Reading Kansas: Media Bias and the Territorial Struggle over Slavery

This new study of antebellum political rhetoric argues that Kansas was the site of an imagined civil war—and that in the act of imagining “bleeding Kansas” Americans unleashed passions and stoked grievances that hastened the onset of the real Civil War. Miner, the leading authority on Kansas history, seeks not only to plumb the depths of Americans’ obsession with the fate of that contested territory, but also to elucidate the myriad discursive forms the obsession took.

Seeding Civil War is based on Miner’s careful reading of hundreds of thousands of newspaper articles (including the vast cache of clippings in the Thomas W. Webb Collection of the Kansas State Historical Society), along with periodicals, pamphlets, and Congressional debates from across the country. Miner acknowledges that Kansas in the 1850s has been a subject of perennial interest for historians and that recent work—most notably Gunja SenGupta’s For God and Mammon: Evangelicals and Entrepreneurs, Masters and Slaves in Territorial Kansas, 1854–1860 (1996) and Nichole Etcheson’s Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (2004)—has lent a new sophistication and level of detail to the historiography. Miner’s contribution is to take an implicit or secondary theme of the existing literature—the role of the press in the Kansas controversy—and to make it central.

The book unfolds thematically, with the opening chapters providing some fascinating context on antebellum journalism and on initial press reactions to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and with subsequent chapters taking up topics such as emigration, slavery, religion, and political leadership. The chapters are knit together by the author’s emphasis on the press’s pervasive—and corrosive—practice of stereotyping, by which individuals, groups, and events were willfully misrepresented in order to create galvanizing dichotomies of good and evil. Such misrepresentation at times brought short-term political gain but, in the long-term, contributed to the dramatic deterioration of sectional relations.

Miner’s first chapter establishes that innovations in technology and in the art of reporting together generated the “verbal mania” over Kansas (p. 35). The new Hoe patent printing press, with its system of revolving cylinders, could crank out pages at an unprecedented rate, and this meant the leading journals of the day boasted extensive circulations of 50,000 copies daily; as the most popular newspapers, such as the New York Tribune, were invariably those in centers of population density, “large cities were becoming ever more pivotal in national affairs” (p. 42). Indeed Miner’s book, he notes early on, better reflects the perspectives of New York and other Eastern cities than it does public opinion in Kansas itself. The telegraph held its own promise, but wire services at this stage could only generate and circulate brief news flashes. For more detailed assessments, newspapers relied on field correspondents who could send letters from the scene to editors back home. Sometimes these correspondents were “embedded” professional journalists, as we might say today, but often they were private citizens whom the newspapers hired to provide firsthand accounts of key events.

Coverage of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act dramatized the potential of this system for molding public opinion, as supporters and critics of the bill quickly ginned up propaganda campaigns. Democratic champions of the bill argued that Senator Stephen Douglas’s plan to have “popular sovereignty” decide the fate of Kansas and Nebraska was the ideal way to preserve the sectional equilibrium: Kansas could enter the Union as a slave state and Nebraska as a free one. But visions of equilibrium were soon dispelled by images of aggression and victimization. Northern opponents of the bill quailed at the image of “border ruffians” from Missouri, whom the press portrayed as bloodthirsty agents of the demonic “Slave Power,” intent on imposing slavery on Kansas prairies. With equal fervor, Southern supporters of the bill quailed at the image of domineering abolitionists, psychopathic in their moral righteousness, intent on robbing whites...