While white middle-class Kansans employed the Free State narrative to obscure, dismiss, and justify racist violence,
they also refashioned it as a tool of resistance, seeking to protect the
state's mythology and, consequently, its economic fortunes through
an appeal to this state mythology. Their commitment to suppressing racist
violence — and particularly to suppressing mob killings — grew
during the 1880s and reached its climax in the years around the turn of
the century.
32
White resisters, motivated to preserve the Free State image, expressed
profound anxiety that racist violence would make Kansas indistinguishable
from the "South." "We are told that we have violated all our
noble traditions," worried the
Topeka Daily Capital after the
Leavenworth burning, "that the stain can never be washed away, that the
citadel of equal rights established by John Brown has been crushed to
earth, that the land consecrated by freedom's blood to law, and order
and race equality has degenerated to the level of South Carolina."
33
These Kansans celebrated resistance as the inoculation of the state from
the infection of "southern" tendencies. The
Leavenworth
Times applauded whites in Wabaunsee County in 1888 when they condemned
the mob beating of a black man accused of theft. "Near Eskridge, a poor
negro was treated to the methods employed by the old ku-klux gangs of
Georgia," it reported. "As soon as the facts came out a large indignation
meeting was held by the farmers, and the outrageous action was denounced
as it should be in free Kansas."
34
Rhetoric notwithstanding, whites were often more concerned about upholding
their state's reputation among external observers than they were about
upholding racial justice. They did not object to racist violence because
it was wrong, in other words, but because "'it does not look right to
outsiders.'"
35 After the Leavenworth burning,
the
Atchison Daily Globe frankly acknowledged that the hand-wringing
among state officials was primarily about preserving the name of
Kansas
for the national audience. "'We will keep ourselves right with the record,'
as the politicians say, and there the matter will end for all time," it
conceded. "'It will not look right to eastern people if we do not
condemn the lynching,' said one legislator yesterday, 'but personally
I approve
of it.'"
36
As white Kansans deployed the Free State narrative, they internalized
it, absorbing it into their geographical imaginations where it sometimes
constrained behavior. On several occasions, they didn't carry out racist
violence even when they deemed it justifiable. In these cases, they yearned
to be in the "Negro-Hating South" where the essence of place
sustained murderous impulses. The
Olathe Mirror typified this
view after Alfred Brown gunned down a white man near that town in 1896.
"There are too many such fellows as Brown in this county, and they should
thank their stars they do not live south of the Mason and Dixon line."
37 When whites brutalized a black man in Wabaunsee
County in 1899, the
Eskridge Star expressed its disapproval on
the same grounds. "We are opposed to mob law," it insisted. "We live too
far north."
38 In 1905, the
Emporia Times
and Emporia Republican expressed its sympathy for mob violence
against a man accused of rape with sensational front-page headlines that
shrieked "Nigger Assaults White Woman" and "Many People In for Hanging."
"No white woman is safe where such brutes are at liberty," it opined,
"and it is essential to make an example that will serve as a wholesome
lesson." Then, in a repudiation which revealed the vitality of the Free
State narrative, the
Republican concluded that the spirit of
Kansas made a "southern" mob killing untenable in that city.
"This is Not Dixie," it lamented, "and He Will Probably Be Left for the
Law to Handle."
39
So intense was the desire among some white Kansans to prevent the "South"
from infiltrating the Free State that they took extraordinary measures
to insulate themselves. In the aftermath of the Leavenworth burning and
the accompanying torrent of national condemnation, state legislators devised
a novel method for suppressing racist violence within state boundaries — they
would simply redraw them. As the
Atchison Daily Globe put it,
"the 'joke' on Leavenworth has been carried to that point where it is
proposed to put Leavenworth county into Missouri." If burning-at-the-stake
was inherently "southern" and antithetical to the "Free
State," proponents reasoned, they would simply amputate the offending
county and confer it upon their neighbor, a "southern" state
where such atrocities were expected and, perhaps, inevitable. The Missouri
legislature showed obvious pleasure in declining to take off Kansas' hands
what it called the "degenerate municipality."
40
Although the resolutions were never more than symbolic, Kansas legislators
had demonstrated that if racist violence was incompatible with state lore,
and if Leavenworth was synonymous with racist violence, then they would
like nothing better than to excise the county and preserve the imagined.
