Wars define nations, marking boundaries, separating people and property, and declaring victors. But our country's choices after the wars of the last 150 years have been the defining factors for life for African-Americans in the United States.
After the Civil War, the first World War, and World War II, the country went through rapid periods of development and policy change. Bursts of economic and industrial progress paved the way for social progress, too. But these big changes were quickly clawed back, and overshadowed the setbacks experienced by black Americans in those same time periods.
The land that is known as Kansas was once part of the Louisiana Territory, which the U.S. purchased from France, who purchased it from Spain. But it was never really Spain's or France's land to begin with. The plains were the inherited territory of the Kickapoo, Kaw/Kansa, Pawnee, Comanche, Oto, Osage, Wichita, Kiowa, Iowa, Escanxaques, and other indigenous tribes for hundreds, if not thousands of years before Europeans discovered the continent and started claiming it for themselves.
Today, descendants of these native tribes live throught the United States, within westernized communities like Topeka -- founded by white people but named after indigenous terms -- but also on small, restrictive -- but sovereign -- reservations. Indigenous women are the most at-risk demographic on the entire content, with the widest disparities in health, economics, mortality, and almost all other measures. The results of colonization are still felt viscerally today by indigenous people, 500 years after the first European settlers landed. For people with native heritage, "freedom" is a loaded word.
Freedom is a heavy word for Black Kansans, too. Even now in 2020, black families face significant economic and health disparities from other demographics, not only as a result of slavery, but also as a result of the subsequent centuries of continued oppression toward people of color in the form of Jim Crow laws and 'black codes,' as well as codified discrimination in housing, employment, education, and health.
This book will focus primarily on the three waves of broken promises for black freedom and prosperity, and those events' effects in Kansas. The author wishes to acknowledge that a more nuanced discussion is warranted. Discussing Kansas as a state is almost to ignore the native heritage of this territory and the people who lived here for generations before Europeans forcibly claimed the land and drew arbitrary boundaries around it. Today we recognize the tragedy of our contemporary "freedom." Freedom for whom, and freedom from what? Wars and disease killed thousands of native people before this land was claimed as a state, but it was the founding of the state that eventually led to a foundational chance at freedom and opportunity for formerly enslaved black people.
A hundred reasons the war shouldn't have happened
The fight for Kansas, and for a free Union was violent and bloody. The Civil War claimed more than 600,000 lives. Southern slaveowners had massive financial interests in maintaining their insidious practice, so they organized an army and fought. But northern abolitionists fought back, and with strategic moves by Grant, Lincoln, and Frederick Douglass, the North won the war and made the country free.
Though it ended more than 150 years ago, the Civil War is as relevant as ever. The founding of Kansas as a free-state was the one of the major reasons the Civil War started, and yet, Confederate flags can be seen displayed today in Topeka and other parts of the free state, on flagpoles, on houses, on the bumpers of cars and the back windows of pickup trucks.
The story that proud Kansans tell today is that we fought hard to join the Union as a free state. But the truth is not quite so clear. Even at its founding, not every Kansan was against slavery. Of the state's 105 counties, 26 were named for pro-slavery men. The 1855 Territorial Legislature voted Kansas in as a pro-slavery territory. But things had changed by 1859, when the free-state 'Wyandotte Constitution' was passed by referendum, 10,421 to 5,530. Two years later, on January 29, 1861, that same constitution was approved by the U.S. Congress. In an ironic stroke of luck for the abolitionists, the South had already voted to secede, and pro-slavery legislators from southern states were no longer attending Congress. They surely would have voted against the Kansas free state consitution on that day, but they were absent, and the vote passed.
Slavery was such a critical institution in the economy and the way of life in the south that it was a struggle during colonial times for northern colonies to get southern colonies to agree on methods of counting the population and collecting taxes. The colonies which profited most from holding people as property tended to have the most autocratic governments, with power and control concentrated among just a few wealthy, well-connected members of society. If they didn't count enslaved people as part of their population, they wouldn't have to pay as much in taxes to the central government.
The slavery fight came up again and again as the nation's early leaders emerged, but northern objectionists - hardly impassioned enough to be called abolitionists - could not bring up the issue without causing a rift.
Even after the Declaration of Independence - supposedly, a time of unity for the fledgling country - the newly-united states all struggled to get on the same page. As more states joined the Union, factions emerged and the bloody battles for power began. Kansas became a free state only because southern legislators had walked out of congressional session in Washington D.C., and the abolitionist legislators had enough votes to pass the state's constitution. It was a risky move, pulled literally behind the back of some of the country's elected officials. Was war not inevitable in a nation so divided?
Mixed results of the Civil War
War is a last resort of practical nations, but a natural tendency of human groupthink. Fear is the most powerful human motivator. We fight out of fear, out of a tendency to violently protect our comforts.
South Carolina voted to secede from the nation shortly after Lincoln's presidential victory in the autumn of 1860. The state built up armories around the national military post in Charleston, Fort Sumter, and eventually opened fire upon the fort - manned by northern troops. Where a developed nation with intelligence networks and well-rounded leaders might have sent a delegation with lavish gifts and an eloquent proxy to negotiate - these tools had hardly been developed in the nation's tumultuous first two generations, and the conflict devolved to a military one.
War doesn't decide who's right; only who's left. After four years of military action, the south was devastated by the Civil War and had no choice but to acquiesce to the new standards imposed by the north. But the failure left a bitterness in the hearts of all southerners who had felt their cause justified.
Toward the end of the war, General Sherman issued Special Field Order 15, commandeering 400,000 acres of southern land and devoting that to freed black people. Just a few months later, the next U.S. president reversed the order. One step forward, two steps back.
The Lost Cause
The war didn't change hearts and minds of southerners. Southern states have spent the intervening 150 years proving this to the country, and to black people and other minorities. Only in 2020, did Mississippi vote to remove the confederate battle flag from its state flag.
The battle flag was popularized decades after the end of the civil war. Mississippi didn't actually adopt a state flag with that symbol until 1894, a full generation after the end of the Civil War. Georgia adopted the same symbol in 1956, a full century after the end of the Civil War. Georgia removed that symbol from its flag in 2001, but its current state flag is based on the original flag of the Confederate States of America. Lesser-known symbolism is not exactly an improvement in this case.
https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/these-5-states-still-use-confederate-symbols-their-flags-msna624326
The symbolism of the Confederate Flag has less to do with the actual Civil War, and more to do with the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.
"They say that history is written by the victors, but the Civil War has been the rare exception. Perhaps the need for the country to stay together made it necessary for the North to sit silently and accept the South's conception of the conflict. In any case, for most of the past 150 years, the South’s version of the war and Reconstruction has held sway in our schools, our literature and, since the dawn of feature films, our movies."
— The San Francisco Chronicle[8] https://www.sfchronicle.com/movies/article/Romanticizing-Confederate-cause-has-no-place-6403446.php
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy
Some Northerners may have been abolitionists, but Northerners and Southerners mostly agreed on the concept of Manifest Destiny. For a small country, the U.S. was remarkably coordinated in its efforts to murder and steal from indigenous people in order to expand the country's territory from coast to coast.
While conflicts between settlers and indigenous people were not new, the efforts to strategically remove native people from desirable land started in earnest with the Corps of Discovery in 1803.
Lewis and Clark, Missionization, Indian Wars
Lewis and Clark expedition, July 1804 -- saw a Kansa village https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/lewis-and-clark-in-kansas/12129
Early 1800s - Missions built to 'educate' native children https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/missions-in-kansas/14236
The Beginning and the End: Lewis and Clark among the Upper Missouri River People by Clarissa Confer https://www.jstor.org/stable/1409483
"Corps of Discovery" - Lewis and Clark expedition
Lewis and Clark's military expedition, the "Corps of Discovery" led westward through the plains to the coast through the country's newly-acquired Louisiana Territory. The United States was barely two decades old, and President Thomas Jefferson made the gamble to double the size of the country. In 1788, the Constitution had been formally ratified, and in 1803, Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase.
The purchase was legally dubious. The land had been "owned" by the French, and the Spanish before them, but was never purchased or legally given to the Spanish. It was only claimed, as if it had been nonexistent before white Europeans arrived there. In fact, thousands of native people had lived in the vast territory, but their lives were under greater and greater threat as European settlers moved west across the continent.
Hoping they would find a "Northwest Passage," or a river from the middle of the country all the way to the west coast, Jefferson appointed Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark to build a military contingent for the task.
They never found a Northwest Passage, and sold their boats for horses to cross the Rocky Mountains. While the Corps of Discovery brought news and knowledge of the new territory back to the Capital, the military expedition led to devastation among the native tribes they met. Trade with white people brought disease and devastation to the plains tribes, especially the Mandans in the region around present-day central North Dakota.
https://www.history.com/topics/native-american-history/sacagawea
https://www.pbs.org/lewisandclark/native/mis.html
Missionization
The story of the Mandans wasn't new. White people had been devastating native tribes on the continent for centuries. Some sources even suggest that transmission of maladies like smallpox was likely accidental (though strategically advantageous for the settlers) -- since little was understood at that time about viral transmission.
Europeans having prolonged interaction with native tribes may have been enough to cause their downfall. In the 1400s, Spanish travelers came through Kansas and found the Etzanoa settlement, which may have been as large as 20,000 people at that time - a community many generations in the making, and in its day, one of the largest cities on the globe. But 100 years later, when French explorers came through the same area, the settlement was gone. The cause of their demise is currently unknown, but disease, drought, flood, or famine were all possible culprits.
https://www.history.com/news/colonists-native-americans-smallpox-blankets
Etzanoa.. 1450-1700 https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-kansas-lost-city-20180819-htmlstory.html
PrairyErth
Philosophical movements contributing to cultural thought of the time
The Age of Enlightenment of the 1600s and 1700s in Europe had given way to the ideals that led people to start the new country here. The Victorian age of the mid-1800s led to a desire for refinement and higher moral standards, but coincided with strict social codes, and encouragement of church attendance. The agnostics, freethinkers, and secularists broke off from that movement - carrying the mantle of enlightenment - but believing that wisdom and goodness could be achieved outside of the church. The late 1800s and early 1900s were the culmination of more than 100 years of the Industrial Revolution and dramatic changes in the social order. To philosophers, writers, and thinkers at the turn of the century, anything seemed possible.
"Etta Semple (née Martha Etta Kilmer September 21, 1854 - April 11, 1914) was an American atheist and feminist activist, editor, publisher and community leader in Ottawa, Kansas. She was the president of the Kansas Freethought Association and, in later life, founded a "Natural Cure" sanitorium for 31 patients.[1] Semple was part of a group of people in Kansas who actively fought the intrusion of religion into United States government, when prominent religious leaders of the time were "pushing to amend the US Constitution and declare America a Christian nation."[2]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etta_Semple
1897 Socialist Society at Washburn College, Vrooman Brothers https://www.kshs.org/publicat/history/1986summer_whitehead.pdf
Ike Gilberg Born in 1870s Russia, moved to Missouri 1890s First appearance in Topeka in 1904ish
https://www.kshs.org/publicat/history/2018summer_rosenblum.pdf
"1,000 votes for a working class candidate possess more promise than the same number of strikes" Political revolution, nonviolent
not a philosopher, not published in Appeal to Reason wanted to make municipal government more efficient and fair
Appeal to Reason called him a great orator in 1910
voted out of Topeka Socialists in 1911, flaunted the rules Curry, pres of Topeka Socialists Local #1, may have been buddies with Mayor Billard
Started Topeka Socialists Local #2
Conflicts with Mayor Billard
Gilberg believed in Sundays off, 6 workdays/week Mayor Billard wanted City staff to work 7 days/week
Gilberg spoke on behalf of stagehands and pawnbrokers
Argued for establishment of municipal utilities Food warehouses maintained by city
Eva Harding physician only worked for women and Children 6th & MacVicar - park she donated for the children of the city Friend of Carrie Nation and Rex Stout's sisters
Did lots of advocacy for local Jewish community
Prosecuted for speaking out against conscription policies in WWI.
Emanuel and Marcet Haldeman-Julius and The Little Blue Books in Girard, KS
Socialists in Kansas
The railroad boom of the late 1800s led to a rush on natural resources - and coal was plentiful in Crawford County, Kansas. Much of the mining activity centered in Girard, with a half-dozen mining concerns operating at one time, employing hundreds of miners, and leading to complementary development in other towns like Pittsburg and also in Joplin, Missouri.
Because Girard was home to so many laborers, it was a perfect setting for pro-labor philosophy to take hold. Julius Augustus Wayland moved to Girard and founded the socialist newspaper 'Appeal to Reason' in 1897. The newspaper grew to national prominence, featuring writing from Jack London, "Mother" Jones, Upton Sinclair, and Eugene Debs. By 1910, the newspaper had reached a national circulation of more than 500,000 readers every week.
("In 1904, Appeal to Reason commissioned Upton Sinclair to write a novel about immigrant workers in the Chicago meatpacking houses. Sinclair's novel, titled The Jungle, appeared in 1905 as a serial in Appeal to Reason.") https://spartacus-educational.com/USAwaylandJ.htm https://inthesetimes.com/article/appeal-to-reason-in-these-times-socialist-newspaper-left
Life wasn't easy as a socialist publisher. The Appeal opposed World War I and the national conscription policy - and as a result, the federal government rescinded the publication's rights to send its editions by second-class mail. Wayland eventually committed suicide in 1912.
But things weren't over for the presses.
Emanual Julius grew up hoping that inexpensive literature could be made available to the masses. His journalism career brought him to Girard, Kansas, to work for Appeal to Reason. In Girard, Emanuel met Marcet Haldeman, social activist and contemporary of suffragette Jane Addams. Emanuel and Marcet had many shared philosophies, and married in 1916, becoming the Haldeman-Julius family. In 1919, the couple purchased the presses, and most importantly, the national mailing list for the Appeal, and in 1919, started publishing what would become the Little Blue Books - notecard-sized pamphlets of history, literature, art, and culture.
The publishers recruited writers from all over the country and the world to write about topics like, "
Building upon the success of Appeal to Reason, the Little Blue Books broadcast a common-sense socialist attitude within the national labor movement and contributed to the steady growth of labor-union membership in the first half of the 20th century.
By the 1970s, the Haldeman-Julius press had distributed more than 300 million copies of its Little Blue Books.
https://inthesetimes.com/article/appeal-to-reason-in-these-times-socialist-newspaper-left
http://www.ksgenweb.org/archives/crawford/history/1905/101.html
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/appeal-to-reason/index.htm
https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/marcet-and-emanuel-haldeman-julius/12077
More notes on the Louisiana Purchase.