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

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.