The Civil War in Kansas: Ten Years of Turmoil

By Debra Goodrich Bisel

In the 1850s, the eyes of the world were on Kansas. The Civil War in Kansas will be an overview of the years 1854-1865, since the war began in Kansas nearly seven years before it spread to the rest of the nation. From the repeal of the Missouri Compromise to its entry in the Union, Kansas played a small role in the war as a whole, but its effects on the state were nonetheless important. With regards to the Kansas citizens who played a part, it would be an understatement to call them "colorful." From John Brown to Jim Lane, Kansans made headlines throughout the nation and the world. Bisel presents the history of Kansas during the Civil War years in an accessible way that will satisfy history buffs as well as enlighten novices.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781614234050

Debra Goodrich Bisel

Deb is the resident historian at Historic Topeka Cemetery and is co-host of the weekly TV show Around Kansas. Her co-host, Frank Chaffin, is a long-time radio personality and is a partner in the internet reincarnation of WREN. He counts among his friends Randy Sparks, of the New Christy Minstrels, who wrote and performed the theme song for Around Kansas. Deb has appeared in numerous documentaries including the recently released Road to Valhalla and the Gunslingers on the American Heroes Channel.

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Introduction

The Kansas Image

The Kansas Statehouse is an impressive structure with a dome that rivals that of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. Its ornate wings house the chambers of government in a near palatial setting. In fact, the statehouse is decidedly un-Kansaslike in its personality. Kansans are not showoffs. They value results over appearances. They accomplish things quietly.

Each year, thousands of schoolchildren, from Wichita to White Cloud and from Gardner to Goodland, descend like hordes of locusts on the marble steps and leave fingerprints on the brass banisters. Their chatter echoes off the limestone. Frantic teachers herd them up to the second floor to view what will likely be the one sight pressed into their brains from the day’s excursion: the towering image of John Brown, rifle in one outstretched hand, the Bible in his other. Underneath his feet are the bodies of two dead soldiers—one in blue, the other in gray. Around him, men pray and fight, waving different flags, as wagon trains roll past. Behind it all, a tornado and a prairie fire threaten the landscape. Yet John Brown towers above it all. There are gasps, moments of silence and then tons of questions. Who is he? Who are the men around him? Is the tornado going to get him? Will the prairie fire kill him? What does he have to do with Kansas? Why do they have guns? Is he a bad man? Is he crazy?

Historians ponder the same issues as schoolchildren. Native son John Steuart Curry was the natural choice when a group of newspaper editors spearheaded the effort to cover the walls of the statehouse with murals depicting the story of Kansas. Curry, along with Iowa’s Grant Wood and Missouri’s Thomas Hart Benton, made up America’s greatest regionalist painters. The Curry homestead in Jefferson County was located on the Hickory Point Battlefield, the site of one of dozens of occasions that gave the territory the name Bleeding Kansas. As a child, Curry would have been well aware of the area’s legacy. He might have found a stray bullet or perhaps a rusted knife blade. He and the neighborhood children might have chosen sides and replayed those violent days. Whatever he did as a child, as an adult his work demonstrated the impact of having been born and reared on the war-worn soil of Kansas.

Curry went east, working at the Westport Art Colony in Connecticut. He achieved national recognition with his painting Baptism in Kansas. He was subsequently hired to transform the walls of several federal buildings in Washington, D.C. Curry was honored to have the opportunity to return to his native state and paint the Capitol’s murals, but in the end, the experience would break his heart and, according to his widow, hasten his death.

Tragic Prelude, the painting with John Brown as its centerpiece, was Curry’s greatest work—or at least he thought so. Born only forty years after John Brown launched his campaign of terror, Curry was shaped by the struggles with nature and the political strife that had formed Kansas.

Artist and actor Don Lambert formed a bond with Mrs. John Steuart Curry that resulted in many of Curry’s works coming back to Kansas. Don Lambert.

I want to paint this war with nature and I want to paint the things I feel as a native Kansan, Curry said when he was commissioned to paint the statehouse murals. Reflecting on the images, the artist added, I sincerely believe that in…the panel of John Brown, I have accomplished the greatest paintings I have yet done, and that they will stand as historical monuments.

Many Kansans did not agree. They nitpicked the details of the paintings: the Hereford bull was not the right color; the tornado looked like the trunk of an elephant; and the pigs’ tails did not curl enough. All of these criticisms were just dancing around the center of the issue, literally. The fact was that Kansans did not want the fanatic John Brown representing them.

In 1942, Curry refused to sign the murals and considered them unfinished. He left his native state, never to return, devastated that what had been a labor of love for him had been so maligned by his fellow Kansans. He died in Wisconsin in 1946.

Kansas actor and artist Don Lambert studied Curry’s work and set out to correct the injustice done to one of the state’s most talented sons. In 1990, Lambert went to Connecticut to visit the woman who had been Curry’s wife for twelve years and his widow for half a century. He was not sure how she would receive him, but she welcomed Lambert into her home and her husband’s legacy. She gave Lambert her blessing to portray Curry. Lambert informed her of the many fledgling efforts to restore her husband’s reputation in Kansas. The two developed a lasting friendship.

Two years later, in celebration of the multimillion-dollar restoration of the building, the Kansas legislature hosted Lambert as Curry. He was wearing white, paint-spattered coveralls and looked strikingly like the famous artist. The chambers were quiet as the legislature reflected on his performance and the actions of their predecessors fifty years earlier. They gave Lambert a standing ovation and passed a resolution of apology to John Steuart Curry.

Lambert arranged for a $100,000 legislative appropriation to buy seventeen Curry sketches done in preparation for the mural. Mrs. Curry was so impressed by the efforts that she cut the price in half and added three other drawings to the deal. She continued to donate items, including substantial gifts to the Beach Museum of Art at K-State, with the certainty that her husband was finally going to be recognized and appreciated in his homeland.

Curry had correctly foreseen the impact of his work when he called the murals historical monuments. It is a pity that he could not enjoy the recognition and reverence that his work would one day command.

Tragic Prelude is the work of native son John Steuart Curry, who was commissioned to cover the walls of the Kansas Statehouse with images from Kansas history. He believed that it was his greatest work, although it was unappreciated at the time. Kansas State Historical Society.

Author Bryce Benedict recalled how the image had towered over him as a child. I had no idea who he [John Brown] was or why he was up there, he said, but I would never forget his face and those outstretched arms. He was inspired to find out who the larger-than-life character was. As he became immersed in history, Benedict came to understand Brown’s role, both in Kansas and in the nation. I think that mural aptly portrays how Kansas was born in blood, Benedict added. The mural defines Bleeding Kansas.

William C. Davis, prolific author on the Civil War, commented that in the 1850s, [John Brown] and Kansas became synonymous. They remain so since. He added, Whether one regards him as a freedom fighter or the first of the modern terrorists, John Brown is a mountain in the path of history. One simply cannot go around him. Anyone on that path must confront the man and what he did on those prairies that made them together a milestone on another road to turmoil, war, and freedom.

For Kansans, John Brown is inescapable. In the 1970s, when the homegrown rock band Kansas launched their musical career, it was Curry’s Tragic Prelude that they chose for their debut album cover. Founding band member Kerry Livgren commented, Since we were kids we all saw that mural in the statehouse. It was simply a link identifying us with our homeland. Livgren added that after all this time, he hasn’t changed his mind. I would use it again.

Like Livgren, most Kansans have come to value the work of John Steuart Curry and realize that he did capture what it means to be a Kansan. It would appear then, from the images, that being a Kansan entails great struggle. As another great Kansan, Greg Case,¹ said, Opportunity is born out of turmoil.

That turmoil began with the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Chapter 1

A Peaceful Valley

Isaac Cody was not idly waiting for the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. He had already obtained permission to put up a "cheep [sic] cabin" in the Kansas Territory and had signed a government contract to supply hay to Fort Leavenworth. He was ferrying his family across the Missouri River to their temporary home when he received the dispatch that President Pierce had signed the law almost two weeks earlier, on May 30, 1854. The next day, he unpacked his surveying tools and began outlining land claims.

Isaac and his wife, Mary, had begun planning this trip in the previous fall. A young son had died after a fall from a horse, and Mary was disconsolate. This move was just the sort of distraction that the family needed. Isaac’s correspondence with Iowa congressmen informed him that the bill creating the new territory would likely be voted on during the winter session. Isaac was by no means a nomad, but he had made more than one move seeking a better life and had enjoyed some financial success. When the Codys loaded their six surviving children into a wagon and left Iowa, they did not camp along the roadside at night, as did most other pioneers, but were instead able to afford the best hotels along the way.

Crossing the state line into Missouri, the children encountered black people for the first time, most of them slaves or servants. They were a great curiosity to the children, and they asked if these were Indians.

Isaac’s brother, Elijah Cody, was a successful businessman in Weston, Missouri. He encouraged his brother to come west and told him that it was a beautiful country. The Kansas countryside in spring did not disappoint the Codys. Riding out to Government Hill at Fort Leavenworth, the family saw the Salt Creek Valley for the first time: [I]t was filled with Trains and cattle and mules running around. There must have been Hundreds of White covered wagons waiting there to make up their Train to start West, wrote Julia Cody Goodman. Father and Mother both made the remark that if they could get their house in that beautiful valley, there would be their Home.²

The Kansas/Missouri border in 1856. Dale Vaughn.

The Codys soon learned that a Kansas spring is not to be trusted. The climate can turn at any moment, but the political climate may have been far more dangerous.

Most of the early settlers in that area of the Kansas Territory supported the extension of slavery. One could almost throw a rock from Missouri to the territory when the river was down, and thus many Missourians had their eyes on that beautiful valley for a long time, just waiting for the federal government’s blessing to lay stake to it. Young Willie Cody (later in life the world-famous Buffalo Bill) recalled that many of those proslavers came over with whiskey and, when the bottles were empty, drove them into the ground to mark their claim.³

Ironically, on the same day the Codys arrived, settlers were gathering at the Kickapoo Indian trading post to organize into the Salt Creek Squatters Association. It was a common practice to establish some order in the land claim business. A register of claims and a board to handle disputes were appointed, in addition to a vigilance committee (which included Isaac) to enforce decisions. Another item of business was the treatment of abolitionists. The vigilantes would make sure that abolitionists were not welcome in this neighborhood.⁴ This is one example of the many groups organized in the image of a governmental entity with no governmental authority whatsoever. The only true power they possessed was that of the gun.

Isaac Cody was included in this group because his neighbors assumed that his politics would be the same as his brother’s. Elijah Cody was not only a prominent businessman in Weston, but he was also a prominent slaveholder. They soon found differently, though.

Father was a plain spoken man, Julia Cody Goodman recalled, and these Missourians soon found out how Father stood on that as they would go back and tell about Elijah Cody’s Brother being for Kansas to be a Free state, and they would come back and howl the slander about Father. But he would [continue to] talk.⁵

Isaac went about his business and hired several men to fill his hay contracts with the fort. In all his dealings, he made no attempt to disguise his political views. In the middle of September, Isaac was traveling between his home and Fort Leavenworth. A crowd of mostly proslavery advocates started to heckle Isaac and demanded a speech.

He tried to beg off, said Julia, offering every excuse. They grabbed him, put him atop a freight box and then began shouting questions at him:

One of the men called out, You are the man that wants Kansas Territory to be a Free state, don’t you? He went on talking on various questions and some one called out again, Say, Cody, you want to make Kansas a free state. He sayed yes. With that a man jumped on the Box and called him a Damed Abolicetionist and grabed at him.⁶

Young Willie was likely not present, but his later memoirs carried a description of the incident, probably a combination of the accounts he was told. He wrote that the crowd was hissing and shouting:

You black abolitionist, shut up! Get down from that box! Kill him! Shoot him! and so on. Father, however, maintained his position on the dry-goods box, notwithstanding the excitement and the numerous invitations to step down, until a hot-headed pro-slavery man, who was in the employ of my Uncle Elijah, crowded up and said: Get off that box, you black abolitionist, or I’ll pull you off.

William F. Buffalo Bill Cody, circa 1858, at about twelve years old. Cody’s father, Isaac, was one of the first martyrs to the cause of abolitionism. Kansas State Historical Society.

Father paid but little attention to him, and attempted to resume his speech, intending doubtless to explain his position and endeavor to somewhat pacify the angry crowd. But the fellow jumped up on the box, and pulling out a huge bowie knife, stabbed father twice, who reeled and fell to the ground. The man sprang after him, and would have ended his life then and there, had not some of the better men in the crowd interfered in time to prevent him from carrying out his murderous intention.⁷

Julia said that as her father fell, a neighbor, Dr. Hathaway, got to him and they took him in to the store and he done what he could for him. They did not try to do anything with this man, Mr. Dunn. They broke up the meeting.⁸

Mrs. Cody was summoned, and it was decided that Isaac should not go home but rather should go to Elijah’s home to recuperate. It was considered safer there, an ironic conclusion since the Charles Dunn (who had done the stabbing) was employed by Elijah Cody. Bill’s memoirs reflected, My uncle of course at once discharged the ruffian from his employ.⁹

Young Willie did not record his reaction to his father’s stabbing, but his sister, Julia, did. Julia recalled that Willie (a child of only eight at the time) would cry and then he would say, Oh, I wish I was a man; I would just love to kill all of those Bad men that want to kill my Father, and I will when I get big.¹⁰

Missouri newspapers took a somewhat different view of Dunn’s actions. From the Democratic Platform