“Bleeding Kansas” — Violent Resistance to the Violence of Whiteness
Chapter Seven of A Family History of Whiteness: American Roots of Racial Injustice
In the best of times, political divisions and debates need not lead to violence. Today — arguably, not the best of times — we have people in the United States, mostly on the extreme Christian nationalist right, whose political passions inspire them to speak glibly of the inevitability of a new American civil war.[i]
When debates in politics cease being civil, the desire for civil war can begin to gain traction among the most ardent of true believers. Civil wars are not only intensely violent but also intensely personal. Is it time to take MAGA-inspired fantasies of civil war seriously? As always, history, if we care to learn from it, can broaden our perspective and help us find answers.
On May 22, 1856, South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks attacked and badly injured Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner. The assault quickly gained notoriety because of its motive and because it took place on the floor of the U.S. Senate Chamber. The cartoon above — a copy by John L. Magee of an original by an unknown artist — is a political caricature. The actual assault was even more vicious than it is depicted here. Witnesses said Brooks struck Sumner on the head at least a dozen times with the heavy gold knob on the handle of the cane, not the stick.
The offense which made Brooks decide to subject Sumner to a public beating was the “Crimes Against Kansas” speech Sumner had delivered several days earlier. Sumner was a leader of the newly-minted (in 1854), Republican Party. In his long speech, Sumner verbally assailed Democratic Senators Stephen Douglas of Illinois and Andrew Butler of South Carolina, the architect and chief advocate, respectively, of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the 1820 Missouri Compromise and required the question of slavery in the new territories to be determined by “popular sovereignty.” In November 1854, pro-slavery White men from Missouri swarmed into Kansas and tipped the vote in favor of slavery, but the issue was far from settled.
In his 1856 speech, Sumner called Douglas, who was in the Chamber, a “noise-some, squat, and nameless animal…,” but he was even more harsh in his treatment of the aged and absent Butler. Sumner made fun of Butler’s reputation as a chivalrous Southern gentleman by likening Butler’s attachment to slavery to a quixotic romance, and by implication, a sexual attraction to the “harlot, Slavery.”
Preston Brooks felt the insult to Butler — his first-cousin once removed — was beyond the pale and demanded a response. He discussed with sympathetic colleagues the idea of challenging Sumner to a duel but concluded Sumner was not his social equal and therefore should be punished, as one would punish a dog, with a caning.[ii]
It does not take much of a stretch of the imagination to hear echoes of the extreme, polarized, and violent politics of the 1850s in the extreme political polarization and potential for violence in American politics of the 2020s. There are disturbing parallels between the 1850s and now.
In the 1850s, very much like today, extremist political movements attracted followers by playing on the economic insecurities and fears of “others” felt by many Americans and by scapegoating oppressed peoples, especially immigrants and people of color.
In the 1850s, nativist demagogues incited riots by playing on “old stock” White American protestant fears and distrust of Catholics, primarily Irish and German immigrants who, at the time, were not considered to be White people. Today, far-right demagogues stoke violence by playing on White American fears of “replacement” by non-European, or non-Christian immigrants or by Black and Brown Americans.
In the 1850s, violent gangs of street brawlers like the Bowery Boys, the Atlantic Guards, and the Plug-Uglies (among others) were encouraged by the nativist fear-mongering rhetoric of the American Party (also known as the Know Nothing Party). Today, violent far-right enforcers like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and the Three-Percenters (among others) are inspired to violent action by the inflammatory MAGA rhetoric of extreme right Republicans.
In the 1850s, as is true today, religion and class divisions played a big part in exacerbating political polarization. The issues of slavery and immigration splintered the American polity into many factions in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Today, the issues of racial injustice and immigration continue to divide the U.S. electorate, as opportunistic demagogues play on racial, religious, and class tribalism to raise the temperature of political debates and stymie any potential for rational debate and compromise.
From the mid-1850s to the start of the Civil War, my paternal Stites ancestors lived in the heart of an American political maelstrom. Starting out in 1848, they migrated west from Indiana through Illinois and Missouri before establishing a homestead in Atchison County, Kansas just as the territory entered a period of guerrilla warfare, from 1854 to 1861, known as “Bleeding Kansas.”
“Bleeding Kansas” was the moment in history that pushed John Brown into the national spotlight. Brown arrived in Kansas in November 1855, the same year my Stites ancestors arrived there. He came to join five of his sons already in Kansas and he brought with him a wagon fool of weapons. Very quickly, Brown assumed leadership of the radical abolitionist forces in Kansas forming to fight the pro-slavery “Border Ruffians.” Even before Brown arrived in Kansas, as early as the 1830s, he was convinced violence was the only effective way to abolish chattel slavery in America.
The picture of John Brown I have had in my head for most of my life is an image of righteous insanity, a maniacal manifestation of Old Testament fury. As a pacifist, my admiration of Brown for the strength of his will to end slavery was tempered by my distaste for the mercilessly violent means with which he pursued that end.
I assumed John Brown had to be more than a little bit crazy to drag pro-slavery leaders from their homes in the middle of the night and murder them in front of their families as Brown and his sons did in Kansas on the night of May 24, 1856. Brown had become incensed by a May 21 assault on the abolitionist stronghold of Lawrence, Kansas by pro-slavery Democrats and Missourians and he was further provoked by news of the May 22 caning of Charles Sumner by Preston Brooks in Washington.
There is no doubt John Brown was overcome with anger on the night of May 24, 1856 when he and his sons killed five men with broad swords. Brown’s fury knew no bounds, but he was not mad. He acted with clear intent and with full knowledge of the impact of his deeds.
In a review of David S. Reynolds’ 2005 biography, John Brown: Abolitionist, Adam Gopnick acknowledges the ambivalence aroused by Brown’s penchant for violence:
…even an admiring historian cannot deny [John Brown] was a man of violence…, what we would now call a terrorist…a man who believed the United States should be met with violence because it supported and perpetrated oppression.
Gopnik later quotes from the writing of Dr. James McCune Smith to underline the commitment to the violent overthrow of slavery Brown shared with his friend, Smith, and with other Black radical abolitionists:
Our white brethren cannot understand us unless we speak to them in their own language; they recognize only force…They will never recognize our manhood until we knock them down a time or two.
John Brown’s resort to violence makes sense in retrospect. He saw the futility of impassioned pleading for an end to slavery. As Adam Gopnik points out, pacifists like the leading White abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison had no real plan for ending slavery whereas Brown and his Black radical abolitionist collaborators understood and “shared with the slaveowners a romantic ideology of personal honor through violence.”[iii]
John Brown understood, as few other White men of his time did, that violence was the only realistic way to bring an end to the entrenched economic and political might of “Slave Power” and to destroy the institution of chattel slavery. Others, among them, Abraham Lincoln, came to this realization later and acknowledged the Civil War as a continuation of John Brown’s fight.
My paternal Stites ancestors, Alfred Stites and family, arrived in Kansas Territory in 1855, just a few months before John Brown’s arrival. The Stites family homesteaded on land near the town of Pardee in Atchison County, about seventy-five miles north of Osawatomie where Brown and his sons had their homesteads. Like Osawatomie, Pardee was an abolitionist town, named for Reverend Pardee Butler who had a founded an anti-slavery Christian Church there in 1854.
I have not been able to determine whether or not Alfred Stites or any other Stites ancestors participated in the Bleeding Kansas fighting between radical abolitionists and pro-slavery forces in the summer of 1856 or after. Did any of them share John Brown’s righteous fury and commitment to violent action to end slavery? I have good reason to believe my Stites ancestors in Kansas were sympathetic to the cause of freedom for enslaved Black people, but I doubt they shared John Brown’s deep empathy and anger.
My ancestors did not go to Kansas because they wanted to do battle with pro-slavery forces. Like so many other Midwestern farming families of the time, they were forced to migrate west in search of affordable land. They suffered financially, as John Brown did, from the Panic of 1837 and its aftermath, including a decade of economic depression and steep drop in prices for agricultural products.
During this time of economic hardship, land speculators — like the one depicted in the 1852 painting below — preyed on poor farm families by offering land at what seemed to be bargain prices but all too often came with terms for payment beyond the revenue that farming the land might produce. As a result, many farm families — including the family of my third great grandfather Alfred Stites — found themselves forced to move further and further west as they repeatedly acquired and then lost title to land they could not afford to keep.
Whatever political passions Alfred Stites might have had, moving his family to Kansas was most probably motivated more by financial hardship than politics. His life experience and the difficulties his family faced probably would have made Alfred, and many other Kansas farmers, unlikely to share the radical abolitionist fervor of John Brown and more inclined to support the ideology and political goals of the Free Soil Party which stood against the extension of slavery but not for violent resistance to the institution of chattel slavery.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the United States was deeply divided and increasingly exorcised over the issues of slavery and “Slave Power” and immigration and national unity. These issues split White Americans into several distinct political factions.
The Free Soil Party was formed during the 1848 presidential election by anti-slavery Democrats (known as “Barnburners”), Northern Whigs from the anti-slavery Conscience Whig faction, and members of the small abolitionist Liberty Party. The Free Soil Party represented the interests of White homesteaders — like my Stites ancestors in Kansas — who feared competition for land and resources from slaveowners as well as from free Black people and immigrants.
After the defeat of their presidential candidate, former President Martin Van Buren, many Free Soilers rejoined the Democrats or Whigs. In 1854, what was left of the Free Soil Party merged into the new Republican Party which stood, as the Free Soil Party had, against the extension of slavery into new states and territories but stopped short of advocating abolition of slavery in states where it already existed.
In 1856, three political parties contended for the presidency; the Republicans nominating John C. Fremont, the nativist American Party (Know Nothings) nominating former Whig President Millard Fillmore, and the Democrats nominating the victorious candidate, James Buchanan. In that closely contested election, the American Party ignored the question of slavery and ran on an anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic platform. The Republican platform focused on opposition to the expansion of slavery. Buchanan and the Democrats, though the Party was deeply divided internally over the issue of slavery, won the contest by painting their opponents as extremists whose policies would destroy the unity of the country.
Events in Kansas had a big impact on the 1856 presidential election. The extremism and violence of John Brown probably did more to harm than to help the chances of electing the Republican John C. Fremont. In 1859, John Brown again took action that profoundly shaped American politics. His unsuccessful raid of the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now, West Virginia), an attempt to secure weapons for a slave revolt, followed by his arrest, trial, and hanging, made John Brown a martyr in the cause of abolition and made slavery and secession the focal points of the 1860 presidential election.
Lincoln was campaigning in Leavenworth, Kansas when he got the news of the December 2, 1859 execution of John Brown. In his speech he condemned Brown’s actions while commending his ideals:
Old John Brown has just been executed for treason against a state. We cannot object, even though he agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong. That cannot excuse violence, bloodshed, and treason.[iv]
It is not inconceivable that some of my Stites ancestors in Kansas heard Lincoln speak in Leavenworth in 1859. Whether they witnessed his speech or not they almost certainly cheered Lincoln’s election as president, and, in time, they also supported John Brown’s call for violent action against slavery.
Alfred Stites did not live to see the end of the Civil War. He died in 1862, but several of his children, including his fourth son, William Stites, my second great grandfather, fought for the United States in the war. If family lore is to be believed, one of Alfred’s daughters, my second great grand aunt Marilda, gave her life to preserve the Union. In the winter of 1862, dressed in men’s clothing, she joined the Kansas Infantry, and not long after, died of exposure.
My Stites family ancestors, like so many people of their time, eventually came to embrace John Brown’s cause, and his violent methods, as their own. And yet, I still remain uncertain about how to feel about John Brown’s commitment to violent action. In the end, I find myself unable to agree with Abraham Lincoln’s assessment of Brown’s actions. As long as the U.S. Government stood in the way of an to end slavery, I believe John Brown was absolutely right in opposing the state with violence, bloodshed, and treason.
John Brown lived in a time of widespread and massive state-supported violent oppression of enslaved Black people. He had good cause to resort to violence in response. Today, extreme right-wing evangelical Christian nationalists who speak of civil war, unlike John Brown, have no justification for a resort to violence against the U.S. Government— at least, none that I can understand or respect.
The Know-Nothing Party of the mid-nineteenth century did not produce a martyr or any hero with anything near the stature and impact of John Brown. I am confident the MAGA Party — modern-day Know-Nothings — will not succeed in motivating the majority of Americans to turn to violence, bloodshed, and treason against government and the rule of law. For that they would need to define a cause and produce a heroic role model with the moral rectitude of John Brown. It is my firm belief and utmost hope that the moral chaos of their cause and the conditions of our times make that utterly inconceivable.
NOTES
[i] In his impressive 2023 book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War (New York: W. W. Norton), Jeff Sharlet chronicles the ubiquity of talk of civil war among the right-wing religious extremists he encounters in a cross-country road trip to explore the mindsets of participants in the January 6, 2021 insurrection and their supporters.
[ii] The Senate appointed a Select Committee to investigate the assault on Senator Sumner. The Select Committee’s report summarizes testimony from several witnesses and recommends that the matter of determining a response to Representative Brook’s actions be referred to the U.S. House of Representatives. In his testimony, Mississippi Governor A. G. Brown reported that Preston Brooks told him he regarded Sumner’s speech “as an atrocious libel on South Carolina and an insult to my absent relative (Butler)…” and “I determined, when it was delivered, to punish him for it…”
[iii] Adam Gopnik, “John Brown’s Body: A New Biography Restores Brown’s Centrality to the Civil War,” The New Yorker, April 17, 2005.
[iv] Jonathan Earle, “Kansas Territory, the Election of 1860, and the Coming of the Civil War: A National Perspective” (Kansas City Public Library, no date).
