1st Kansas Colored Volunteers

Seeking the Promised Land: African American Migrations to Kansas

With the promise of freedom and new economic and educational opportunities, Kansas attracted many African Americans in its territorial days, through statehood, and into the 20th century. Slavery existed in the Kansas Territory, but slave holdings were small compared to the South. Many black migrants also came to the territory as hired laborers, while some traveled as escaped slaves through the Underground Railroad. In the 1860s, others joined the Union Army, and some moved from the South in large groups during the Kansas Exodus, a mass migration of freedpeople during the 1870s and 1880s. As a territory that had a long and violent history of pre-Civil War contests over slavery, Kansas emerged as the “quintessential free state” and seemed like a promised land for African Americans who searched for what they called a “New Canaan.”

Kim Warren
University of Kansas

Slavery on the Western Border: Missouri’s Slave System and its Collapse during the Civil War

Less than 40 years after the Civil War, General John G. Haskell, the president of the Kansas Historical Society, described slavery in western Missouri as “a more domestic than commercial institution,” in which the “social habits were those of the farm and not the plantation.” Many of his white contemporaries remembered slavery in a similar way, arguing that conditions were much more favorable on the farms of western Missouri than in the cotton fields of the Deep South.

Diane Mutti Burke
University of Missouri-Kansas City

A Long and Bloody Conflict: Military Operations in Missouri and Kansas, Part II

The start of 1862 witnessed the federals in their most precarious position of the war in Missouri. Sterling Price’s Missouri State Guard (MSG) controlled the interior of the state – including large sections of the strategically vital Missouri River Valley. Guerrillas ran rampant through the interior as well. It was up to the newly-installed commander of the Department of the Missouri, Major General Henry W. Halleck to restore the Union’s fortunes in the states. Halleck was not idle over the holiday season of 1861, as he instructed Brigadier General Samuel R. Curtis, commander of the recently-formed Federal Army of the Southwest, on his plans for the upcoming campaign season.

Terry Beckenbaugh
U. S. Air Force Command and Staff College

By Matthew E. Stanley, Albany State University

The 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry (later the 79th U.S. Colored Infantry) was an African American regiment that served in the Union Army during the American Civil War. The regiment was organized prior to the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and without federal authorization, thus becoming the first black unit to see combat alongside white soldiers during the war in October 1862.

By Terry Beckenbaugh, U. S. Air Force Command and Staff College

The small skirmish that occurred on October 29, 1862, at Island Mound in Bates County, Missouri, was significant because it marked the first time during the American Civil War that a regiment of African American soldiers saw combat. The 1st Kansas Colored Volunteers who fought at Island Mound were in Kansas service prior to the Emancipation Proclamation’s implementation on January 1, 1863, but not in U.S. service because the Lincoln administration was reluctant to enroll black troops and risk tipping Union slave states, including Missouri, toward the Confederacy.

By Kim Warren, University of Kansas

In an effort to help runaway slaves escape from slave states to the North and to Canada, white and African American abolitionists established a series of hiding places throughout the country where fugitives could hide during the day and travel under the cover of night. Although runaways tended to travel on foot and trains were rarely employed, all involved referred to the secret network as the “Underground Railroad,” a term which first appeared in literature when Harriet Beecher Stowe referred to a secret “underground” line in her 1852 book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

By Christopher Phillips, University of Cincinnati

James Montgomery, abolitionist and federal army colonel, was born in Ashtabula County, Ohio, in Ohio’s deeply antislavery Western Reserve, on December 22, 1814. The deeply evangelical Montgomery was soon caught up in the controversy over slavery and popular sovereignty in the newly formed Kansas Territory. An ally of John Brown and Charles Jennison, Montgomery became notorious for antislavery guerrilla warfare along the Missouri-Kansas border.

By Christopher Phillips, University of Cincinnati

James Henry Lane, a U.S. congressman, senator, and federal general, was born in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, the son of a lawyer and U.S. congressman.

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