Civil War

One hundred and two years ago, on Saturday February 9, 1861, the fervent abolitionist Charles Robinson was sworn into office as Kansas' first state governor. As a long-time supporter of the Free-State cause in Kansas, Robinson was no stranger to adversity – or to skirting existing laws to achieve what he considered to be a higher moral purpose.

As parking lots fill to capacity with frazzled shoppers during this holiday season, and lighted decorations appear in every corner, we may do well to remember that not so long ago Missouri and Kansas looked remarkably different, and Christmas provided an annual ray of hope for a nation torn apart during the Civil War.

As a crisis in law and order unfolded, Northerners and Southerners villainized each other by "blackening" the identity of their foe. When Abraham Lincoln set foot on Kansas soil in December 1859, Missouri women were hard at work sewing "guerrilla shirts" for their men who would wear them as a sign of their regional character and loyalty.

My first foray into the world of digitizing Civil War-era sources took me not into the hills of Missouri or trekking across the plains of Kansas. Instead, I found myself not far from the desk at which I write this post. Only five floors up, at the Kansas City Public Library’s in-house archive, the Missouri Valley Special Collections opened its large, ornate, wooden doors to me for five days of digitization.

In the years before the Civil War, Kansas was a battleground. As Free State forces clashed with pro-slavery marauders from Missouri, a 40-something mother of four from Vermont waged a war of her own. As “Bleeding Kansas” raged around her, Clarina Howard Nichols came into her own as a champion of equal rights for women and blacks.