The romanticized Free State narrative — the one
that connoted a territorial struggle to destroy the moral abomination
of slavery — had already replaced the more complicated reality by
the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. The
Leavenworth Daily Conservative
articulated it as early as 1867 when a mob hanged and shot two African
Americans in Wyandotte. "A frightful, hideous, double murder has been
committed in our State, and if the perpetrators of the vile deed are not
speedily brought to condign punishment, then it is in vain that Kansas
has struggled into the foremost rank of progressive States, for she is
unworth[y] of the proud position." The
Leavenworth Daily Times
expressed similar anxieties when white workers forced the firing of black
laborers from railroad construction in Leavenworth County in 1871. "We
would not be astonished to read such a statement from any Southern State,"
it reported, but to read it from Kansas made for a "strange message, indeed."
"The question of labor is invaded by the question of color— honest
labor is to be graded by the shade of a man's skin. And this was the message
of Free Kansas, on yesterday evening to the civilized world!"
46
The narrative solidified still more during the
Exoduster
movement which brought to Kansas thousands of black migrants who were
escaping the racist violence and oppression of the Deep South. During
that influx, whites in Lawrence issued a resolution declaring that "'we
regard the exodus of the colored people of the South as a legitimate result
of the injustice practised upon them, and since so many of these people
reach Kansas in poverty and suffering we should be untrue to our history…if
we did not extend to them a cordial welcome.'"
47
In addition, some white Kansans recognized that the Exodus — a literal
affirmation of their superiority to the South — placed a greater
responsibility and increased national scrutiny upon them to live up to
their professed ideals, a conclusion borne out by the increased level
of middle-class resistance in the years after the Exodus.
48
The
Junction City Tribune pondered this problem at the height
of the migration. "For years the north has complained that the south has
been cruel to the negroes," it reflected. "The south now sends us a few
boat loads of darkies, merely to give us a taste. In some places they
are met with a flourish of patriotism and charity, in others with shot-guns
and pitch-forks." White Kansans had little alternative but to stifle racist
violence or to surrender to hypocrisy, it concluded. "Denial or explanation
does no good."
49
The Free State narrative achieved its greatest prominence around the turn
of the last century as middle-class whites grew increasingly anxious about
the impact of racist violence on the state's reputation and about the
necessity of shoring up distinctions between Kansas and the South. In
lauding a father who thwarted a mob killing in Spring Hill in 1911, the
Topeka Daily Capital pressed the view that racist violence was
no longer acceptable in the Free State. "'This undoubtedly is the man
who attempted a vicious crime upon my daughter,'" the father reportedly
declared, "'but, 'Judge Lynch' does not live in civilized Kansas any more.
To burn this fellow to death will only scandalize the country. Let the
law, I beg of you, take its course.'"
50 The
white middle-class did in fact produce results with its rhetorical resistance,
as well as with other more tangible efforts to suppress mob killings.
Whereas crowds threatening mob violence murdered their victims approximately
thirty-four percent of the time between 1865 and 1894, they did so only
eight percent of the time between 1895 and 1914.
51
Published: 6 September 2007
© Brent M. S. Campney and
Southern
Spaces 
