Brent M. S. Campney, "This is Not Dixie;" Southern Spaces

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