Customer Reviews

Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era

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"Bleeding Kansas", 150 years after the event this phrase still causes strong feelings. Very few are neutral on Kansas even now. In trying to solve the question of slavery expanding into the territories, Congress left it to the settlers allowing Congress to maintain a fragile peace on the national level. On the Kansas Missouri border, this policy caused the Civil War come early and stay late. Popular Sovereignty pictured peaceful elections decided by local voters in a spirit of good fellowship and respect. Popular Sovereignty was stuffing the ballot box, intimidation, murder and small battles between "settlers" imported by both sides. Immigrant Aid Societies, Breecher's Bibles, Red Legs and Jayhawkers all entered our vocabulary. Jim Lane and John Brown become national figures. William Quantrill, Cole Younger and Frank James all start their travels in Kansas. While we have names and strong feelings on "Bleeding Kansas" or "The Troubles" as Missourians called this time, most of us do not have a good grasp of the events.
Nicole Etcheson fills this void. She manages to keep national politics, regional responses, local politics and the fighting in perspective without overwhelming the reader. With her sure narration, we walk the halls of Congress, sit in meetings at the White House, raise money for immigrant aid, ride with John Brown or just try to get a crop in. Along the way, she refuses to take side! The author uses each side's ideas and justifications for their actions without moralizing or condemning. This gives us a real insight into the thinking of Missourians crossing the border to vote in elections. While helping us to understand the actions of the New Englanders that contributed thousands of dollars to resettle "free soil" families while buying rifles. Neither side is completely right or wrong. Anti-slavery farmers are no less raciest than slave owners nor are they more likely to aid runaway slaves. This history of several political movements, a failing national policy, a shooting war and political double-dealing upsetting even by contemporary standards. A strong story line is the change in racial attitudes of the free soil movement. They move from a standard raciest set of laws to a state that almost welcomed Black settlers.
The book is never boring and all of the threads are easy to follow. A very enjoyable read, informative and leaves us with a balanced understanding of Bleeding Kansas. While detailed, the author manages to keep moving and never bogs down on a single point. The portraits of the participants, while often unflattering, are always honest. The illustrations are well chosen and in the right place. The footnotes are informative and have a page reference making them easy to find. The bibliography is excellent with more books on the subject than I would ever wish to read.
This is a book that all students of the Civil War need to read and is a required read for those interested in the Trans-Mississippi.

Nicole Etcheson does a masterful job of weaving the chaotic detail of the early Kansas chaos into a cogent history. She convincingly demonstrates that the stories we heard in high school of the motivations underlying the conflict were over generalized at best, and usually misleading. Her narrative is lively and her insights are enlightening. This book should be read by anyone interested in the events leading to the Civil War.

Professor Etcheson's book is a thorough, objective view of "Bleeding Kansas," the years leading up to the Civil War (1854 to 1861.) She makes the politics of the time as interesting as the armed combat between the (Kansas/New England) Abolitionist and the (Missouri/Southern) Border Ruffian. Etcheson also looks at all points of view with a frank and honest eye, not lionizing the anti-slavery faction or villainizing the pro-slavery faction.

It is by far the most up-to-date and historically accurate book on this important era. A must-read for the Civil War buff and for those in Kansas and Missouri to understand the integral part the region played in setting the stage for the War Between the States.

This is a case of the author not being able to see the forest for the trees. The trees in this case being the events that took place, the who, what, where and when. The forest being the setting in which these events took place, and the motivations of the individual participants.

We begin to suspect we're in trouble in the first two paragraphs of the introduction, where the author admits that as a graduate student doing research in another area of pre-Civil War history, she found herself puzzled that she found so many references to Kansas. Um, hello, you're a graduate student in American history and you still are not aware of Bleeding Kansas? I found that rather incredible.

I also found incredible the way she almost completely mischaracterizes Stephen Douglas. To judge from this book, you might think that Douglas was some starry-eyed dreamer who introduced the concept of popular sovereignty from some vision he had concerning the philosophical underpinnings of liberty. Um, once again, hello, you are a graduate student in history and you still are not aware that Stephen Douglas was not a dreamer, he was a hard-nosed politician, who tossed out the concept of popular sovereignty merely as a sop to the South so that he could secure a northern passage for a transcontinental railway in order to benefit his constituents in Illinois?

And this is just the first few dozen pages.

So if you're looking for the motivations of Jim Lane, John Brown and all the other players on the Bleeding Kansas scene, you will find little of it here.

That said, however, she does do a good job with the trees. She has obviously done a lot of research and has dug up quite a bit of detail. This book is particularly good in filling in the gaps between the skirmishes of 1855-56 and the eventual sack of Lawrence by Quantrill's raiders in 1863, a period that is somewhat glossed over in other sources.

My recommendation would be this. If you are new to the subject, find another source as your introduction. But if you already have some background in this area, then you will probably find it worthwhile to give this one a look.

This is a very good general history of the era with significant details to entice more research. It is well written and touches on part of the History of Kansas that is often overlooked as the precursor to the American Civil War. Hope that Etcheson continues the work on the era and perhaps follows in the footsteps of a noted early 1900s, empowered female historian of Kansas, Anna Heloise Abel whose work is incredibly accurate especially as it has to do with the overwhelming conspiracy to extinguish the titles Indian tribes held in the permanent Indian Territory of Kansas.

This an excellent account of a complicated political dispute.
the author gives a clear and logical history of bleeding Kansas.
After reading this book, I finally felt like I understood the
issues involved.The author includes lots of information
about how the people of the antebellum period felt to help
the reader understand the conflict. I read alot of popular
history and this is the best I've read in quite awhile.Hats
off to Etcheson for this excellent work. I look foward to
her next work.

This book made me look at the Civil War in ways that I've never seen it. It was unforgetable and a great read.

It seems to me that the author overrelies on newspaper accounts in her research, which are often notoriously unreliable, especially if far removed from the events that are being described. In addition, newspaper accounts during the Border War were characterized by extreme bias, and Etcheson quotes them often without commenting on inaccuracies and distortions, which only reinforces their error. She is sometimes coy in the narrative mode, so much so that even in the description of John Brown ruthlessly hacking to death and shooting the Doyles at Pottatawatomie Creek, she fails to mention who is killing and mutilating, only referring to an "angular old man" in charge and does this for fully a page of text, then only referring to the maniac Brown indirectly, as "old man Brown." What "old man Brown"? She should specify the killer. What is more incredible, no, flabbergasting to a degree, is that she doesn't mention that Brown is killing the three Doyles because they carry warrants for John Brown's arrest for intimidating a Kansas Territorial supreme court judge, Sterling Cato--a failure in precise research it seems to me. She also uses the old hackneyed propaganda terms, "bushwhackers," instead of the more accurate, value-neutral term "guerrillas" in describing Missouri insurgents, and also, employs propagandist Horace Greeley's coined, centuries-old, favorite inaccurate and misleading term, "Border Ruffians" and "ruffians" to describe the Missouri elites' actions in Kansas, an unforgivable, antiquated lapse by someone affecting objectivity. Etcheson's one-sided, description of the Border War is unconvincing to those who don't share her "liberal" interpretation of events. After 150 years of winners' histories, it's time for a lot more objectivity by our "professional" historians. They should tell it like it is, not how they wish it to "appear" to the uninitiated. Dr. Etcheson is a fine person, but her liberal slant on the Border War needs to be noted. I must admit that it is what we Missourians have learned to expect from academia in general. We also believe it is an unfairly slanted perspective on the real stuggle along the border.