Stephen Douglas (1813-1861)

In which we talk about Stephen Douglas’ sponsorship of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the ensuing violence in “Bleeding Kansas,” and the rise of the Republican Party as a result of Northern outrage over the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Our book recommendation this time is Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era by Nicole Etcheson.

Few people would have expected bloodshed in the Kansas Territory.  But civil war tore this territory apart in the 1850s, and “Bleeding Kansas” became a forbidding symbol for the national crisis over the expansion of slavery.  Etcheson seeks to revise our understanding of this era by focusing on whites’ concerns over their political liberties.  The first comprehensive account of the conflict in Kansas in more than thirty years, her study emphasizes the issue of popular sovereignty rather than slavery’s moral or economic dimensions.  As Etcheson demonstrates, the struggle over the political liberties of whites may have heightened the territory’s turmoil, but it led eventually to a broadening of the definition of freedom to include African-Americans.  Her insightful re-examination sheds new light on this era and is essential reading for anyone interested in the ideological origins of the Civil War.   

 

Listen to Episode 12: BleedingKansas