After the Leavenworth burning, the
Topeka Daily Capital
admitted that Kansas was no longer "in a position to make disparaging
remarks concerning violent deeds occasionally perpetrated by the hot-blooded
people beyond the pale of Mason and Dixon's line."
41
Ultimately, however, by appraising their record of racist violence against
the aggregate number of incidents perpetrated by white southerners rather
than against their own image, white Kansans, irrespective of their political
affiliation or their position towards blacks, seldom questioned the limits
of the Free State. Certainly, they disagreed vigorously over the efficacy
of racist violence; they rarely disagreed, however, on the assumption
that blacks had little cause for complaint in Kansas. Commentators who
denounced racist violence in one breath sometimes rehabilitated the Free
State narrative with the next. When a mob drove a black family from a
house in an all-white neighborhood in 1910, the
Pratt Republican
insisted that it "always stands for law and against any form of mob law"
but advised angry blacks that "it might be well to remember that the black
man had no rights until the white man gave him that 14th amendment to
the Constitution and also the liberal laws of Kansas."
42
As compelling as the Free State narrative was, there were instances too
obvious to ignore. When students at the University of Kansas raided the
dissection laboratory in 1902, seized the cadaver of an unknown black
man, and hanged it on campus, in what one commentator called a "sham lynching,"
the
Horton Commercial complained that many Kansas papers had
suppressed an incident that undermined state lore. "Had this lynching
of a dead Negro occurred in Louisiana or Texas, it would be termed 'another
Democratic outrage in the South' by Republican papers of Kansas. But as
it occurred in Kansas they deem it wise to keep mum."
43
Others cautioned Kansas newspapers to practice humility in their denunciations
of the South given the propensity for inflicting similar violence against
blacks within the Free State. The
El Dorado Daily Walnut Valley Times
voiced this concern after whites elsewhere in the state murdered a young
man in 1893. "Let us not howl at the south for murdering 'niggers.' Up
at Salina a mob hung a darkey for slashing but not killing a man."
44
In some instances, whites explicitly repudiated the Free State narrative,
defiantly embracing anti-black violence irrespective of its consequences
for the state's image and economic prospects. The
Fort Scott Herald
unapologetically accepted responsibility on behalf of Kansas when a mob
dragged, hanged, and burned an alleged rapist in that city in 1879: "Neither
do we pretend to get out of it by claiming that a large proportion of
the men engaged in it were from Missouri." Exasperated by homilies from
elsewhere after the 1901 burning, the
Lawrence Daily Journal
revealed that the Free State was better at doling out condemnation than
at accepting it, warning that "other states should understand that this
is a family affair, and if they don't keep their hands out of it, Kansas
is likely to back Leavenworth up to sail in and do it again. Kansas demands
for herself the privilege of doing the criticizing."
45
Published: 6 September 2007
© Brent M. S. Campney and
Southern
Spaces 
