Studying the Kansas Territorial History I

When I studied history as a young person, I never had the patience or insight to go "day-by-day." Even though I mastered dates and names, events and theories, and thus always received top grades, I never did more than have a "bird's-eye" view of my subject. Thus, in fact, I never really understood anything. I have decided in my middle age to rectify that ignorance, to the extent possible.

Last week, while I was in Kansas doing some consulting, I decided to take the path less traveled by stopping in at Lecompton, about 10 miles from Lawrence, which was territorial capitol of Kansas, at least from 1857-1861. Though I had learned the traditional language used to describe Kansas Territorial life (1854-1861), such as "bleeding Kansas" or "border ruffians" or "bogus legislatures" or "fraudulent voting," I really never dug beneath the surface of any of these terms to discover what they might have meant. That is, I permitted language to create a buffer between me and the phenomena of life rather than to enable or invite me to look more closely at those same phenomena. So, I said to myself that when I returned home to Oregon, I would take some time trying to understand the way that life developed in the Kansas Territory ("KT") in those days. Since Kansas faced the Civil War in a nutshell and in anticipation in those days, a study of that period might also go a long way to aid my understanding of issues that were played out on the "big screen" in America from 1861-65.

I have repeatedly discovered what I call the "paradox" of historical investigation. On the one hand, almost every effort to understand a historical period is rewarded by new and useful knowledge. Yet, on the other, every sincere investigation also leaves you gasping for and desirous of more information. Answering one question in history always opens up two or three more that you hadn't considered when you began your work. Finally, when you realize that this is the nature of historical work, you have to declare a "truce" at some point, write what you know, realize the limited nature of the human condition and endeavor, and then move on to something else. I found this paradox to be true as I began to study KT history.

Preliminary Questions

I rarely study a historical period or person just to try to "understand" it in general terms. More useful for me is to have formulated some questions about the period--questions that open my understanding. For example, I wanted to know the origin of all the constitutions (four of them) between 1855-1859 in the KT. I wanted to understand how the legislature was selected and how often it met. Since it was roundly styled as the "bogus" legislature, I wanted just to see what that meant. I wanted to understand how voting took place, how the population grew, why there were so many governors in so few years, when the free-staters managed to "take over," how the Lecompton Constitution was actually formulated, what the relationship of the land ordinance to the Lecompton Constitution was, how Congress received or rejected this Constitution. I wanted to create a historical skeleton or scaffolding on which I could hang events; I wanted precise knowledge of the developments over the days, months and years of the KT history in order to take the mystery as well as the propagandistic value away from the terms that were used to study early KS history. These essays discuss what I discovered when I not only read some secondary sources but then decided to chuck them all by delving into the Annals of Kansas, an early twentieth century compilation of the territorial days by Daniel Webster Wilder (1832-1911).

Getting the "Flow" of 1854-1861 in the KT

It may be helpful to anchor our treatment of this period by understanding a few salient points. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, the "Organic Act" ("Act") creating these two territories, was signed into law by President Franklin Pierce on May 30, 1854. It is beyond the scope of these essays to describe the process of adopting that legislation; suffice it to say that it allowed, in Section 19 of the Act, the inhabitants of these new territories to decide whether they would want slavery extended into these territories. The Act ignored what turned out to be a bigger legal issue, and that was the authority of Congress vs. elected territorial legislatures to legislate for a territory. Was their jurisdiction overlapping? Did Congress have superior authority? Any authority other than simply creating the Territory? This became one of the issues behind possibly the most influential Supreme Court decision in American History: Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857).

A governor, Andrew Reeder, was appointed for the KT by President Franklin Pierce, and Reeder arrived in the territory on October 7, 1854. This, then, begins my interest in the territorial period. One can look at 1855 as the year of conflicting legislative programs, 1856 as the year of physical hostilities and 1857-58 as the years of presenting to Congress, and having rejected by Congress, the proslavery Lecompton Constitution. Once we reach August 2, 1858, when the voters of the KT decisively rejected the version of the Lecompton Constitution referred to them by Congress for a vote, we run into the end of the slave-power and Southern influence in KT. From thence it would be the former people in the minority, the free-state Jayhwakers--who congregated mostly in Lawrence and Topeka from 1855-56--who would not only be able to win the day but would (re)write the history.

Conclusion

So, with this as an introduction, let's go back and try to recreate the various periods in KT life, beginning with Governor Andrew Reeder's arrival and the first KT legislative session in 1855.

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