Charles R. Jennison

By Tony O’ Bryan, University of Missouri – Kansas City

Although the name “Red Legs” is commonly conflated with the term “jayhawkers” to describe Kansas guerilla units that fought for the Free-State side during the Bleeding Kansas era or the Union side in the Civil War, Red Legs originally referred to a specific paramilitary outfit that organized in Kansas at the height of the Civil War.

By Tony O’ Bryan, University of Missouri—Kansas City

Before the start of the Civil War, the name “jayhawkers” applied to bands of robbers, associated with the Kansas Free-Stater cause, who rustled livestock and stole property on both sides of the state line. During this period, a jayhawker could be a hero or a villain, depending on individual circumstances or one’s opinion on the issue of slavery in Kansas Territory. By the time the war ended, however, the term “jayhawkers” became synonymous with Union troops led by abolitionists from Kansas, and "jayhawking" became the generic term for armies plundering and looting from civilian populations nationwide.

By Christopher Phillips, University of Cincinnati

Charles R. Jennison, abolitionist and federal cavalry colonel, was born on June 6, 1834, in Antwerp, in upstate New York’s famed “Burned-Over District,” so named for its fervid evangelical religious revivals that were foundational to Northern antislavery reform. In 1857 he moved his young family to Osawatomie, Kansas, perhaps not coincidentally the home of John Brown, whose by then notorious radical politics Jennison would soon emulate.

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