Lynching Beyond Dixie: American Mob Violence Outside the South

3. “Light Is Bursting upon the World!”: White Supremacy and Racist Violence against Blacks in Reconstruction Kansas

• 3• “Light Is Bursting upon the World!” White Supremacy and Racist Violence against Blacks in Reconstruction Kansas Brent M. S. Campney “The everlasting ‘nigger’ has stepped in to mar the pleasure of the weekly drills of the militia,” reported the Smoky Hill and Republican Union in a sarcastic report of events in Clay County, Kansas, in the fall of 1863. An advocate for black rights, the Union took umbrage with the anger expressed by whites when blacks joined the county militia. It also condemned the refusal of some militiamen to participate in integrated exercises. “What a dirty, low, mean, contemptible, miserable, disgusting prejudice this is!” Most disgusting, it concluded, was that these same whites would impose the harshest penalty on any black man who should refuse to assist them in defending their communities in the event of an assault by Missouri guerillas. “These poor negroes would be hung to the first tree should they refuse to aid in punishing bushwhackers.” Despite the attitudes expressed by whites in Clay County, the Union foresaw a better day when the Civil War would be over and prejudice against blacks consigned to the past. “Thank God light is bursting upon the world!”1 In the aftermath of the war, however, white Kansans made a mockery of the Union’s optimism, unleashing a campaign of violence aimed at enforcing their supremacy over blacks in the young state. “A negro charged with violating . . . a white girl, near Shawneetown, was burned at the stake,” reported the Miami County Republican during the bloody spring of 1867. “Two other negroes charged with . . . murdering a white man were hung • 82 • Brent M. S. Campney and their bodies brutally mutilated by a mob at Wyandotte.” That same spring, mobs hanged three blacks in Fort Scott and shot three soldiers in Dickinson County. Editorializing on the latter incident, the Union reported that the victims had been accused of rape but speculated that “one-half if not more of the incentive which prompted their killing, was the fact that they were black.” Clearly, the “light” of tolerance, which it had foreseen only four years before, had yet to burst upon the world.2 The dichotomy between the Union’s wartime optimism and its assessment of reality thereafter finds its parallel in the historiography of Kansas. Many historians embrace a sanguine narrative of progress, claiming that white-black race relations between the Civil War and the Kansas Exodus— the migration of freed southern blacks to Kansas in 1879–1880—were defined by harmony and cooperation. “In Kansas . . . radical ideals found greater favor,” Eugene H. Berwanger asserted. “A newly liberal attitude emerged and, in showing more sympathy toward blacks than it had before the war, the West followed a trend that was evident in states north of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi rivers.” Nicole Etcheson argued that white Kansans entered Reconstruction with a “widened . . . conception of liberty” and that they “increasingly asserted the right of blacks to their liberty.” Similarly, James N. Leiker posited that “the relationship between blacks and whites in eastern Kansas appears to have been relatively friendly until 1879.”3 Certainly there is some evidence to corroborate this interpretation. Many white Kansans did call for the empowerment of the emancipated slaves in the former Confederacy, reflecting motives as diverse as humanitarian concern for the freed people, the desired punishment of white southerners, and the partisan desire for loyal Republican voters in the South. A small but vocal group championed a similar program of Reconstruction within the Free State. The Emporia News epitomized this in 1864, acknowledging, “We have always possessed more or less of that prejudice so common against the blacks, and do yet; still, we are in favor of doing everything in our power to elevate them.” At a minimum, it discouraged whites from placing any roadblocks in the path of the freed people. “If the negro can get on an equal with the white man, let him do it,” the News continued. “We don’t want any special legislation to keep us above the negro. Give him his rights, and then if we, as a race, can’t swim we deserve to sink.”4 Those advocating these policies for Kansas included an influential cohort of so-called Radical Republicans who championed black equal- • 83 • “Light Is Bursting upon the World!” ity. Among them was Daniel Read Anthony, brother of suffragist Susan B. Anthony, former abolitionist, Civil...