Speaking of the Civil War along the Missouri-Kansas border, Starr in Jennison’s Jayhawkers says; “The atrocities committed by unionist and secessionist Missourians against each other were evil enough; and, in fact, Missouri unionists, driven from their homes and serving in Kansas regiments, frequently took the lead in despoiling secessionist or merely lukewarm former neighbors; but it was basically Kansas craving for revenge and Kansas craving for loot that set the tone of the war along the Kansas-Nebraska border. Nowhere else, with the grim exception of the East Kentucky and East Tennessee mountains, did the Civil War degenerate so completely into a squalid, barbarous, murderous slugging match, as it did in Kansas and Missouri.”
Where did these Kansas cravings for revenge and loot come from? The consequences of the actions of some Missourians in the territorial struggles - the attempts to corrupt the democratic process and force slavery into Kansas, the attendant violence which included raids launched from Missouri – are fairly obvious. Also, some Kansas jayhawkers, a small minority, were sincere abolitionists who believed slave-holders were legitimate targets for being relieved of their immorally obtained wealth, regardless of where they stood on the Union. However, I don’t think one can fully appreciate the motivations of the Kansans in the Border War without understanding the economic conditions in Kansas on the eve of the war, which resulted largely from the following:
1. Impacts from the political turbulence and violence revolving around slavery issue, most acute in the 1856-1858 period. Financial impacts on squatters ranged from diversion of effort from improving their claims to stolen/destroyed property and forcible eviction.
2. Panic of 1857, which depressed prices on grain and dried up credit.
3. Change in federal land policy in 1858, which caused land to be sold quicker than had previously been the case, before squatters could generate enough wealth from their land to purchase the land free and clear, resulting in either claims either being lost to speculators or being mortgaged at usurious interest rates.
4. Buchanan’s veto of a land reform act (June 1860) which would have given the squatters two more years before having to buy the land, and also would have reduced the price by half (to 62.5 cents per acre).
5. Inefficiencies of applying forest-region agriculture to the semi-arid plains, particulrly in a period of drought, cullminating in the drought of 1860, with results as severe as famine in parts of Kansas.
With the drought on top of the other set-backs to the Kansas economy, it is estimated that up to 25% of the population of Kansas Territory had given up and gone back east by the spring of 1861, while another 25% had been rendered completely destitute. Of those that stayed and were able to keep their claim, many were operating under a mountain of debt. A significant portion of the Kansas population was in dire financial straits. “In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted.”
In the months following the firing on Fort Sumter, a smorgasbord of outlaws, independent military bands, and rogue federal troops from Kansas plundered western Missouri. By the spring of 1862, a good portion of the mobile wealth of western Missouri had been transferred into Kansas. Kansans so inclined had an excuse, and justification among a good segment of their fellow Kansans, for the plundering. Kansans could rightfully blame a segment of the Missouri population (albeit a small one) for the territorial troubles and Factor No. 1 above. They could and did point to the southern, pro-slavery wing of the Democratic Party for Factors No. 3 and 4 above, which could have become associated, in the minds of some distressed Kansans, with pro-slavery Missouri residents. While not even the most biased Kansan could have blamed Missourians for the drought (although I have not completely proved this to myself by reviewing all of Jim Lane’s speeches), the impacts of the drought undoubtedly had a bearing on the psychological outlook of Kansas residents. When men get kicked to the curb, at least some of them tend to get up mad. When a segment of Missourians joined with the secessionists, and war broke out along the border, a lot of Kansans went into Missouri with a very bad attitude. Some of them almost certainly were able to convince themselves that Missourians were to blame, at least in part, for their lack of posterity.
That attitude explains some of the motivation behind the jayhawking, but not all of it. I don’t think one can fully understand the nature of the jayhawkers, and the limited censure they received from the general Kansas population, without understanding the extreme financial desperation of many Kansans at the outbreak of the war. Over the years, when I read reports of the various jayhawking raids, I always found it a little odd that clothes and bedding were often mentioned as being among the items being taken from Missouri homes. Well, now I understand - there were a lot of Kansans that lacked even the most basic necessities when the war broke out. Now I can better understand what Newman was alluding to in his description of the jayhawkers:
“The original Jayhawker was a growth indigenous to the soil of Kansas. There belonged to him as things of course a pre-emption, a chronic case of chills and fevers, one starved cow and seven dogs, a longing for his neighbor's goods and chattels…Slavery concerned him only as the slaveholder was supposed to be rich… Born to nothing, and eternally out at the elbows, what else could he do but laugh and be glad when chance kicked a country into war and gave purple and fine linen to a whole lot of bummers and beggars?”
While I am sure Newman was referring in large part to the frontier riff-raff that had been using slavery politics as an excuse for theft since 1856, the ranks of the jayhawkers were undoubtedly swollen by men driven by the desperation of financial ruin. How many families in Kansas stayed warm through the winter by virtue of the aforementioned clothing and bedding stolen from Missouri? How many farmers would not have been able to afford stock to work their land if not for the discount on fenced Missouri horses, mules, and oxen? How many mortgage payments on Kansas homesteads were made possible by transferred Missouri wealth?
It seems that for at least some of the Kansans that embraced jayhawking, war must have come just in the nick of time.