![]() ![]() ![]() As one free-state partisan grumbled in 1857, “Kansas is now governed partly by a military despotism, partly by an outside oligarchy, under the form of the most unlimited democracy” (153). Kansans’ duelling efforts to govern themselves intersected and at times conflicted with the federal government’s attempts to administer the territory and to keep the peace among feuding settlers. In what Ponce evocatively calls “a flurry of self-government,” Kansas settlers representing competing interests (especially on the question of whether to allow slavery in the territory) held numerous censuses, elections, and constitutional conventions (5). The political travesty did not stem from a lack of governance but from an excess of it. Ponce goes beyond the blood to examine the failures in governance that allowed violence to scourge Kansas territory in the 1850s, setting the stage for the even bloodier American Civil War. The territory west of Missouri (a slave state) and south of Nebraska (which leaned toward being free) most often figures into nineteenth-century history as “Bloody Kansas.” In this illuminating book, Pearl T. ![]()
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