How Bloody was Bleeding Kansas?

trice

Colonel
Joined
May 2, 2006
I was looking at a study called s How Bloody Was Bleeding Kansas: Political killings in Kansas Territory, 1854-61 by Dale E. Watts, originally published in Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 18 (2) (Summer 1995). What follows is the last 3 paragraphs :

While most of the findings of this study tend to confirm traditional interpretations, one very important exception is apparent. Contemporary antislavery accounts and the writings of historians generally depict the antislavery people as the victims of proslavery attackers. Newspaper reporters and other propagandists were very adept at creating graphic descriptions of the atrocities that the Border Ruffians were said to be inflicting on the virtually helpless antislavery settlers. The data, however, indicate that the two sides were nearly equally involved in killing their political opponents: thirty proslavery people, twenty-four antislavery men, one officially neutral U.S. soldier, and one man whose political persuasion is obscured by a garbled historical record. Antislavery men seem to have been just as hostile and aggressive as their proslavery counterparts. The only difference is that their reprehensible actions, such as killing Sarah Carver, either have gone unnoticed or have been excused as accidents or as having been committed in self-defense.

No angels lived in Kansas Territory. The Pottawatomie Massacre constituted the bloodiest single atrocity, but those murders were balanced by the killings of peaceful antislavery men. The gunfire that cut down a Mr. Cook (proslavery) at Easton in January 1856 set the stage for the revenge killing of one of his assailants, R.P. Brown (antislavery). Tit for tat, killing for killing, each side fought to avenge supposed crimes by its enemies while striving to convince the world that it did so only with the purest of motives. Because they eventually won the contest in Kansas, the antislavery group wrote most of the history books. This gave them the opportunity to hide their own misdeeds and to accentuate those of their foes. However, both sides often placed human life below ideology and personal gain.

The exact number of political killings in territorial Kansas will never be known. Propagandists inflated or deflated their reports for political reasons. Estimates were and will continue to be based on rumor as much as on solid information. As was common in the unstable environment of new regions, people disappeared without a trace: some may have been killed by political foes; others probably simply moved on to greener pastures. Newly documented instances of political killings will continue to appear as historical research progresses; however, some cases included here in the political category may prove in the future to have been precipitated by essentially nonpolitical motives. Therefore, the present estimate of fifty-six political killings in Kansas Territory likely will remain relatively constant, fluctuating only within a narrow range as additional information becomes available.
 
Back
Top