How so? To my understanding, Jayhawkers and Bushwhackers both migrated to Kansas in droves for the express purpose of voting on the issue of slavery. What was the fraudulent part?

Migration is not the same as casting a vote in an election when you are not a resident.

The 1855 Kansas Territory elections were a series of pivotal moments in the “Bleeding Kansas” conflict between pro-slavery individuals and “Free-Staters” in Kansas Territory. The initial elections for territorial legislature, held on March 30, 1855, were marred by widespread voter fraud, intimidation, and violence, as pro-slavery forces from neighboring Missouri crossed the border to cast ballots and suppress anti-slavery voters. In response, Kansas Territorial governor, Andrew H. Reeder, ordered new elections to be held on May 22 in certain districts. But even after the corrective elections, pro-slavery candidates still managed to win a majority of seats in the territorial legislature. When the legislature convened in July, it promptly ejected all the Free-State candidates who had won seats in the May elections. This act led to many Kansans lambasting the body as the “Bogus Legislature.”

Allen Wilkenson was a member of said legislature; which attempted to enforce laws ‘passed’ under such blatant malfeasance with the usual threats of government ie violence. Doyle and his sons were part of the party which enforced the power of said legislature; Sherman was a partisan of the legislature as well with a history of threatening free-staters.

There are plenty of people in my community today who have frankly abhorrent political views and are willing to excuse atrocities at home and abroad for any number of reasons - ignorance, self-interest, tribalism, whatever you want to call it. They’re not all activitists and criminals. I don’t think dragging neighbors out of their homes in the dead of night and slaughtering them should ever be a solution that crosses anyone’s mind.

So if there was an effective coup of the local government by the Nazi Party, sanctioned or ignored by the national government, and a fresh spate of politically motivated murders of dissenters against this government, and a few ardent members of the Nazi Party, including a Nazi legislator, were your neighbors, your response to violence being visited on them in turn would be, what, “Violence is never a solution, not even to the combination of extrajudicial and state-sponsored violence 🥺”?

Forgive me for not finding that Christian notion of infinite martyrdom appealing. Or useful. Or moral.

In the case of the Pottawatomie Massacre, all it achieved was steeling the bushwhackers’ resolve and a fresh spate of retributive violence. In the two years leading up to the massacre there were 8 killings in Kansas over this issue; in the three months following and including the massacre there were more than 30. It was a reckless spark in a powder keg

Of course, the reckless spark in the powder keg wasn’t the violence or expulsions that preceded it, no, it was daring to make any form of retribution against two years of slaver violence that had gone unanswered.

The violence by the free-staters led to a congressional investigation, which discovered that a firm majority of the residents of Kansas wanted it to enter as a free-state, but I’m sure that if the free-staters had just rolled over and continued to allow the slavers to pretend to represent the will of the people of the territory, everything would’ve worked out swell. No need for any uncomfortable moments, just a nice, ‘clean’ entry of a slave state into the Union that no one has to fret about. 😊

Maybe John Brown shouldn’t have attempted the raid on Harper’s Ferry, either. I mean, imagine all the innocent slavers he would’ve hurt in the process of the uprising had he succeeded. Civilian slavers, at that, who’d never taken up arms or done any harm (at least none that would be recognized by a jury of their peers) against their fellow white man.