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For God and Mammon - Evangelicals and Entrepreneurs, Masters and Slaves in Territorial Kansas, 1854-60 (Hardcover, New)
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For God and Mammon - Evangelicals and Entrepreneurs, Masters and Slaves in Territorial Kansas, 1854-60 (Hardcover, New)
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This book explores the multiple dimensions of the antebellum Kansas
tempest as a microcosm of the larger history of sectional conflict
and reconciliation. It shows, through an examination of the
antislavery ends and means of the American Missionary Association,
the American Home Missionary Society, and the New England Emigrant
Aid Company, that the northeastern free-state contingent in Kansas
represented a wide spectrum of opinion on black bondage, ranging
from racially egalitarian Christian abolitionist absolutism on the
one hand to free labor pragmatism on the other. Nevertheless,
Yankee confrontations with the allegedly parallel unprogressive
forces of "slavery, rum, and Romanism" in the territory evoked
compelling public images of civilization and savagery, freedom and
dependence that broadened the appeal of antislavery politics in the
free North on the eve of the Civil War. At the same time, the book
analyzes the ideology and dynamics of proslavery activism in
Kansas, demonstrating how clashing conceptions of republicanism and
capitalism helped frame the terms of debate over slavery. It pays
special attention to the discrepancy between the strident optimism
of proslavery rhetoric on the one hand, and the actual operation of
the "peculiar institution" in the territory on the other--a
discussion that incorporates a detailed study of Kansas slavery not
found elsewhere. Finally, the book argues that the sharp polarities
of slavery discourse in Kansas obscured a more ambiguous reality.
Southerners resorted to fraudulent voting, and appealed to
anti-abolitionism, nativism, and racism to battle not only northern
elements but to score points over their proslavery whiggish rivals
as well. Schisms within a competitive, business-minded pro-southern
elite contained the seeds of Mammon's triumph over political
ideology in some proslavery circles, and facilitated a sectional
truce at the African American's expense even before the slavery
question had faded from the political horizon of the territory.
This work is unique in antebellum Kansas literature in that it
employs census data in an attempt to reconstruct the reality of the
rank-and-file lives--both slave and free, northern and southern,
native-born and foreign--that lay behind the stirring public images
conjured by "Bleeding Kansas."
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