Evangelicals and entrepreneurs: The northeastern antislavery experience in Kansas, 1854-1860
Description
The story of 'Bleeding Kansas' and its aftermath, spanning the years 1854-1860, may have represented, in microcosm, the larger history of sectional conflict and reunion. My dissertation records that story through the lens of the free state constituency in the territory. The major protagonists of the study include the New England Emigrant Aid Company, incorporated after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 with the purpose of securing Kansas to freedom and earning dividends for its bondholders through the organized emigration of free labor; the New York based American Missionary Association, which sent a contingent of clergymen to advance the cause of Christian abolitionism and racial justice in the territory, and the antislavery American Home Mission Society which added a more conservative dimension to the evangelical assault upon slavery in Kansas. These organizations represented, between them, the two major strains in American antislavery thought, namely a religious-humanitarian tradition relatively free of explicit racism and a second overlapping tradition of concern for the economic welfare of white America based on the ideology of free labor. Both factions, however, shared a common tendency toward cultural imperialism which was manifested in the New Englander's desire to mold the motley crew of deviant elements whom he encountered in the West including western frontiersmen, European immigrants and all elements of southern slave society into model specimens of New England society by setting a good example. Refracted through the lens of the free state press, the conjunction of the evangelical and economic assaults on black bondage in Kansas, representing different degrees of radicalism on the antislavery spectrum but couched in the common language of the middle-class North, broadened the popular appeal of abolitionism in the free states and facilitated the emergence of antislavery politics The true significance of 'Bleeding Kansas,' however, perhaps lay in its aftermath. Ideological volte-faces among members of camps on both sides of the slavery issue suggest that northerner and southerner may not have been reverse mirror images of each other after all. Instances of interparty cooperation reveal the existence of underlying commercial interests that eventually facilitated a harmonious sectional reconciliation at the expense of the Negro, and anticipated the fate of free labor experiments below the Potomac after the Civil War. One of the concerns of this dissertation is to prepare the ground for determining the extent to which the sequel to the Kansas wars was a 'rehearsal for redemption,' as the northern planter movement was