For God and Mammon: Evangelicals and Entrepreneurs, Masters and Slaves in Territorial Kansas, 1854-1860 (review)

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

94CIVIL WAR HISTORY enormously informative and richly rewarding. Based upon extensive research in legal archives, much of it unpublished county court records from dozens of selected counties across the South, upon state statutes, and on hundreds of volumes of published appellate decisions not individually listed in a bibliography , which, as it is, takes up thirty-six pages, it is now required reading for any serious student of slavery in the American South. William Henry Longton The University of Toledo For God and Mammon: Evangelicals and Entrepreneurs, Masters and Slaves in Territorial Kansas, 1 854-1 860. By Gunja SenGupta. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Pp.157. $3500.) SenGupta's book is an exercise in intellectual history. Disparate portions of it were published in Civil War History (March 1993) and in Kansas History (Autumn 1993). Begun as a doctoral dissertation at Tulane University, it is a lively and fresh analysis of ideologies in the struggle for the soul and soil of Kansas from 1854 to i860. Emphasizing the antislavery element, she finds variables within that group and in the end discerns a bourgeois consensus between antislavery and proslavery elements. God and Mammon seem to clasp hands on the Kansas prairie in i860. God is represented by Northern evangelicals, organized in the American Missionary Association, the American Home Missionary Society, and the New England Emigrant Company. The second of these was the oldest, composed of several denominations, organized in New York to be a national force to evangelize America. When it failed to discountenance slavery, Congregationalists in New England organized the American Missionary Association, which not only advocated abolition of slavery but also racial equality. The New England Aid Company, the most familiar of the three to students of Bleeding Kansas, sprang into being in April 1854 when the Kansas Territory, heretofore closed to slavery, was being opened to settlement and slavery. The company aimed to advance the cause of both God and Mammon to a greater degree than its predecessors. At some length SenGupta analyzes the free labor doctrine espoused by these organizations, their dispatch of missionaries and future territorial leaders, and their efforts to establish a cultural imperialism. Proslavery elements also were motivated by economic interests and divided by rivalry over specific pieces of territory. Migration was the key to Kansas's future. The author shows that without the infamous incursion of "Border Ruffians" in early 1855, emigrants from the slave states would have predominated in the organization of the territory. Slave laborers, however, never became numerous, attaining a height of perhaps five book reviews95 hundred in 1857 and after the proslavery cause seemed lost dwindling to two in i860. SenGupta acknowledges that the evangelical emigrants never became numerous, but asserts that they played an important role in determining freedom for Kansas. Though she makes a scholarly contribution in her detailed examination of the 1855 territorial census, she fails to include William O. Lynch's findings in the i860 census that few New Englanders lived in Kansas. Neighboring states provided the bulk of the population. She concludes that bourgeois interests—chiefly in farmland, town lots, and railroad promotion— brought Northerners and Southerners together, anticipating, she suggests, C. V. Woodward's description of a postwar alliance between businessmen in both sections. The author seems to slip when she says that Governor Geary's truce came too late "to salvage Pierce's faltering career" (131). President Pierce had already been abandoned by his party in favor of James Buchanan. And she seems misleading in saying without explanation that the land grant offered in the English bill was a "bribe" (136). SenGupta's book adds to the understanding of the interplay of evangelism and entrepreneurship in territorial Kansas. Her research is thorough, her knowledge of the appropriate literature impressive, and her style felicitous. She and the University of Georgia Press may be proud of theirjoint accomplishment. James A. Rawly University of Nebraska-Lincoln ...