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

The South "is as much a fiction, a story we tell and are told, as it is a fixed geographic space," argues Tara McPherson. "If one is to understand the many versions of the South that circulate throughout U.S. history and culture, one has always to see them as fundamentally connected to, and defined in relation to, the non-South." 1 Rather than elucidating any "real" South, McPherson explores the "imagined South." Similarly, geographer Doreen Massey argues that places are products of human thought and action rather than products of nature, and reproves "all attempts to institute horizons, to establish boundaries, to secure the identity of places." 2 Places are, in short, "open and porous," "mental territories" constructed through a multiplicity of relations with "other" places. 3

For all its sensitivity to spatial and temporal variation, the literature on white-on-black violence has emphasized the American South. Although whites brutalized African Americans throughout the country, a prevailing impression remains that this was "largely a southern phenomenon and needs to be understood within the southern context." 4

White southerners certainly earned their association with racist violence, employing countless acts of terror to enforce white supremacy. The idea that racist violence was overwhelmingly "Southern," however, has hindered a comprehensive appraisal of it in other sections of the United States. In a study of all-white "sundown towns," sociologist James W. Loewen marvels at the degree to which scholars have insufficiently recognized racist violence elsewhere. "Over and over I tell historians and social scientists about my research, and they assume I'm studying the Deep South," he reports. "Even when I correct them, the correction often fails to register. I tell a sociologist friend that I've just spent months researching sundown towns in the Midwest. Ten minutes later he has forgotten and again assumes I have been traveling through the South." 5

If the South has been branded the primary repository of white-on-black violence, the "imagined Midwest" has occupied a different position in American history and culture. In the late nineteenth century, according to geographer James R. Shortridge, "two concepts — pastoralism and the Middle West — which initially were similar in several respects, rapidly intertwined and soon became virtually synonymous," creating an image of the Midwest as a land of "bucolic virtue, of sturdy, thriving agrarians inhabiting a blissful Middle Landscape." 6 In addition, "two pairs of bonded concepts: slavery and labor, equality and race," forged during the Civil War and nurtured thereafter, evolved into a second image "of the Midwest as a land of freedom." 7 Both images bolstered the still influential Turner thesis which characterized the Midwest as a place of equality where social status was fluid, where individuals achieved through hard work and ability, and where the challenges of the frontier left little space for bigotry. 8

These images are so pervasive that historians sometimes represent a Midwest fundamentally incompatible with racist violence even as they explicitly document evidence to the contrary. In his study of a mob killing in Indiana in 1930, James H. Madison marshals considerable evidence to suggest that racism and racist violence have been central themes in Indiana's history. Yet, in his analysis, he remains committed to the idea that racist violence is somehow incongruous in America's heartland, and that, through this incongruity, the true pathology of American racism becomes evident. "Grant County was an ordinary place," he writes, "a place that celebrated as its heroes its ordinary people, the pioneers who built farms and homes on the flatlands of the Midwest." Nevertheless, Madison concludes, there remained whites even "in this ordinary place in America's heartland who continued to believe in 'us' and 'them.'" 9

As Shortridge has demonstrated, Kansas has constituted the heart of the Midwest historically and geographically. In the 1880s and 1890s, Kansas and Nebraska were first designated the "Middle West," "not in relationship to the 'Far' West, as is commonly believed, but as part of a north-south ordering of space on the plains frontier," a moniker used to distinguish "the comparatively settled and stable 'middle' states both from the frontier 'North West' in the Dakotas and from the culturally different 'South West' in Texas and Indian Territory." Though popular conceptions of the geography of the "Midwest" did shift, Kansas always remained at "the core of the Middle West." 10

Like the Midwest generally, Kansas has been identified with pastoral virtue and racial harmony. Unlike its sister states, however, Kansas was literally defined by race at its inception. Beginning with the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, it became the site of a struggle between northern and southern settlers over the extension of slavery. Although some northern white settlers opposed slavery on moral grounds, most "free soilers" — drawn from Old Northwest states such as Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio — opposed it on economic grounds, arguing that it choked out land and opportunity for whites. Some midwesterners also favored exclusion rather than live with African Americans. As Eugene H. Berwanger has illustrated, "a large group of settlers was more anti-Negro than antislavery." 11 While northern settlers were divided over many issues, they were pushed into an uneasy Free State alliance by what they viewed as the heavy-handed effort of pro-slavery advocates — primarily Missourians — to impose the "peculiar institution." "Slavery's establishment was to be accomplished by disregarding the 'wishes' of the majority of white settlers, thereby enslaving voters to the proslavery agenda," writes Nicole Etcheson. "These events united free-state settlers in the conviction that their political rights and liberties were being trampled by a government determined to impose slavery upon them." 12

In the aftermath of the territorial conflicts and during four years of Civil War, white Kansans began to reshape the memory of the Free State struggle, framing it as a struggle not only for white political and economic freedom but for the liberation of African Americans as well. "While recalling events in the territory from 1854 to 1860," notes Berwanger, prominent actors in these events "ignored other issues, stressing the struggle over slavery and describing their efforts as a valiant attempt to prevent the fastening of Negro servitude on the territory." 13 With violent abolitionist John Brown as their symbol, they spun a romantic narrative throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century that rehabilitated racists as righteous soldiers in a struggle for human dignity. As Michael Lewis Goldberg argues:

Yankee Kansans believed their state's founding was a profoundly moral act, the triumph of freedom and progress over the barbarity of slavery. Northerners who had rushed to settle Kansas in the years before the Civil War had done so to halt the expansion of slavery. . . Free State settlers had suffered like martyrs at the hands of Southern proslavers, whose marauding ways had inspired the national epithet Bleeding Kansas. But in the end, through the perseverance of the Free Staters and the will of God, the righteous triumphed and were rewarded. The lesson of this story, oft repeated, was that Kansans, compared with their relatively benighted counterparts in other states, now possessed a certain moral superiority.14

Kansans embraced the Free State narrative. Scholars might underscore "the bald fact that local and personal economic objectives had commonly overshadowed the national and moralistic antislavery crusade in governing the behavior of individual colonists," notes Robert Smith Bader, but "the general populace did not overly concern itself with such refinements. It loved to tell and retell the heroics of the Free State champions." 15

Regardless of the Free State narrative, there was systemic and enduring racist violence in Kansas in the fifty years after the Civil War. In total, 603 separate incidents were identified in the sample of white newspapers used in this study. Of these, thirty-seven were mob killings, accounting for fifty-three victims, and four were race riots. The others were more common types of collective and individual violence, lethal and non-lethal. Because these incidents were common, they typically received little detailed newspaper coverage. The total number of violent incidents identified in the sample undoubtedly represents only a fraction of those which actually transpired. 16

These 603 incidents do suggest geographical continuities between the pro-southern enclaves of the territorial years and the racist violence of the postbellum period. Many of the incidents of racist violence throughout the study period took place in counties such as Atchison, Leavenworth, Wyandotte, and Bourbon County, which bordered western Missouri and/or the eastern Kansas River Valley, and which claimed large numbers of white settlers originally from Missouri. An observer underscored this continuity two years after the Civil War when a mob killed two African Americans in Wyandotte, remarking that "when lynching does become necessary in Kansas, we should prefer some other class than the conservatives of Kansas City, and the border to take it in hand" [italics in original]. 17

However tempting, it is an oversimplification to suggest a clear-cut relationship between the geography of pro-slavery settlement and racist violence because African Americans tended to cluster in the 1860s within the state's larger urban centers in the Kansas River Valley counties and continued to reside overwhelmingly in these same places throughout the study period, even as the state expanded rapidly to the south and west. The primary catalyst for racist violence appears to have been localized white fear over rapidly growing and/or increasingly concentrated black populations, a fear which flared wherever these demographic conditions presented themselves, including cities that were not even settled during the territorial struggles, such as Coffeyville, Salina, and Wichita. 18 This catalyst was, perhaps, most evident in Lawrence, the capital of territorial abolitionism twice sacked by pro-slavery Missourians and most closely associated with the Free State narrative after the Civil War. Notwithstanding this history, palpable fear clearly motivated white Lawrencians to unleash a wave of racist violence when a mass migration, known as the Exoduster movement, swelled the city's black population in 1879 and 1880. The objective of this violence, which included the mob murder of three African Americans in 1882, was to control the swelling black population, as a white merchant acknowledged after a threatened mob killing in 1883, when he worried that "'there has always been a very large negro population in Lawrence, and it seems to be on the increase.'" 19

This essay explores the ways in which white Kansans employed images of the "South" and its association with racist violence in order to constitute the Free State identity from the end of the Civil War until World War I. It argues that prevailing assumptions about "Dixie" functioned as a durable framework through which white Kansans understood the racist violence in their own midst. On the one hand, the "South," and the bloodshed that took place there, provided a means to obscure, dismiss, and justify incidents in Kansas, enabling commentators to cultivate a sort of historical amnesia, to deem each successive episode an anomaly, the exception that proved the rule of midwestern virtue. On the other hand, the idea of the "South" constituted a powerful incentive for resistance to racist violence among white Kansans fearful of becoming associated with it.

The essay is based primarily on an extensive analysis of incidents of racist violence identified in contemporary white newspapers representing the predominant Republican affiliation of most Kansans at the time and published in the major cities of six counties representative of the three regions in the state between 1865 and 1914. It is supplemented by reference to other white newspapers published near locales where incidents occurred, and to white Kansas newspaper coverage occasionally reprinted in the state's black weeklies. 20

Primary Materials:
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