Bleeding Borders: Race, Gender, and Violence in Pre-Civil War Kansas

Introduction

1 Introduction On the morning of January 12, 1830, several Shawnee Indians and local white traders gathered to attend a birth at the Shawnee Methodist Mission , located just west of a Missouri River trading post called Kawsmouth (later named Kansas City). That afternoon a baby girl named Susannah Adams Yoacham was born to her white parents, who traded goods with the very Indians who helped bring their daughter into the world. Yoacham’s birth, the first recorded Anglo birth in the Kansas Territory, signaled the permanent presence of white settlers in the region west of the Missouri border. Susanna Yoacham’s marriage a mere sixteen years later marked another significant turn in Kansas territorial history; her uncle, a Missouri slaveholder, presented Susanna with a slave woman named Eliza as a wedding gift. Yoacham and her husband, William Dillon, accepted the gift, as was the custom for southern newlyweds of their privileged class. Thus the first white child in Kansas Territory, born at an Indian mission, would become one of the region’s few slaveholders. Red, white, and black merged in the Yoacham family, as they and other settlers ushered slavery into the land soon to be known as Bleeding Kansas.1 Susanna Yoacham married Dillon and received her slave Eliza in 1846, eight years before the Kansas-Nebraska Act gave Yoacham the legal right to own slaves in the Kansas Territory. Passed by Congress in May 1854, the act essentially repealed the Missouri Compromise, which for more than three decades had prohibited slaves from being carried north of latitude 36° 30´. The act ignited a fireball of controversy across the country as FreeSoil advocates and proslavery defendants argued over the fate of slavery north and west of Missouri’s southern border. Historian Michael Fellman has referred to Kansas in the 1850s as “both the central symbol and actual battleground of the fundamental American conflict between North and 2 bleeding borders South.”2 Bleeding Kansas, the conflict that ensued between proslavery and antislavery settlers, would involve people such as Susanna Yoacham, her slave Eliza, and the Indians who attended Susanna’s birth. Yet the historiography on Bleeding Kansas has often ignored people like the Yoachams and the related social and cultural history of this important sectional conflict. Instead, scholars have focused more narrowly on the white, male politicians and settlers who battled for control of the Kansas territorial legislature. Thanks to major works by historians William Freehling, Nicole Etcheson, and Michael Morrison, we are well aware of the congressional debates over the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the subsequent political and military conflicts generated by the ineffective application of popular sovereignty in Kansas.3 These studies leave little doubt that politicians affected the events in Kansas in myriad and profound ways, but one wonders if other actors played significant roles in the drama of Bleeding Kansas. Did Indians like the Shawnee, whose mission was used as the first headquarters for the territorial legislature, shape the conflict in any way? How did slaves who involuntarily emigrated to Kansas from Missouri and other southern states react to the debates over slavery that swirled around them? And finally, did the white women who moved to the region involve themselves in the heated sectional politics and guerrilla warfare that embroiled so many of their husbands, fathers, and brothers? Bleeding Borders argues that Indians, African Americans, and white women played crucial roles in the literal and rhetorical pre–Civil War battle between proslavery and antislavery settlers.4 For example, some local Indians fed and housed antislavery settlers, whereas others supported their slave-owning neighbors and helped capture fugitive slaves who fled across Missouri’s border into Kansas. Slaveholders may have found some allies among the Indian residents, but southerners struggled to establish their peculiar institution across the border, as many African Americans refused to remain enslaved after migrating to Kansas and absconded from their masters. To further complicate the transplantation of slavery in Kansas , a small network of abolitionists harbored these runaways and encouraged their rebellion by circulating abolitionist literature, and white women comprised a central component of this network. In addition, antislavery women’s military and political assaults against proslavery men helped foster an environment that made it difficult for many southerners to support slavery in the territory. Ultimately, I find that Indians, blacks, and women shaped the political and cultural terrain in ways that discouraged the ex- 3 introduction tension of slavery but...