This depiction of the Kansas-Missouri border war can be seen at the Watkins Museum of History in Lawrence. The painting “Blood-Stained Dawn,” was created by Ernst Ulmer around 1991. (Frank Barthell photo)
OPINION
This is part 1 in a series on the Border War between Kansas and Missouri leading up to the Civil War,
By Frank Barthell, special to the Kansas Reflector
When Kansans are reminded of the Kansas-Missouri border war, they might recall hard-fought battles on the hardwood or the gridiron. Coaches named Brown and Stewart and players including Manning and Peeler were among central figures in that war.
The actual border war was fought in the fields, woodlands, farms, and settlements of eastern Kansas and western Missouri. It was more brutal, bloody and consequential than anything you might remember from history class.
Far fewer names are recalled from that war.
“From 1856 to 1865, people in western Missouri and eastern Kansas, engaged in some of the worst guerrilla fighting ever witnessed on American soil, robbing, whipping and killing their neighbors in a vicious cycle of retaliatory violence and intimidation,” writes historian Jeremy Neely in “The Border Between Them.”
Neely’s exposition of the cultural and economic differences between the Kansas settlers from northern states (not just the New England Abolitionists) and those from Missouri, and other slaveholding southern states, is sobering. Populating a western frontier with such diametrically opposed foundational beliefs? What could possibly go wrong?
“What is so striking about the Border Region is how many things happened here on which the fate of the whole United States turned,” write Diane Eickhoff and Aaron Barnhart in their comprehensive travel guide “The Big Divide.” It includes 130 historical and cultural sites in Kansas and Missouri. Kudos to the authors for highlighting the smaller county historical sites along with the larger destination museums and battlefields.
Reenactors assemble to perform their version of John Brown’s Battle of Lone Jack. The 1856 clash was the first skirmish between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces in the border war. (Frank Barthell)
Compelling stories, it seems, can be found anywhere. But they require attention to the details for historians to unearth and verify them.
“Here at the museum we are always revising our knowledge of events, including the Lawrence Massacre, based on new evidence found, and looking at familiar accounts with fresh eyes,” said Will Haynes, director of engagement and learning at the Watkins Museum of History in Lawrence.
Border war historians are always offering fresh points of view and presenting new facts about events from several generations ago. Some happened, almost literally, in my backyard.
I wanted to know more. I identified, visited and spoke with historians, archivists and civic leaders in seven communities. Three in western Missouri; four in eastern Kansas.
I heard stories about a wide assortment of people from that period. We know of James Lane and William Quantrill. Others remain obscure, including Clarina Nichols, an editor of the “Quindaro Chindowan,” an anti-slavery, women’s suffrage newspaper in a Kansas town populated by Wyandot natives and freedom seekers. Their stories were told to me by descendants, now working to keep Quindaro on the map.
When you visit any community impacted by the horrific violence of this war, you’ll discover something in common — a committed group of locals keeping the stories and legacies alive.
The border war and the Civil War that inevitably followed were not “won then done.” We’re still feeling the consequences. We can’t, and shouldn’t, put that history in our rearview mirror.
Frank Barthell is a former video producer at the University of Kansas. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.