Crossroads of Conflict: Contested Visions of Freedom & the Missouri-Kansas Border Wars
Liberty has been our nation’s most salient and contested value. Yet from the inception of the American Revolution slavery played a critical role in the emerging ideology. Freedom and slavery were "the two extremes of happiness and misery in society." As the debate over the status of slavery in Missouri commenced in Congress in 1820, the aging Thomas Jefferson observed that the issue of the expansion of slavery was “like a fire bell in the night” and one that portended the “knell of the Union.” [Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, April 22, 1820]. A compromise eventually was reached by which the admission of future slave and free states would come in pairs with the Mason Dixon line and the Ohio River serving as the dividing line between slavery and freedom. In the years that followed, Americans’ vision for their nation increasingly diverged as Southerners championed the interests of slavery and Northerners argued for free soil and even abolition. Jefferson likely would not have been surprised that the issue of slavery continued to plague the nation as it was decided how to divide the territory taken from Mexico. Nor would he have been astonished that Americans’ conflicting ideas of liberty and freedom were eventually decided through violence -- first tentatively on the prairies of Kansas and then decisively on the battlefields of the Civil War.
Beginning in the years following the War of 1812, settlers from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia flooded into the bottomlands of the Missouri River bringing with them the cultural values of the Upper South. Many also brought their slaves. When the nation’s leaders argued over the future of Missouri slavery in 1820, they did not consult actual Missourians who would have soundly supported their peculiar institution. In 1836, the Americans bought the Platte Purchase from the Sax and Fox tribes and thus forced Native Americans westward off the fertile soil of the Missouri River Valley. Over time the population of the state became increasingly more diverse as German and Irish immigrants and settlers from northern states moved there. Many of the new arrivals had a different vision for Missouri, encouraging early industrial development in St. Louis and promoting new railroad ties to the Northeast and Upper Midwest.
As the nation grew, thousands of people passed through Missouri on their way west on the Sante Fe, California, and Oregon Trails. The Missouri/Kansas border became a bustling crossroads where merchandise, cultures and beliefs mixed and changed to take on a character of their own. But when the Unites States’ Congress opened up settlement across the state line in Kansas in 1854, this cultural and political diversity took on a new resonance. Americans held different visions for the future of the new Kansas Territory depending on their beliefs about liberty and freedom. Operating under the concept of popular sovereignty, settlers holding conflicting ideas flocked into the territory: some traveling from nearby Missouri and others from as far away as New England.
Bitter feuding turned to open hostilities on the Kansas/Missouri Border well before the firing on Fort Sumter. Violence erupted in Kansas as free soil and pro-slavery settlers vied to stake land claims and elect a new territorial government. The eyes of the nation watched as the citizens of Kansas and Missouri attempted to resolve the question of the extension of slavery that had so long plagued the entire nation. Eventually, even the halls of Congress were not immune to the forces unleashed on the Border.
The free soil forces eventually won the battle and Kansas joined the Union as a free state in 1861, but the bitter memories of the violent conflict merely simmering beneath the surface erupted in an even more virulent form during the Civil War. It was now Missouri’s turn to bleed as the growing internal divisions existing before the war and the presence of hostile forces on the western border turned the state into the scene of vivious guerilla warfare. Missouri civilians – both black and white – were caught in the crossfire as Union and Confederate troops fought for control of the state and Bushwhackers and Jayhawkers ravaged the countryside.
The experiences of Missouri and Kansas residents during the era of the Border Wars is a window on the issues and circumstances that shattered the union during the Civil War. It was on the Kansas/Missouri border that Americans first grappled with the problem of liberty and slavery face to face – sometime even shedding blood in the interest of their cause. An exploration of this most uncivil of wars also provides insight into the ways in which societies can be fragmented by ideology and ultimately rebuilt upon different lines. Only when Missourians and Kansans embraced a common vision for America – one based on shared agricultural practices, ideas about economic development, and racial inequality – could Americans on both two sides of the border reconcile.