Guerrilla Warfare on the Kansas/Missouri Border

Background

There had to be a reason that the Southern political and military establishments were so set against the Union enlisting Colored troops into the Army. It turns out that there were several. The first was a deep-seated fear of slave uprisings against the Southern establishment spawned by the promise of freedom. With four million slaves in the South[1], it is easy to imagine a massacre of biblical proportions if all slaves were to join in a rebellion against their masters. The second was the absolute racism that gripped the southern populace telling them of their superiority over the inferior black beings. Cornish, in The Sable Arm, states “Many Kansans and Missourians opposed arming Negroes out of prejudice….”[2] The thought of living in equality with former slaves was as foreign to most Southerners as living on another planet. Finally, southerners had no idea how to manage the economy in the absence of chattel slavery. Their wealth and future income were dependent on the continuation of slave labor for the means of production. Southern slave owners had most of their wealth tied up in human capital and viewed them like cash.

Although this article covers, among other topics, the first instance of Colored and White troops engaged in a Unit level battle against one another in the civil war. The issue they contested was incubated by society for over 85 years, from the Declaration of Independence to debates over the very Constitution of the United States of America. In the Declaration, the phrase “That all men are created equal” and in the Constitution, Article I Section 9 allows for the prohibition of the importation of slaves after 1808.[3] These enabling proclamations would set the tone for what was to come. From before our founding, we find legislation repeatedly propels us forward to the inevitable clash of cultures that was the civil war. Each additional Congressional Act drives the opposite sides of the debate farther apart with increasing alacrity and fervency. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and 1789 established the mechanism whereby additional states would be inducted into the Union while at the same time mandating that they be free of slavery.[4] Five such Free States were created in the Northwest Territories.

The Missouri Compromise of 1820 established again, that territories of the Louisiana Purchase north of latitude 36° 30” and West of the Missouri state line would be free of slavery as Missouri was admitted by Congress as a slave state. Another agitation came by way of the U.S. Annexation of Texas in December of 1845 and another with the territorial acquisition of the great Southwest at the end of the Mexican/American war in 1848 by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.[5]

To try to allow for rail expansion in this vast new Western territory, Stephen A Douglas authored the Kansas/Nebraska Act of 1854, which repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, in favor of the idea of having the controversy over slavery settled locally through the concept of “popular sovereignty”, wherein the citizens of each territory would select slavery, or not, in their respective constitutions.  There have been many books written about how these various legislative events brought about “the late unpleasantness” as it is called euphemistically in the South. With the passing of the Kansas/Nebraska Act, Kansas saw the beginning of emigration that brought Missouri citizens flooding into Kansas temporarily, so they could vote for pro-slavery tickets in the statewide elections. This was done by these same Missouri citizens fraudulently to ensure slavery would be supported in the Kansas territory and eventually the State. At the same time, northern anti-slavery forces started the New England Emigrant Aid Company (NEEAC) which financed the trip to Kansas for thousands of anti-slavery northerners and supported them as they became established. This influx of homesteaders from the north eventually overwhelmed the temporary squatters from Missouri who had no nexus or right to vote in Kansas. The NEEAC was responsible for “allowing antislavery residents to outnumber their proslavery counterparts in the territory in less than two years after the Kansas-Nebraska Act.”[6]

There is not enough space here to report in detail the workings of each of these monumental pieces of legislation, but we must show the common thread running through them leading to the civil war and the reality experienced by the upwards of 200,000 Colored troops engaged in fighting for the Union Army, “to the sword,” for their freedom. Colored soldiers’ insistence on fighting for their and their family’s freedom and liberty infuriated rebel secessionists in Missouri and caused them to subject Colored soldiers to a different level of barbarity than that applied to White soldiers in the same battles. Irregular elements of the southern war effort, known as Missouri bushwhackers, as well as regular troops of the Confederate Army, pledged to show ‘no quarter’ to Colored soldiers, and if by some chance captured, would be returned to their masters, or sold into slavery on the block. Most Colored troops left on the battlefield were slaughtered by Confederates on the spot[7].

It is important here to spend time relating the various attitudes present in Kansas when discussing Black people in general. Many people had no intention of having free Black people even reside in the state of Kansas under any circumstances.[8] There was even a ballot measure passed (but never taking effect)[9] in the first Free-State Constitutional Convention stating that free Blacks would be prohibited from inhabiting the State of Kansas. It is interesting to note that while Kansas boasted about six hundred people of color at the start of the war, Missouri had 115,000 slaves, 20,000 of whom resided in the counties that bordered Kansas.[10] Kansas citizens were afraid that there might be a rush of Kansas-bound Missouri slaves if they were welcomed as freemen in Kansas. Others were abolitionists plain and simple. They wanted slaves from Missouri to come to Kansas immediately and become freemen and women of color. Some, like the abolitionist John Brown, exhibited the fanaticism of the radicalized free staters. He waged a war against slavery from Kansas beginning in 1856 and culminated in his defeat in the raid at the Harpers Ferry Arsenal. Even others did not believe in slavery but were firmly convinced of the racial inferiority of blacks.

Because of Kansas’s importance as a symbol to the slaveholding south as well as the slave-free north after the Kansas/Nebraska Act, we see wholesale agitation for both positions by politicians and citizens who subscribe to these polar ideologies. Kansans and Missourians during the Bleeding Kansas years after 1856 and ending just before the Civil War in 1861 when Kansas was admitted to the Union by Congress as a free state, lived through a precursor of the war in actions by both sides trying to impress their philosophy regarding slaveholding on their fellow citizens. People like John Brown, James Lane, James Montgomery, and on the pro-slavery side Charles Hamilton, William Quantrill, and Bill Anderson all used their followers to perpetrate violence against the other side in the name of the government they supported.[11] This period of years saw hundreds killed and wounded on both sides, all prior to the outbreak of war. Towns were attacked and fired. Important citizens were tested to see which side held their loyalty. All-in-all, the Bloody Kansas period anticipated the civil war in its ferocity as well as the fervency of its leaders. Even in this period, the participation of Colored freemen in the fight on the Jayhawker side was an affront that stuck in the craw of Missouri pro-slavery Bushwhackers. Hatred in this period grew to monumental proportions. Abolitionists were adamant about freeing Missouri slaves. John E. Stewart a former Methodist Minister, in a letter to his friend Thaddeus Hyatt discussed his actions in this regard:

“For I am in the habit of taking my team into Mo. Under the pretense of buying something, say pigs, [illegible], potatoes. &c., &c., get into a conversation with some slaves, find out some who wish to escape, appoint a meeting, show them in the bottom of the wagon, give them some weapons to defend themselves with. And then put it through for life, & sometimes our success depends on the fleetness of our horses, sometimes on a steady hand, when the revolver cracks.”[12]

Although John Brown was the most famous, John Stewart was one of many such abolitionists who “stole” Slaves and took them to Kansas to be protected by the underground railroad in Lawrence and other towns. Acts such as these pressed Missouri slaveholders to fear the Kansas abolitionist mindset and to want to protect their property at all costs. In the end, the fight over Kansas statehood did not rise sympathy for slaves but engendered antipathy for their slave-holding Missouri neighbors.[13] Although many slaves were spirited off in these raids, many more left Missouri under their own steam and went to Kansas to be sheltered by the abolitionists of the NEEAS who operated the underground railroad.

Start of the Civil War

Senator and Brigadier General James Henry Lane of Kansas in January 1862 at a rally in Leavenworth Kansas stated with his usual bombast, “I may lose my standing in the church, but I tell you I take stock in every negro insurrection, and I don’t care how many there are.”  If Southerners object to being killed by negroes, he continued, “let them lay down their arms.”^[14]

Lane was known to President Lincoln as a man of action. Lincoln made Lane a brigadier-general of volunteers and authorized him to recruit his brigade, train them, and get into the war as quickly as possible.[15] With this charge, and according to Lane, a direct conversation with Lincoln about the enterprise, Lane returned to Kansas, a man on a mission. He strove to implement his control over the “Kansas Brigade” and to recruit six more regiments. His forays into neighboring Missouri in the fall of 1861 were very inflammatory, killing suspected successionists, taking or destroying their property, and taking their slaves. Lane did not enjoy the backing of the Kansas Governor, Charles Robinson, who complained to General Freemont, Lane’s superior.[16] Freemont liked Lane’s direct approach and through his inaction, allowed Lane to continue with his recruiting efforts. Lane for his part, again, believing he had at least tacit approval from Lincoln[17], organized a robust recruiting effort to fill a regiment with Colored soldiers. In the face of mild rebukes and instructions to the contrary from Washington, Lane continued to tell Colored soldiers that they would be provisioned by and mustered into the Union Army.

Some of the enlisted ‘volunteers’ came from raids into Missouri where would-be soldiers were liberated from their masters. Others came from runaways already in Kansas, and still, others were freemen from other northern states. Lane did not quibble about the source, only the numbers. Appointed “Commissioner of Recruiting in the Department of Kansas,” in the summer of 1861, Lane raced back to Kansas from Congress to implement his plan for a Colored regiment.[18] On August 5, 1862, Lane telegraphed Secretary of War Stanton that recruiting efforts in Kansas were going so well that he anticipated enough recruits for 4 regular regiments and 2 Colored regiments.[19] The next day Lane followed up his missive to Stanton with another clarifying that he was enlisting Colored troops under the auspices of the Second Confiscation Act of Congress.

Volunteers were offered freedom by General Lane for themselves and their families if successful in the war. Documented reasons for Colored enlistment can be found in Lane’s General Order number 3, wherein he guaranteed freedom to volunteers and their families of successionist masters if they had not born arms against the Union nor given aid and comfort to the enemy.[20] This was true, especially in Western Missouri, where slaves were susceptible to this message. The proximity of freedom in Kansas along with a ready recruiting station for Colored troops was a clarion to all the 20,000 and more slaves residing in the Missouri/Kansas border counties at that time.

As commander of the Western Department, General Freemont recognized the strategic importance of the Mississippi River. He also knew that Missouri was key to the Union effort to take and hold that resource. Missouri did not secede from the Union but had many thousands of Confederate sympathizers and thousands of slaveholders. With this amount of hostility, Freemont deemed the state to be ungovernable and declared martial law. As an aside in this martial law order, he included: “and their slaves, if any they have, are hereby declared freemen.” Of course, this early in the war, on August 30, 1861, Freemont had no authorization from Washington to have made this pronouncement. Freemont was taken to task by Lincoln and asked in a letter to trim his proclamation to comply with the Confiscation Act of August 6, wherein congress authorized Union forces to free slaves who were actively being employed in any capacity by secessionist forces. Freemont ignored Lincoln’s letter, instead sending his wife as an emissary to try to persuade the President of the value of Freemont’s proclamation.[21] The diplomacy failed, and Lincoln formally ordered Freemont to rescind his emancipation order.[22] The bad blood between Kansas Jayhawkers and Missouri Bushwhackers that began with the Kansas/Nebraska Act in 1854, continued through the bloody Kansas era and matured into a steely hatred as Freemont declared martial law and Lane’s Colored troops began to form the 1^st Kansas Colored Infantry.

Another illustration of this hatred was clear when on 18 May 1863, after a skirmish between Missouri guerrillas led by Thomas Livingston and a Union supply train guarded by Kansas 1^st Colored Infantry troops near Baxter Springs, Kansas, refused to exchange Colored prisoners from the 1^st Kansas Colored Infantry for a like number of captured bushwhackers. On inspection of the battlefield, Col. Williams of the 1^st Kansas Colored, found troops with their “brains beaten out with clubs, and the bloody weapons left by their sides, and their bodies most horribly mutilated.”[23] There were many instances to come where such atrocities were repeated. In the Official Record (O.R.) one will find documented cases of Colored troops given no quarter and slaughtered on the field.

The very first exchanges of bullets between White and Black combatants in the civil war took place on the extreme western edge of the conflict at that time; the Kansas/Missouri border. Ironically, these earliest exchanges of hostilities were between participants recognized by neither side as soldiers in their official Armies. There had been many exchanges between Black and White individuals in various skirmishes and battles before but never as an organized combat unit of Colored infantry against an equally organized white enemy. This first engagement on October 29, 1862, known as Island Mound, established the fighting credentials of Colored troops when one of the rebel leaders allowed; “the Black Devils fought like tigers…not one would surrender though they[we] had tried to take a prisoner.”^[24]

In the battle of Island Mound between Kansas 1^st Volunteer Colored Militia men and Missouri bushwhackers, on October 29, 1862, the guerrillas set the tone for what became a fierce and bloody war pitting two hundred forty Black troops and eight hundred Missouri raiders against one another in a life-and-death struggle just east of the Kansas/Missouri border. The Missouri confederate extra-military raiders found hatred one of the weapons used to keep going in the face of defeat and retirement from the field. The Kansas Colored troops used the promise of freedom for themselves and their families as motivation to excel in battle while understanding that they would have to fight to the death to be free. They encountered hatred and vitriol from guerrillas, regular confederate troops, the southern public, and even some union White people. The collective actions and inactions of the Government over the years since its founding, as well as reinforcement by the reality of fighting the Colored infantry face-to-face and losing to them, set the stage for extreme prejudice. This hatred acted to stoke the fire of sedition, treason, and criminal behavior by bushwhackers only to cloak such behavior in the semi-legitimacy of “the war.”

Another battle, an exemplar of the fortitude of Colored troops, was the battle of Honey Springs. In this battle, General Blunt intended to confront the brigade of Confederate General Cooper. With the 1^st Kansas Colored troops under Colonel Williams anchoring the center of Blunt’s line, the Union forces closed within about forty yards of the confederate skirmish line when both sides exchanged fire at close range almost simultaneously. The Colored Union troops stood and fought until the confederate line broke. General Blunt wrote in his after-action report that the 1^st Kansas Colored had “particularly distinguished itself; they fought like veterans, and preserved their line unbroken throughout the engagement. Their coolness and bravery I have never seen surpassed; They were in the hottest of the fight, and opposed to Texas troops twice their number, whom they completely routed.”[25]

Another testament to the hellish vitriol spat from the Missouri border was Quantrill’s raid on Lawrence, Kansas. William Quantrill’s Raiders reacting to the death of four of their female relatives and the injuring of several others, raided Lawrence, Kansas. Union General Thomas Ewing, knowing that the female members of the Bushwhackers families were providing aid and sustenance to Quantrill’s men, ordered them jailed in Kansas City. Ewing arrested eight sisters, cousins, wives, and sweethearts of notable members of the Quantrill band of Bushwhackers. Their incarceration was an effort to deprive Quantrill’s men of a base of support in the area. In a terrible accident on August 13, 1863, the building wherein they were being held by the authorities collapsed, and four of them were crushed and another four were injured, at least one seriously.[26] On August 21^st, just over a week after the accident, Quantrill and his men rode into Lawrence, Kansas, and fired the town killing 150 to 180 men most of whom were unarmed. The reason given was the killing of their women in the Jail in Kansas City a week before. It was widely known that Quantrill and his men plied their trade as thieves, gunmen, rascals, and general reprobates, all under the guise of helping the confederate cause and opposing the Yankee Union Army, all in support of slavery.

Sentiment of Non-Combatants

Distinct groups had different sentiments and feelings about Colored troops in the Army. Most northerners at the beginning of the war did not know how enlisted Colored troops would affect the war. Some believed people of color would be too timid to fight like White men. Some believed that Colored troops in the Army would enrage the southern population to make them fight harder by raising the stakes from just the restoration of the Union to the elimination of slavery. The newspapers were full of stories about Colored soldiers and what would happen. The experience of bloody Kansas since 1856 prepared the civilian population for General Lane and his organization to begin the process of bringing Colored troops into the Kansas militia.[27] There was little comment from the citizenry other than approval.

Kansans and Missourians with Southern sympathies opposed arming the negroes out of hatred, prejudice, and white supremacy beliefs. Of course, slaveholders feared the loss of control over their ‘property.’ The economic loss was certainly top of mind but would have been secondary to the thought of equality. Having to live in a society wherein people of color had the same advantages and privileges as whites, including the franchise to vote, was simply unthinkable to a preponderance of southerners.[28] Southern whites had such a low opinion of Negroes due to their experience and proximity to uneducated slaves that it was just not thinkable that they would live together as equals. Politicians as well as most citizens believed the introduction of Colored soldiers in the Union Army would certainly lead to wholesale servile insurrection in the South.[29] The previous slave revolts in South Carolina, Georgia, and Haiti in earlier times convinced plantation owners of such events’ danger and terror potential.[30]

Sentiment of Governments

The U.S. Government, Mr. Lincoln, in particular, did not want the prime directive of restoring the Union to be diluted with the message of emancipation or any other message about Colored people. Congress through passing the first and second Confiscation Acts encouraged the recruitment of former Southern slaves by allowing the President to use them in the defense of the Union in the armed forces in whatever way was most beneficial to the war effort.[31] Lincoln declined to utilize the tools given to him by congress for the first 2 years of the war. Until the Emancipation Proclamation in January of 1863 Colored troops were an oddity manifested primarily in the Kansas Militia by the 1^st Kansas Colored Infantry, fighting in the border war between Missouri and Kansas against guerrillas, outlaws, and bushwhackers. The battle of Island Mound in October 1862 in Missouri was the first major engagement of Colored troops in the war. Senators like James H. Lane were recognized by Lincoln as being capable of evaluating the idea of using Colored troops in the Army. The President encouraged a somewhat clandestine experiment to be conducted in Kansas to measure the reaction of the many constituencies that could sway public opinion on the matter. The Kansas/Missouri border was a veritable petri dish swimming with all the components needed to ignite all the bad possibilities from this idea or prove that it was feasible and would shorten the war. Overall, the U.S. Government in the first two years of the war did not use Colored troops for two reasons. Avoiding at all costs any negative influence on the border slave states that had not seceded from the union was paramount. Having any more States secede and add troops to the confederate army would have been a development complicating the prosecution of the war by orders of magnitude. Without a buffer of non-seceding states between the confederacy and the Northern States, the Government would require perhaps another several hundred thousand troops to guard the borders. Secondly, Lincoln did not want to give Southerners additional motivation to fight. If servile insurrection developed and became a problem in the South, where would it end? The Government of the U.S. let alone the Confederate Government was not equipped in any way to manage over four million slaves in full revolt against whites and the institution of slavery.

The Confederate Government was totally focused on the second concern of the Union Government. Servile Insurrection was uppermost in the mind of the political establishment of the Confederate States. For the same reasons as the Union Government but on the opposite side of the issue, the Confederates feared Colored troops in the military. If slaves were to get the idea that Colored people could do well in the military and have success against the Confederate Army, an uprising might be assured. A second issue for the South was driven by economics. Southerners were inculcated into their lifestyle being supported by slave labor. Slaves were indispensable in the production of food and cash crops in the South. There were also thousands of Black tradesmen living and working in the cities but belonging to slave master plantation owners who ‘jobbed out’ their trained tradesman slaves. Over 40% of the population were slaves and about 30% of households in the deep south owned slaves in 1860.[32] A total of four million Colored people were enslaved primarily in the South at the start of the civil war.

Conclusion

Did the enlistment and participation of Colored troops in Kansas regiments cause a more intense reaction by hostile actors from Missouri in 1862 and 1863? It is known that secesh households in Missouri, holding slaves or not, feared Jayhawkers barging into the state to liberate slaves and forage for property and foodstuffs. Sometimes this activity approached the criminal in treatment of confederate sympathizers even by quasi-government militia men from Kansas. In turn, Missouri guerrillas and bushwhackers ran operations against Union sympathizers living along the Missouri/Kansas border. They perpetrated thousands of individual acts of cruelty and terror in physical assaults on persons and destruction of real property while appropriating personal property for use of the organization or converted to personal use. In any other circumstance, this activity would be called theft, murder, terror, and mayhem. The persons responsible would be called thieves, murderers, and assassins. These organized bands of criminals along the Kansas/Missouri border were motivated by racism, ignorance, revenge, white supremacist ideology, and greed. After the battle of Honey Springs, Colored troops surveying confederate captured stores found five hundred sets of manacles designated for any Colored troops captured by confederates to facilitate their return to their masters or to the auction block.[33] Clearly, there was a preoccupation with how to treat Colored Union troops either when it came to giving no quarter if they surrendered or if captured to put them in chains for the final transport to bondage. If there had been no Colored troops recruited and enlisted in Kansas, there would have been no need for special provisions for them in the eventuality of battle on the western front.

Southern fears about Colored troops in the Union Army came true apart from widespread servile insurrection. Slaves were emancipated and often deserted their masters as soon as the opportunity presented itself. Thousands of slaves escaped to Kansas from Missouri in 1862 and 1863. Many of these runaways ended up in the 1^st Kansas Colored Infantry and fought throughout the war in Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, and the Indian Territory. These men fought well and bravely to the accolades of their officers and non-commissioned officers. Finally, the 1^st Kansas Colored Infantry suffered casualties far above the norm. in totality, they lost one hundred eighty-three enlisted men and five officers killed in action. In addition, one hundred sixty-five enlisted and one officer died of disease.[34] To this day appropriate accolades have not been granted the 1^st Kansas Colored Infantry for their outstanding service to the nation in the Western Trans Mississippi theatre of the civil war.

On 1 May 1863, the Confederate Congress passed the Retaliatory Act, which authorized the death penalty for every White officer in any Black unit fighting the Confederacy. The act also required captured Blacks to be delivered to state authorities for punishment under state law. According to the Kansas State Historical Society, “During the war, the regiment included one percent of Black troops in the Union Army but suffered six percent of black combat deaths.”[35] Without a doubt, the enlistment and deployment of Colored troops in Kansas excited the Southern establishment and citizenry to exercise extreme measures based on fears engendered by their existence.

Bibliography

Primary

“Benjamin Fullager Letter to Brother – May 14, 1862 – Community and Conflict – the Impact of the Civil War in the Ozarks – Missouri Digital Heritage Hosted Collections.” Accessed October 20, 2022. https://mdh.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/mack/id/4560/rec/1.

“Braden, David R. Misc. Collection – State Archives – Kansas Historical Society.” Accessed November 13, 2022. https://www.kshs.org/archives/46729.

Bureau, US Census. “1860 Census: Population of the United States.” Census.gov. Accessed December 15, 2022. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1864/dec/1860a.html.

———. “Decennial Census Official Publications.” Census.gov. Accessed December 15, 2022. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/decade/decennial-publications.html.

Christ, Mark K. “‘To Let You Know That I Am Alive’: Civil War Letters of Capt. John R. Graton, First Kansas Colored Infantry Regiment.” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly 78, no. 1 (2019): 57–80.

“Community and Conflict » Archive » Battle of Mine Creek.” Accessed October 20, 2022. https://ozarkscivilwar.org/archives/333.

“Community and Conflict » Archive » Benjamin Fullager Papers.” Accessed October 20, 2022. https://ozarkscivilwar.org/archives/3358.

The Lyman Gibson Bennett Collection. “Community and Conflict » Archive » The Lyman Gibson Bennett Collection.” State Historical Society of Missouri Research Center. Accessed October 21, 2022. https://ozarkscivilwar.org/archives/675.

“Correspondence of Warren and Mary A. Day – State Archives – Kansas Historical Society.” Accessed November 13, 2022. https://www.kshs.org/archives/48654.

Department, United States War. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1880.

“Hiram Hill Collection – State Archives – Kansas Historical Society.” Accessed November 13, 2022. https://www.kshs.org/archives/40382.

King, Susan Baker. “Susan Baker King Taylor, Reminiscences of Life with the 33d US Colored Troops | EHISTORY.” EHistory: The Ohio State University. Accessed November 21, 2022. https://ehistory.osu.edu/articles/susan-baker-king-taylor-reminiscences-life-33d-us-colored-troops.

“Lewis Bodwell, Frontier Preacher, 1 – Kansas Historical Society.” Accessed November 13, 2022. https://www.kshs.org/p/lewis-bodwell-frontier-preacher-1/12947.

National Archives. “The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,” August 15, 2016. https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/guadalupe-hidalgo.

Office, United States Adjutant-General’s. Official Army Register of the Volunteer Force of the United States Army for the Years 1861, ’62, ’63, ’64, ’65 …: Territories of Washington, New Mexico, Nebraska, Colorado, Dakota; Veteran Reserve Corps, U.S. Veteran Volunteers (First Army Corps), U.S. Volunteers, U.S. Colored Troops. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1867.

Redkey, Edwin S. A Grand Army of Black Men: Letters from African-American Soldiers in the Union Army 1861-1865. Cambridge University Press, 1992.

“Samuel Lyle & Florella Brown Adair Family Collection – State Archives – Kansas Historical Society.” Accessed November 13, 2022. https://www.kshs.org/archives/40161.

“Sherman Bodwell Diaries and Notebook – State Archives – Kansas Historical Society.” Accessed November 13, 2022. https://www.kshs.org/archives/40283.

“The Emigrant Aid Company Parties of 1854 – Kansas Historical Society.” Accessed November 13, 2022. https://www.kshs.org/p/the-emigrant-aid-company-parties-of-1854/12933.

“Thomas C. Stevens Correspondence – State Archives – Kansas Historical Society.” Accessed November 13, 2022. https://www.kshs.org/archives/225860.

United States. War Dept, United States. War Records Office, United States. Record and Pension Office, United States. Congress. House, Robert N. (Robert Nicholson) Scott, H. M. (Henry Martyn) Lazelle, George B. (George Breckenridge) Davis, et al. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Washington, Govt. Print. Off., 1880. http://archive.org/details/warrebellionaco17offigoog.

“U.S. Constitution | Constitution Annotated | Congress.Gov | Library of Congress.” Accessed December 4, 2022. https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/.

“Welcome to Civil War on the Western Border | Civil War on the Western Border: The Missouri-Kansas Conflict, 1854-1865.” Accessed November 13, 2022. https://civilwaronthewesternborder.org/.

Wells, Thomas C. “Letters of a Kansas Pioneer, 2 – Kansas Historical Society.” Kansas Historical Quarterly Magazine. Kansas Historical Society, August 5, 1936. https://www.kshs.org/p/letters-of-a-kansas-pioneer-2/12689.

Younger, Cole. The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself. Electronic resource. Chicago: The Henneberry Company, 1903. http://kclibrary.lib.overdrive.com/ContentDetails.htm?ID=46CD1EC8-5ADC-4761-A921-8EBBB043EFD0.

Secondary

Britton, Wiley. The Civil War on the Border… G. P. Putnam’s sons, 1899.

Cornish, Dudley Taylor. The Sable Arm: Black Troops in the Union Army, 1861-1865. University Press of Kansas, 1987.

Dobak, William A. Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862-1867. Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, United States Army, 2011.

Earle, Jonathan Halperin, and Diane Mutti Burke. Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri: The Long Civil War on the Border. University Press of Kansas, 2013.

Eddins, Crystal Nicole. “Runaways, Repertoires, and Repression: Marronnage and the Haitian Revolution, 1766–1791.” Journal of Haitian Studies 25, no. 1 (2019): 4–38.

Etcheson, Nicole. Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era. University Press of Kansas, 2004.

Fellman, Michael. Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War. Oxford University Press, 1990.

Goodrich, Thomas. War to the Knife: Bleeding Kansas, 1854-1861. U of Nebraska Press, 2004.

“Kansas History – Spring 1989 – Kansas Historical Society.” Accessed December 11, 2022. https://www.kshs.org/p/kansas-history-spring-1989/15224.

Lull, Robert W. Civil War General and Indian Fighter James M. Williams: Leader of the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry and the 8th U.S. Cavalry. 1st ed. War and the Southwest Series, no. 12. Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 2013.

Mahoney, Micheal, and Kansas City Public Library (Kansas City, Mo.), eds. The Missouri-Kansas Economic Border War. Electronic resource (video). Kansas City Public Library Signature Events. Kansas City, Mo: Kansas City Public Library, 2013.

Michael E Carter. First Kansas Colored Volunteers: Contributions of Black Union Soldiers in the Trans-Mississippi West. Fort Leavenworth, Kansas: US Army Command and General Staff College, 2004. http://archive.org/details/DTIC_ADA428662.

“New England Emigrant Aid Company | Civil War on the Western Border: The Missouri-Kansas Conflict, 1854-1865.” Accessed December 4, 2022. https://civilwaronthewesternborder.org/encyclopedia/new-england-emigrant-aid-company.

Onuf, Peter S. Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance. Indiana University Press, 1987.

Speer, John. Life of Gen. James H. Lane: “The Liberator of Kansas”: With Corroborative Incidents of Pioneer History. J. Speer, 1896.

Spurgeon, Ian Michael. Soldiers in the Army of Freedom: The 1st Kansas Colored, the Civil War’s First African American Combat Unit. Campaigns & Commanders, volume 47. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014.

Syrett, John. “The Second Act: Divided Republican Support and Flawed Result.” In The Civil War Confiscation Acts: Failing to Reconstruct the South, 35–54. Fordham University Press, 2005. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13x0830.7.

Trudeau, Noah Andre. Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War 1862-1865. Little, Brown, 1999.

“Warrant for the Arrest of Gen. John Reid | Civil War on the Western Border: The Missouri-Kansas Conflict, 1854-1865.” Accessed November 10, 2022. https://civilwaronthewesternborder.org/islandora/object/civilwar%3A7156.

Williams, Frederick D. The Northwest Ordinance: Essays on Its Formulation, Provisions, and Legacy. MSU Press, 2012.

---

[1] US Census Bureau, “1860 Census: Population of the United States,” Census.gov, accessed December 15, 2022, https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1864/dec/1860a.html.

[2] Dudley Taylor Cornish, The Sable Arm: Black Troops in the Union Army, 1861-1865 (University Press of Kansas, 1987). 75.

[3] “U.S. Constitution | Constitution Annotated | Congress.Gov | Library of Congress,” accessed December 4, 2022, https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/.

[4] Peter S. Onuf, Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance (Indiana University Press, 1987). I-IV.

[5] Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo [Exchange copy]; 2/2/1848; Perfected Treaties, 1778 – 1945; General Records of the United States Government, Record Group 11; National Archives Building, Washington, DC.

[6] “New England Emigrant Aid Company | Civil War on the Western Border: The Missouri-Kansas Conflict, 1854-1865,” accessed December 4, 2022, https://civilwaronthewesternborder.org/encyclopedia/new-england-emigrant-aid-company.

[7] Noah Andre Trudeau, Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War 1862-1865 (Little, Brown, 1999). 193.

[8] Correspondent, “The Perplexing Question Will be Negroes,” New York Times, November 5, 1855.

[9] Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (University Press of Kansas, 2004). 75.

[10] Richard B. Sheridan, “From Slavery in Missouri to Freedom in Kansas: The Influx of Black Fugitives and Contrabands Into Kansas, 1854-1865,”  Kansas History – Spring 1989, accessed December 11, 2022, https://www.kshs.org/p/kansas-history-spring-1989/15224.

[11] Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas. 188-94.

[12] John E. Stwart to Thaddeus Hyatt, December 29, 1859, Thaddeus Hyatt Collection, Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka, Kansas. (Hereafter cited as KSHS).

[13] Ian Michael Spurgeon, Soldiers in the Army of Freedom: The 1st Kansas Colored, the Civil War’s First African American Combat Unit, Campaigns & Commanders, volume 47 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014).

[14] Cornish, The Sable Arm. 71.

[15] United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (O.R.) (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1880), ser. III, vol. I, 280-1.

[16] Spurgeon, Soldiers in the Army of Freedom. 30-2.

[17] John Speer, Life of Gen. James H. Lane: “The Liberator of Kansas”: With Corroborative Incidents of Pioneer History (Garden City, Kansas: J. Speer, 1896). 261-2.

[18] O.R., ser. III, vol. II, 959.

[19] Ibid., ser. III, vol. II, 294

[20] Leavenworth Daily Conservative, August 28, 1862

[21] Spurgeon, Soldiers in the Army of Freedom. 33-4.

[22] O.R., ser. I, vol. III, 466-67.

[23] William A. Dobak, Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862-1867 (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, United States Army, 2011). 196.

[24] Trudeau, Like Men of War. 6.

[25] O.R., ser. I, vol. XXII, pt. I, 448.

[26] O.R., XLI (2), 76-7

[27] Conservative (Lawrence, Kansas), October 6, 1861; September 14, 1861.

[28] Cornish, The Sable Arm. 75.

[29] Trudeau, Like Men of War. 30-1.

[30] Crystal Nicole Eddins, “Runaways, Repertoires, and Repression: Marronnage and the Haitian Revolution, 1766–1791,” Journal of Haitian Studies 25, no. 1 (2019): 4–38.

[31] John Syrett, “The Second Act: Divided Republican Support and Flawed Result,” in The Civil War Confiscation Acts: Failing to Reconstruct the South (Fordham University Press, 2005), 35–54, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13x0830.7.

[32] U.S. Census Bureau, “1860 Census.”

[33] Spurgeon, Soldiers in the Army of Freedom, 174.

[34] “First Kansas Colored Infantry Engagements – Kansas Historical Society,” accessed December 16, 2022, https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/first-kansas-colored-infantry-engagements/19203.

[35] Ibid.