Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1998
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 4, Fall 1998, pp. 342-43
Abstract
This is the first detailed examination of conditions in Kansas Territory in almost forty years. Although library shelves are crowded with dramatic accounts of border warfare, until now few scholars have ventured into the manuscript and census materials to profile all the groups represented among migrants to the territory during this turbulent period. Gunja SenGupta has produced an intriguing and well researched portrait of life in the territory which will invite future scholars to delve even further into the subject.
SenGupta argues that the free state and slave state forces in Kansas acted out of mixed motives with mixed results. Although the freel slave polarities in the territory were well-defined, all the settlers shared a common political rhetoric of republicanism and a common set of motivations beginning with the desire for land and material advancement. Thus, proslavery settlers expected that their chattel would bring them wealth and status; antislavery migrants expected that free family farms constructed on the New England model would do the same. Both agreed that Kansas was to be white man's country-completely white if it was to be a free state. And in the end, the victory of free-staters heralded a new set of alliances between old enemies as former proslavery settlers became deeply involved in developing the new state's economy.
Comments
Copyright 1998 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska- Lincoln