Integrating American Violence

The Reign of Terror in America and Bleeding Borders suggest how studies of American social violence have moved from counting and analyzing incidents of murder, mayhem, and mobbing as aberrant forms of human action to seeing turbulence as an ordinary tactic of personal and social jockeying. Neither book deals deeply with incidents of social violence. Borders brings to the 1850s Kansas conflict a focus on several current scholarly concerns: Native Americans, gender roles, Southern honor, and “whiteness” studies. Reign explores how Federalists’ reactions to French Jacobin violence after 1792 developed into political, peace, and antislavery positions. Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel and Rachel Hope Cleves also share personal experiences that influenced their accounts, quick and acceptable confessionals that suggest some of their books’ strengths and limitations.

Oertel’s epilogue talks of her pilgrimage from Kansas-born naiveté to deeper South wisdom. She “grew up hating the state of Missouri,” Oertel writes, and was taught that Northerners “were wholly different from those prejudiced backward southerners.” Through her studies and project, she found Kansas racism “a rude awakening,” though it was “liberating and enlightening” to learn that “the seeds of racism planted themselves throughout the country” (p.143). Oertel’s truths about the faults of Kansas and the country are self-evident, but her conviction of equal guilt blurs a bit the Kansas conflict she discusses.

Oertel integrates her reasonably rich materials with much of today’s conventional academic wisdom. To remind people that Native Americans and women lived in “bleeding Kansas” is worthwhile, but little deepens the contours of the conflict. To add Indians to the hungry maw of “whiteness” scholarship, where ethnics and poor whites have already been digested, is reasonable; at least they were commonly considered a racial group. Yet the general attitudes toward the two groups, Oertel suggests, were antithetical. For most white Kansans, equality or amalgamation with blacks was the epitome of social horror; for most concerned about Indians, sexual-social integration was the praised solution. Oertel points out the tidy irony that, by the time war-freed blacks came to Kansas in some numbers, the better regarded Indians were being pushed out.

Women were more involved with the conflict, overwhelmingly in support of the same positions as their menfolk. Oertel claims proslavery women were contented with “the comfort of traditional patriarchal relations” (p.74). Her evidence comes from proslavery men; one Southern woman enters, to complain of having to work and comb her own hair when slavery ended. Oertel pays more useful attention to abolitionist women, a half a dozen of them wives who wrote and spoke to Northern audiences about proslavery and Democratic dishonesty and brutalism. She also chronicles uniform- and munitions-making and acts of family protection by Free State women. Oertel repeats some tales of “secret” female military units and heavy traffic on the underground railroad that one suspects were fables designed to sell books or remembrances much enhanced over time. We learn of one Mrs. Mandell, prepared to defend Lawrence with a pitchfork, standing with John Brown (who wasn’t there), and an armed Charles Robinson (who devised the nonresistance policy).

By accepting extreme versions of docile “true womanhood” and “Victorian notions of feminine delicacy,” Oertel argues that abolitionist women “bled” or changed their gender roles in Kansas (pp. 58–60). Certainly this conflict-ridden frontier gave women new duties—and a few new opportunities. Yet there’s no evidence of a shift in gender roles; the activists already had been strongly in support of their moral/social causes before they came.

Oertel’s discussion of masculinity centers on an alleged victory for the South in “the rhetorical battle over the meaning of manliness.” Southern manhood, she claims, glorified “aggression and violence,” while Northerners championed “self-restraint and moral rectitude”—until...