Hurrah Frei Kansas!

Frei Kansas, freier Boden, Von Vorrecht frei und Bann! Dem schwarzen und dem rothen Sowie dem weissen Mann! Free Kansas, free space, without privilege or discrimination! For the black, and the red, as for the white man of the nation.

Abolitionist Song of Free State Kansas Germans

(Many thanks for this to Prof. William Keel)

Learning from Quindaro: Indians, Feminists, Blacks, and Germans, Intercultural Action for Freedom in the Kansas Free State Struggle, 1856-63
Charles Reitz Professor (Ret.) of Philosophy and Multicultural Education Kansas City Kansas Community College

Anti-Racism in Kansas Free State Struggle

Frederick Douglass (1852) asked in What to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?

Where are the white radicals when it comes to anti-racism?

You are all on fire at the mention of liberty for France or for Ireland, but are cold as an iceberg at the thought of liberty for the enslaved of America.

By 1856: Abolitionists and Radicals Feminists: Lucy Armstrong, Clarina Nichols Irish: Greeley, Lane, Montgomery, Jennison, Stewart, Phillip Germans: Bondi, Kaiser, Weiner, Leonhardt, Deitzler Kossuths of Kanzas (--Thomas Higginson, 1857)

Quindaro, Kanzas, 1856-57

Founded by coalition of anti-slave Wyandots and Amos Lawrence's New England Emigrant Aid Society

Town Plan with Portrait of Quindaro Nancy Brown Guthrie of Wyandot Nation . Locus of multicultural human rights movement: Native Americans, Blacks, Women, Irish, German 48ers Quindaro: A Wyandot Indian word meaning, "a bundle of sticks," interpreted as "in union there is strength."

Ruins of Old Quindaro City and Landing Today

Marvin Robinson, Fred Whitehead, Steve Collins

Lucy B. Armstrong, Wyandot by marriage missionary's daughter, Abolitionist

Wyandots
governed by clan councils of one man

and four women; women chose chiefs

Clarina Nichols,
Co-editor of Quindaro Chin-do-wan (Leader) Vermont abolitionist, feminist Women's Rights, Women's Suffrage Underground Railroad Teacher of Black students Marilyn S. Blackwell Diane Eickhoff and Kristen T. Oertel.

Kansas and Feminism

1861 Kansas Territory becomes a Free State

Wyandotte Constitution
Which also expanded women's rights;
to own property; participate in school district elections; legal right of wives to retain household property; this can not be lost by husband's indebtedness; secured legal recognition of widows as heads of households

Quindaro and Blacks -- Underground Railroad

Quindaro voters approved Negro suffrage in municipal elections; African-Americans Jerimiah Crump and Jimina King Married in Quindaro House hotel

John Newman

http://researchfrontiers.uark.edu/16694.php

Prominent Germans in Quindaro

Henry Steiner and Jacob Zehntner, owned the Quindaro Brewery; Frederick Klaus, limestone quarry and stoneyard; Jacob Henry brickyard and kiln; N. Ranzchoff, clothiers

Phillip H. Knoblock, Union officer Charles Morasch, brewer Theodor Praun

In eastern Kansas (Wyandot City, Quindaro City, and Lawrence) Germans were the largest ethnic group in Union Army

August Bondi was in 1848 Revolution in Austria and rode with John Brown at Battle of Black Jack, Kansas

Go West to Kansas
A founder of Greeley, Kansas, a station on the Underground Railroad:
John Brown hid 11 slaves there for one month in January, 1859

and save it from the curse of slaver

German-American 48er Revolutionaries in Kansas Free State Struggle: August Bondi,Theodor Weiner, Jacob Benjamin, Charley Kaiser, Charles Leonhardt

Race and Radicalism in the Union Army Mark A. Lause

John Brown and others sought a State of Topeka a utopia in which neither race nor gender barred citizenship and equal rights Some Unionists...articulated a triracial dream of nation's future Forty-eighter German socialist Adolph Douai: anti-slavery Texas linked strategically to Kansas by Oklahoma Indian lands: multi-racial revolution.

Front page series by Douai

Dr. Charles Kob, Dr. Moritz Hartmann [Program for a belt of freedom]

Mark Lause on Radicalism and Anti-Racism

After Harpers Ferry, Kansas radical, Richard Hinton, talked with German socialists of New York, Friedrich Kapp's Kommunisten Klub, about liberating John Brown from prison, but Brown refused. Jim Lane was most influential proponent of radical proposal to raise and equip Indians and Blacks to reoccupy Indian Territory held by South. Radical associates of John Brown plunged into this work. This involved a rare level of interracial understanding, trust, and cooperation.

Man of Douglas / Man of Lincoln (Ian Spurgeon) The Lane Trail / Underground Railroad Lane's Army of the North Lane's Frontier Guard of Lincoln at White House
Triracial Indian Brigades
Jennison Montgomery Stewart Leonhardt/Lenhart

Gen. Lane's Kansas Danites/Jayhawkers

First Kansas Colored Infantry

William Matthews, First lieutenant, Independent Colored Kansas Battery

James H. Lane personally inducted 48-er, Charles Leonhardt, into Danites

Frank Baron Todd Mildfelt Danites/ the first Jayhawks men of valor... appointed with weapons of war

200 man army Kansas Territorial militia

Lane with Indian Scouts; Bondi's writings attribute Jayhawk to Lane Acted in concert with John Brown to expel the slavepower. Leonhardt met with Wide Awakes in Omaha with UGRR

Todd Mildfelt on Charles F. W. Leonhardt and Esther Lewis

daughter of UGRR stationmaster in Iowa
Free State guerilla leader:

... it is utterly imposible for me to forget the deep impression John Brown made on m in our Homestruggles during 1847 1849 we had often held our own life a blood offering for our country's s as this man pleaded the cause of another people and race.

Charles Leonhardt's account (1870) of his Free State Kansas participation in Underground Railroad

Conclusions:
Kansas history not just local, but national and international significance. The anti-racism and vanguard political practice put forward by Quindaro Nancy Brown Guthrie, Lucy Armstrong, Clarina Nichols, and Frederick Douglass was modeled by many GermanAmerican 48ers like Bondi and Leonhardt (and Marx).

Transatlantic radicalism combined with advocacy of racial justice represented a significant transformative force in U.S. history. But counterrevolution vs. Reconstruction Black power,
Western Indians, and militant industrial labor force (1876-77).

International/intercultural human rights movements today have a genuine precedent here; this history should be part of our multicultural education curriculum reform effort.

Karl Marx On Kansas!

(published in Die Presse, Vienna, 1861) For hardly had the Kansas-Nebraska Bill gone through when armed emissaries of the slaveholders, border rabble from Missouri and Arkansas, with bowie-knife in one hand and revolver in the other, fell upon Kansas and sought by the most unheard of atrocities to dislodge its settlers from the Territory colonized by them. These raids were supported by the central government in Washington.

Marx On Kansas and Missouri!

(published in Die Presse, Vienna 1861)
Colonel Jennison in Kansas has surpassed all his military predecessors by an address to his troops which contains the following passage: I want no men who are not Abolitionists, I have no use for them, and I hope that there are no such people among us, for everyone knows that slavery is the basis, the center, and the vertex of this infernal war... The slavery question is being solved in practice in the border slave states even now, especially in Missouri.

Karl Marx in Das Kapital (1867)

In the United States of North America every independent movement of the workers was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured part of the Republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once arose. The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours agitation.