| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era. By Nicole Etcheson. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. xiv, 370 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-7006-1287-4.)
The standard story line of "bleeding Kansas" highlights the uncertain future of slavery in a territory where popular sovereignty dominated public discourse and sectional competition for advantage there often turned bloody. Scholars have long focused on how the nation perceived the Kansas issue, how politicians in Washington maneuvered, and how a single-minded antislavery man, John Brown, inflamed passions in an already tense environment.	1
Nicole Etcheson approaches the subject from a different angle. What intrigues her about the Kansas issue is why most white settlers had little investment, emotionally or materially, in slavery and why antislavery rhetoric focused more on fear of being enslaved than on freeing slaves. She observes that the essential issue in 1850s Kansas on both sides was "political liberties of whites" (p. 1). As a corollary, she argues that for free staters in Kansas the very act of defending their own political liberties affected their willingness to support runaway slaves and, as time passed, support rights for blacks.	. . .

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