometimes ineffectively took up arms to protect their families and their antislavery ideology against naturally violent proslavery men. Southern men mocked northerners, even as they faced criticism for slavery, violence, and a lack of chivalry amongst the populations in Kansas. The charged rhetoric fired across the geographic divide eventually sent northern and southern men to prove their masculine worth on the battlefield.

The author concludes her study with an exploration of miscegenation and its perceived threat to white racial hegemony. Oertel again notes that historians usually ignore Native Americans when studying miscegenation. White men who married native women strengthened the patriarchy because Indian women provided men with domestic service and could help their white husbands acquire land. In many ways, miscegenation was an organic derivative of western expansion. Oertel finds more anxiety about white-black relationships, and she notes that many of the arguments in Kansas about slavery rested on the premise of miscegenation. Northerners argued that the existence of slavery promoted miscegenation, and southerners countered that slavery naturally separated the races.

Despite the uniqueness of Kansas during the 1850s, the author concludes that the state actually mirrors the rest of the nation. While women and black men used their experiences in Kansas to gain...

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