"The Crime against Missouri": Slavery, Kansas, and the Cant of Southernness in the Border West

Abstract

Scholars have long recognized the Kansas conflict as a rehearsal for the Civil War. As both a source of national debate over slavery's extension and the scene of violence that laid bare the fiction of popular sovereignty, the story of "Bleeding Kansas," has provided historians with essential material for broad studies of America's antebeLum political implosion. Contemporaries, too, recognized Kansas as a national political watershed; indeed, when Lincohi and Douglas squared off in their famed senatorial duel on the Illinois prairie during the hot summer of 1858, the Kansas issue formed the core topic of their "Great Debates."' Despite this attention, a gap exists in the scholarly coverage of the Kansas stmggle. In focusing solely upon either the violence in Kansas or the territorial conflict in the national political arena, historians have offered an unbalanced-and thus incomplete-portrayal. Furthermore, by concentrating on antislavery Kansans, they have largely ignored the perceptions of Missourians, who formed the largest portion of the Kansas population until well into 1855, otlier than their near blanket denigration as "border ruffians" or "pukes," undemocratic savages who ravaged a virgin Kansas to perpetuate slavery in the West. Though recent studies have begun to correct tbe oversight, scholars continue to employ Daniel Crofrs's Reluctant Confederates as the modem standard on the secession crisis in the Border South, though the book omits from its interpretive scope the slave states that did not secede from the Union.t he We .