From Bleeding Kansas to Civil War: What to Remember About Power and Violence

As Americans witness the escalation of violence in cities far from our own borders, I can’t help recalling another period when isolated clashes hardened into full-scale war. This is Part Two of my blog series on Bleeding Kansas. You’ll find the first article here.

Earlier I described how the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 opened the door for the Emigrant Aid Company (EAC) to populate Kansas with anti-slavery settlers. Rumors flew that the organization commanded vast sums of money and intended to send tens of thousands of settlers. Plantation owners in Missouri who hoped to acquire Kansas land became alarmed.

As fear hardened into resolve, two men came to embody the opposing responses to that fear.

David Rice Atchison: Power Preserved Through Intimidation

On one side stood David Rice Atchison, a Missouri senator who believed Kansas must become a slave state to preserve the balance of power in Congress. He urged Missourians to cross the border and vote illegally to ensure that the Kansas Territory entered the Union as a slave state. To Atchison, intimidation did not undermine the law—it defended it. By stoking fear and offering himself as the solution, he sought to consolidate political power and influence along the border.

Daniel Read Anthony: Moral Conviction and Armed Resistance

Across the line in Kansas stood Daniel Read Anthony. He, too, accepted violence—but for the opposite reason. He believed slavery was a moral abomination and that unjust laws forfeited their authority. Where Atchison fought to extend an old order that protected slavery, Anthony fought to prevent its spread.

By the late 1850s, violence dominated daily life. When Anthony returned to the region after a sojourn in Rochester, NY, he heard proslavery men challenge one another to kill as many abolitionists as possible before sundown. Abandoning his Quaker pacifism to preserve his life, he took up arms.

Although we remember this era as Bleeding Kansas, Missourians suffered deeply as well—especially in western Missouri, often called Little Dixie for its Southern sympathies—years before the Civil War erupted in 1861.

Second-Born Sons, Stolen Votes, and Border Retaliation

When Kansas held elections to determine whether it would enter the Union as a slave or free state, droves of Missouri’s “second sons” crossed the border to vote illegally. Many were ambitious young men who, unlike their firstborn brothers, had little chance to inherit family farms. The alternative of homesteading in Kansas with enslaved labor appealed strongly to them. Abolitionists like Anthony responded by raiding Missouri farms in retaliation.

What followed was a brutal guerrilla war along the border. Abolitionists seized enslaved people and escorted them into Kansas. Anthony’s moral convictions drove him—but motives rarely remained pure. He also profited, stealing enough livestock to launch a prosperous stock farm near Huron, Kansas.

From Border War to Civil War

When the conflict escalated into the full-scale Civil War, Anthony joined the Union army and, under its banner, looted and burned entire towns in Little Dixie. Reports of his excesses eventually reached higher command, which reassigned his regiment to guard railroads in Tennessee.

There, Anthony bristled at orders to return formerly enslaved people who sought refuge in his camp. This defiance earned him a court-martial—until Abraham Lincoln, recalling a prior favor, pardoned him. Anthony resigned from the Army soon afterward and turned his abolitionist energies toward journalism and politics.

Violence reached a new peak in 1863 with William Quantrill’s raid on the abolitionist town of Lawrence. Shortly afterward, Union General Thomas Ewing Jr. retaliated by ordering Little Dixie evacuated. As James W. Erwin notes in From the Homefront in Civil War Missouri, most able-bodied men had already left western Missouri to fight for the Confederacy. The order fell hardest on women, children, and the elderly.

I have oversimplified this lead-up to the Civil War by using Atchison and Anthony as examples. In truth, both acted in concert with many others. Still, it matters that each man—on opposite sides—stood to profit politically and personally from waging war.

My Dauntless Series attempts to tell both sides of this Border War. In Secrets to the Wind, Anthony grieves friends from the Emigrant Aid Company as he helps bury the dead after Quantrill’s raid. To show the suffering on the Missouri side, Born of This Fire follows two women and a child through two Union raids and the eventual destruction of their Little Dixie home.

Who Profits from War—and Who Pays the Price

History reminds us that whenever fear is cultivated, borders are inflamed, and ideology hardens, there will always be individuals—then as now—who discover that war and unrest offer opportunities for power, wealth, and advancement. Those who pay the highest price, however, are almost never the ones who profit, but the families who live, flee, and grieve in the war-torn places left behind.

New Podcast Interview

Back in November, I was a guest on the Read Like a Writer Book Club podcast. In my interview with host Robin Henry, we talked about Born of this Fire and a lot more. Check out the episode on Spotify.

 

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