Those white Kansans who crafted the Free State narrative,
principally urban middle-class professionals, newspaper editors, and politicians
concerned about the state's reputation, presented it as a foil to the
"Negro-Hating South" where "black men have no rights which white men are
bound to respect."
21 While theirs was a truthful,
if occasionally hyperbolic, assessment of white racism and violence in
the South after the Civil War, Free State proponents often linked it to
the more dubious claim that racist violence was largely confined to that
section of the nation. The
Topeka Daily Capital articulated this
when it condemned a Georgia mob that tortured and burned-at-the-stake
Sam
Hose, a field hand, in the spring of 1899. "The sickening story of
recent lynching bees in Georgia has no parallels in the history of civilization,
outside of the southern states of this Union," it concluded. "The vengeance
of the southern whites on negro ravishers shows that the elemental man,
or the elemental savage, is still there."
22
Kansas newspapers reported the savagery of southern race relations during
and after slavery, and reflected the acute sectional hatred generated
by a long and bloody Civil War characterized from the northern perspective
by southern rebellion and treason in defense of this savagery.
White Kansans envisioned their Free State as the anti-South, standing
in stark contrast to brutal southern traditions and, suggested a state
politician in 1867, "occupying a position in the foreground of enlightened
progress." Kansas had been born of the struggle for freedom for all people
and baptized with the blood of abolitionists dedicated to the destruction
of slavery, they insisted. Forged of this noble purpose, the state would
remain a place where people of all races could achieve success through
hard work and where racism and racist violence were anathema. "There is
no State in the Union where a colored man has a better [hope] to ask for
a solid Republican support than in the State of Kansas," declared the
Leavenworth Times in 1887. "Blood was shed on Kansas soil for
the negro." Ignoring the fact that free-soil ideology had proven quite
compatible with racism, white Kansans routinely invoked their territorial
origin story as
prima facie evidence of their subsequent commitment
to racial equality. Reflecting on his state's record toward African Americans
in 1909, a white citizen explained the present through the prism of the
1850s, telling the
Topeka Daily Capital that "'Kansas fought,
bled and died for the negro.'"
23
White Kansans could acknowledge that individual acts of racist violence
occurred in their state but minimize their significance by declaring each
successive one an aberration — infrequent, uncharacteristic, and even
unprecedented — rather than as evidence of a pattern. When a mob of
five thousand men, women, and children burned-at-the-stake Fred Alexander,
a laborer, in Leavenworth in 1901, the event attracted national attention
and precipitated an unusual level of debate among white Kansans over its
implications for the state's legacy. The
Topeka Daily Capital ignored
the dozens of racist mob killings stretching back to 1865 — including
a burning-at-the-stake in 1867 — when it insisted that "this sad,
solitary misstep is not excused or palliated by the people of the Sunflower
state." "In view of the lofty standard which this state has ever maintained,
leading the van in all that goes to make an enlightened and Christian
civilization," it added, "it is due to Kansas that the Leavenworth holocaust
should be construed as a state calamity rather than a state disgrace."
24
White Kansans sometimes framed discussions of racist violence within a midwestern pastoralism to suggest
that these irruptive acts of racism were anomalous incidents. When Wesley McDaniel, a drunken, low-status
white man, assaulted a black laborer named G. W. May at the Bourbon County
Fair in 1883, the
Fort Scott Daily Monitor prefaced its condemnation
with a sermon on the meaning of the festival itself. "The products of
the field were there arrayed in holiday attire, giving evidence of the
virgin excellence of our soil" and of the "industry and intelligence of
a people who have combined to a greater degree than any other people on
earth the true dignity of manhood with the necessity that all men earn
their bread by the sweat of the brow," it noted approvingly. Transitioning
to the violence, the
Monitor fused the bucolic bounty of Kansas
with biblical transgression, characterizing the incident as a betrayal
of the state's essence by an unrepresentative son. "This collection might
well be compared to the Garden of Eden in its combination of excellences
and like the Garden of Eden, it had just one serpent to mar its harmony
and beauty."
25
More commonly, whites cloaked racist violence in narratives about the
"South" and the "Free State." They sometimes cited
incidents in Kansas as contaminants, misplaced and inherently 'southern'
phenomena not indigenous to their state. In 1901, the
Wichita Daily
Eagle characterized the Alexander burning as the cultivation of
a southern crop in the inhospitable soil of the Midwest. "A negro rapist
has been. . . burned at the stake, chained, kerosened and burned alive,
in strict accordance with the method employed by the prejudiced south.
. . . Such tragedies are unlooked for and unexpected at the hands of
western
people where the hanging of horse thieves has proved about the only exception
to the regular rule of trial by jury."
26
Although a great many Kansans in these years were settlers from across
the United States, commentators usually did not remark upon the sectional
origins of those who perpetrated racist violence, suggesting that they
regarded most assailants as fully assimilated 'Kansans' motivated by other
issues and concerns. However, when individuals popularly identified as
southerners perpetrated this violence, white Kansans ascribed great explanatory
power to their origins. Reporting the attempted hanging of John E. Lewis
near Topeka in 1906, the
Topeka Daily Capital emphasized a Texas
connection. Lewis, it reported, "is grand chancellor of the colored Knights
of Pythias of the state, and it was his Pythias badge that aroused the
southern hostility of the Texans. They didn't like to see a 'nigger' putting
on such airs, and proceeded to adopt the regulation Dixie method for teaching
the negro his place."
27 In other cases, whites
viewed acts of racist violence as
de facto evidence of the origins
of the perpetrator. When a newcomer gunned down a black laborer in 1905,
the
Hutchinson Semi-Weekly Gazette concluded that the murderer
"was almost a stranger in town, and probably a southerner."
28
Sometimes Kansans gauged the superiority of the Free State on the basis
of the distinctions in the responses to racist violence in Kansas and
in the South. In the wake of the 1901 Leavenworth immolation, the
Topeka
Daily Capital speculated on the likely responses of the state's senators
to this incident and contrasted them to the responses characteristic of
southern politicians, as typified by those of the one-eyed South Carolina
senator,
Ben
"Pitchfork" Tillman. Should the two senators from Kansas
be asked in the U.S. Senate to address the incident in their state, it
declared, "judge, all the earth, of the difference of their utterances
[t]o the brazen exultation of the Carolinian Cyclops discoursing on similar
tragedies within his state." Notwithstanding that the actions of the mob
and the support for these actions among white citizens and law enforcement
officials revealed more commonalities than distinctions between the South
and Kansas, the
Capital put great stock in oratory: "the ringing
resolutions of the Kansas legislature, the utterances of her public men
and her public press are proof to all the world that the melancholy affair
is not excused or condoned in Kansas."
29
In 1911, the
Belle Plaine News epitomized the way that the Free
State narrative could be used to establish the depravity of the South
and the virtue of Kansas, no matter how fine the distinctions between
them. When Frank Abbott, a white foreman, killed William White, a railroad
laborer, the
News freely (and correctly) intimated that the perpetrator
(a southerner, it noted with contempt) would face no penalty, the same
result that would await him in the 'prejudiced south.' Nevertheless, it
insisted that the inconvenience of Abbott's arrest and show trial before
his inevitable acquittal proved the moral superiority of Kansas. "Being
arrested for killing a 'nigger' was no doubt a surprise to Mr. Abbott,
who, reports have it, has killed other negros [sic] and pounded up a few
more," it reported. "The man may come clear but he will find it a little
different than in Alabama and may wait till he gets out of Kansas before
being to [sic] hasty again."
30
Few incidents underscore the degree to which the Free State narrative
could mold the perceptions of white Kansans than an 1896 custody dispute
between officials in Leavenworth and in neighboring Platte County, Missouri — the
state which, for reasons of history and proximity, constituted a surrogate
for the "South." Both Leavenworth and Platte County claimed
jurisdiction when Frank Garrison killed a white man on an island in the
Missouri River. Having custody of the prisoner, and intent upon their
boundary claims, officials in Leavenworth refused to relinquish control,
insisting that "if Garrison was taken to Missouri he would be lynched."
The
Leavenworth Times seemed oblivious to the irony when it reported
that the Sheriff was compelled to spirit the prisoner to the impregnable
Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in order to protect him from Kansans
with a record of mob violence. "County officials were advised yesterday
that an attempt was being made to form a mob to hang Garrison. It was
said that some of the men who were in the mob that dragged a colored man
to death [in Leavenworth] ten years ago were back of the movement."
31
