ABSTRACT
Participants in Bleeding Kansas spoke in terms of freedom and rights that can seem very familiar to us today. When free-state settler Joseph Savage called the Kansas conflict “the great struggle between freedom and slavery,” he expressed an idea shared by many other antislavery northerners, who saw themselves as defenders of liberty.1 But proslavery leader David Atchison championed a type of freedom, too: white Missourians’ freedom to take slaves across their western border and recreate their slaveholding society in Kansas without interference.2 He therefore accused antislavery activists of being “aggressors upon our rights,” and vowed that Missourians would never “be driven or deprived of any of our rights” in Kansas.3 Savage and Atchison spoke the same language but meant very different things. For some Kansas migrants, “freedom” might mean economic opportun - ity, particularly through land ownership, or the right to free speech. Or it could mean the ability to build institutions, like public schools and Protestant churches, which many white Americans wanted to take into the West.4 Atchison’s definition also included the freedom to deny freedom to other people, a contradiction that persisted long after the Civil War. And northern and southern migrants alike generally ignored Native American freedom when they raced to Kansas. In sum, 19th-century views of freedom were strictly limited by modern standards-but also fiercely contested. Settlers on both sides considered themselves freedom-loving people and when their goals and interests collided, the stage was set for a violent showdown.
