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Jonathan Halperin Earle, Diane Mutti Burke, eds. Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri: The
Long Civil War on the Border. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013. xii + 346 pp. $37.50
(cloth), ISBN 978-0-7006-1928-3; $19.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7006-1929-0.
Reviewed by Amy Fluker (University of Mississippi)
Published on H-CivWar (December, 2014)
Commissioned by Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz
The Border War Comes of Age
After a long period of neglect in which the border
war was dismissed as a mere “sideshow” of the Civil War,
the publication of Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri: The
Long Civil War on the Border represents a hallmark in
Civil War historiography. This book reveals the diverse
range of largely unexplored topics now being pursued by
historians of the border war. Drawing from the scholarship of some of the field’s preeminent historians, including Michael Fellman, Nicole Etcheson, Christopher
Phillips, and Diane Mutti Burke, the essays in Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri offer a dynamic history
of the border region, including the perspectives of men,
women, African Americans, and American Indians from
both sides of the Kansas-Missouri line and both sides of
the larger sectional struggle. By adopting a variety of
methodological approaches, including military, political,
religious, gender, and cultural history, it is a volume that
positions the border war at the heart of the Civil War era
and, in the process, redefines the parameters of Civil War
history.
Finally, Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri addresses the
memory of the border war, speaking to the persistence
of old hatreds across the Kansas-Missouri border as they
bled over into the postwar press, politics, and even athletic contests between the two states. Its scope is vast and
ranges well beyond the conventional chronology of the
Civil War era, covering topics from the earliest period of
settlement in the region all the way to 2011.
In keeping with the evolving historiography of the
Civil War in the West, Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri
does not present the border war as an aberration from
the larger Civil War. Instead, it explains the violence and
brutality of the border war as a product of larger cultural
and political forces. In his essay, Fellman paints the border war as a product of centuries of endless religious warfare. The “ritualized collective slaughter” of the border
war, he writes, was the consequence of educated, reasonable people imagining themselves as “avenging angels” executing God’s judgment against traitors and radicals (p. 14). Other contributors, however, link the viDrawing on the themes of power, politics, race, and olent conduct of the border war to the role of gender,
gender in the border war, Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Mis- particularly masculinity, in the Civil War. Burke, Krissouri comprises a wide variety of essays divided into ten Tegtmeier Oertel, and Joseph Beilein Jr. demonthree sections. The first addresses the politics surround- strate how competing sectional and racial conceptions
ing the causes of the border war, with a particular em- of gender shaped not only the politics of the war but
phasis on the importance of slavery. The second sec- contributed to its brutality as well. For the men of the
tion deals with the wartime experiences of border resi- border, violence became an important expression of their
dents, their intersection with national politics and atti- masculinity—a way to demonstrate mastery, exhibit selftudes about masculinity, and the evolution of total war. determination, and impose law and order.
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Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri demonstrates that,
far from behaving like irrational, lawless ruffians, the
residents of the border were simply acting according to
fundamentally different understandings of law and order. Taking the controversy over the Kansas constitution
and the caning of Charles Sumner as examples, Etcheson
explains that both sides viewed themselves as upholding justice. For their part, the proslavery party believed
the violence in “Kansas was a part of a larger pattern of
disregard for … the government’s authority,” which had
consistently protected the property rights of slaveholders (p. 56). Meanwhile, abolitionists read these events
as evidence of the determination of slaveholders to have
their own way at the expense of due process. The implementation of martial law also complicated the execution of law and order on the border. Within the state
of Missouri, as Phillips demonstrates, the government
evinced its intention to “preserve ‘law and order’ indiscriminately, whether against rebel insurgents, fugitive
slaves, or abolitionist marauders” (p. 139). As a result,
officials enforced loyalty oaths and other punitive measures, sacrificing civil liberties in an effort to discourage
rebelliousness.
sues and circumstances that shattered the union during
the Civil War” (p. 4). The unintended consequence, however, is that too little attention is paid to the fact that the
Kansas-Missouri border lies on an east-west axis. It is
not a border between the North and South or the Union
and Confederacy at all, but one between two Union states
with broadly similar cultural values. In fact, only Brent
S. Campney’s essay situates the Kansas-Missouri border
within the more complex geographic space of the Midwest. Perhaps by making Kansas and Missouri stand
in for the North and South, other historians have overlooked an important point. While the violence in Kansas
and Missouri certainly loomed large in the debates that
pulled the nation apart, it also emerged from a unique
set of circumstances relating to the peripheral location
of these two Union states.
Nevertheless, Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri is a
compelling volume whose chief value lies not only in
its breadth and in its power to stimulate new scholarship, but most importantly in its contributions to Civil
War history. Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri demonstrates that the forces that fractured the Union emanated
not from the Mason-Dixon Line, but from the KansasBleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri is a pioneering Missouri border, thus situating the border war at the
work and, as such, raises important questions. Primarily, heart of the major political and cultural events of the Civil
to what extent is the border war really representative of War era. In the final estimation, the border war was an
the larger Civil War? Much of the work in this volume all-consuming affair which involved a diverse group of
treats Kansas and Missouri as microcosms of the North people in a nearly decade-long period of conflict—a conand South, the Union and the Confederacy. This is no flict that did not end in a day, but one that continued
doubt a result of the volume’s self-conscious attempt to to resonate with Kansans and Missourians for years to
make “the experience of Missouri and Kansas residents come.
during the era of the border war … a window on the isIf there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at:
https://networks.h-net.org/h-civwar
Citation: Amy Fluker. Review of Earle, Jonathan Halperin; Burke, Diane Mutti, eds., Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding
Missouri: The Long Civil War on the Border. H-CivWar, H-Net Reviews. December, 2014.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=42118
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoncommercialNo Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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