Among my family’s books and letters are some first-person accounts of the Kansas-Missouri Border War, a prelude to the Civil War, writ small and concentrated. Published here for the first time, are letters from the scene in Kansas in May, 1856, by my great-great-grandmother Cecilia Stewart Sherman, when the violence flashed into what she herself called a “civil war.” Along with the letters, the two-volume biography of her husband, John Sherman, William Tecumseh’s younger brother and my great-great-grandfather, includes his account of events. Cecilia’s urgent descriptions are balanced by John’s more reflective voice — he was writing almost forty years after the events and knew exactly where they led. Taken together they are extraordinarily revealing about an American buildup to war.

One hundred-and-fifty years ago, Kansas was contested territory, the fight a mixture of doctrine and greed, fueled by widespread gun-ownership and by ineffective law enforcement. Until then the Kansas Territory had been the pass-through route to the Golden West or south to Mexico. The Territory itself belonged to the Otoes, Ioways, and Missouria; the Kickapoos, the Kaskaskias, Peorias, Shawnees, Delawares, Wyandottes, Chipewas, Osages, and Pottawatomies — Native American tribes already in decline, their names left as markers. Settlers kept to the trails etched into the prairies, the Santa Fe Trail heading south, or the California Trail through the Donner Pass on the way to the riches beyond. They rarely stopped to stay; the open space oppressed them. They felt vulnerable.

But that trend changed in 1854 with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which meant the repeal of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 that strictly limited the number of new slave states to be admitted to the Union. Now, the Act determined that each new state could decide on slavery for itself, by popular vote. It also included the Fugitive Slave Act, which implied that no state was free, because a slave was always a slave, even in a state where slavery was banned.

The formal issues during the Border Wars were slavery and the rights of states, but informally, the conflict was all about property. Missouri, which had been a prosperous slave state since 1821, determined to see to it that its new neighbor to the west would, likewise, be a slave state. Missouri slave property — human beings — was at stake, valued then at $150 million. With no clear guidance from distant Washington, people took matters into their own hands. Missourians and Southern sympathizers moved into the Territory to create a pro-slavery presence, while abolitionist settlers from New England and Illinois and Ohio took the long trip West to keep Kansas soil slave-free.

Back in Washington, Southern and Northern interests wrestling for control of the Congress saw Kansas as a proving ground for or against slavery. Democrats represented the South and the expansion of its peculiar institution. On the opposing side, the Republican Party rose from the ashes of the Whig Party in 1854. Its platform was to end slavery and to keep the Union whole. The fight would become violent even within the Capitol. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a founder of the Republican party, was beaten unconscious with a cane on the Senate floor in May of 1856 by Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina for besmirching the name of Brook’s uncle, another South Carolina congressman, in an anti-slavery speech. Afterwards, Brooks triumphantly brandished his cane throughout the South, while Sumner’s bloody shirt was paraded throughout New England.

As skirmishes intensified between pro- and anti-slavery forces, several important Civil War figures got a taste for the fight in the Kansas Territories. Lt. Col. Robert E. Lee and Lt. J.E.B. Stuart, U.S. Army veterans of the Mexican War, both were stationed in Fort Leavenworth and had run-ins with the abolitionist guerrilla John Brown, whose militia would murder five men in cold blood in Osawatomie, Kansas, in May of 1856. Three years later, it would be Lee’s job to bring Brown to justice for trying to incite a slave revolt in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia — a final act of terrorism for which Brown was hanged. Another Mexican war veteran, William T. Sherman, came to Leavenworth in 1858, to try his hand at law with his Ewing brothers-in-law, who had allied themselves with the Free-State Party. He had no law license, but a local judge allowed him to practice “on the grounds of general intelligence.” Even so, he failed as a lawyer and spent the winter writing impassioned letters on the Union and the “slavery question” to his brother John in Washington, D.C. Also back from the Mexican war, Ulysses S Grant was a farmer in Missouri; Abraham Lincoln in Illinois was an early denunciator of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Samuel Pomeroy was an anti-slavery fighter from Massachusetts in search of a political career, who would be sent to the U.S. Senate in 1861 when Kansas became a state. On the other side, Samuel D. Lecompte, the first chief justice of the Territorial Supreme Court, ruled against the Free Soilers in 1856, calling them traitors; the pro-slavery town of Lecompton was named for him.

In 1856, John and Cecilia Sherman had been married eight years and were childless. He was thirty-three years old; she was twenty-seven. The couple was in their first year of living in Washington, D.C., having come from Mansfield, Ohio, Cecilia’s home town, where John had worked as a lawyer with his older brother Charles. There he had dabbled in Whig politics, but the repeal of the Missouri Compromise had motivated him to run for office; in 1854 he was elected as a Republican to the U.S. House of Representatives. Cecilia was a “carefully educated” woman, according to John, and an intelligent and supportive partner in his long political career, which would include a term as a Congressman, consistent re-election for forty years to the U.S. Senate, and service as Secretary of the Treasury under Rutherford B. Hayes, and as Secretary of State for William McKinley. The Sherman Anti-trust Act is named for him. Cecilia was known in Washington for her propriety and correctness. As a couple they were never considered warm; John, in fact was thought to be so humorless he was nicknamed the Human Icicle. But the passion Cecilia voices in her letters gives an idea of the heat that the Kansas conflict generated at the time.

The press had done much to fan the flames. The vote to elect a Kansas Territorial legislature was scheduled for March of 1855. Pro-slavery firebrands like hard-drinking David Atchison and John Stringfellow exhorted their supporters in the Atchison (Kan.) Squatter Herald, the so-called Border Ruffians, to cross into Kansas and vote, by force if necessary. Stringfellow’s brother Ben wrote, “To those who have qualms of conscience as to violating laws, state or national, the crisis has arrived when such impositions must be disregarded, as your rights and property are in danger, and I advise one and all to…vote at the point of the bowie-knife and the revolver… I tell you to mark every scoundrel among you that is in the least tainted with free-soilism or abolitionism and exterminate him.” Indeed, thousands of votes were cast. A pro-slavery legislature was established in 1855; it immediately enacted drastic slave codes providing severe penalties for antislavery agitation and authorizing a test oath for officeholders. President Franklin Pierce sent Wilson Shannon, a U.S. congressman from Ohio, to Leavenworth as territorial governor, replacing Andrew Reeder. Pierce, a Democrat, expected Shannon to be pliant to Southern interests.

Horace Greeley rallied to the cause in his New York Tribune, summarizing the issue this way: “The contest already takes the form of the People against Tyranny and Slavery.” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that he knew people “who are making haste to reduce their expenses and pay their debts, not with a view to new accumulations, but in preparation to save and earn for the benefit of Kansas emigrants.” Political cartoons drove the point home, such as this one in Harper’s:

Anti-slavery forces declared the Territorial Legislature a fraud and the election rigged. The New England Emigrant Aid Society in Massachusetts organized colonies of abolitionists to settle in Kansas. Over one thousand made the arduous trip, by train to St. Louis, then by boat down the Missouri River to territorial border, where the Missouri forks into the Kansas River. They headed for Lawrence, which had been established in 1854 about forty miles upriver from the border on the banks of the Kansas. Within a year their tent settlement was replaced by huts and cabins; the town’s most imposing structure, the Society’s Free State Hotel, was built of stone. The Society’s agent, Dr. Charles Robinson, and his wife Sara would become the organizing center of the anti-slavery forces. Though Robinson advocated non-violent resistance to the elected legislature, the Society had the foresight to equip the colonists with sixty of the latest in rifle technology: the fearsome Sharps breech-loading rifle, manufactured by its inventor Christian Sharps in Philadelphia. Easy to load and deadly accurate, it was dubbed the “Beecher’s Bible” for the New York minister who advocated its use in what was deemed a holy war to end slavery. (During the Civil War, companies armed with Sharps rifles were known as sharpshooters.) Mere rumor of these arms kept the Missouri Border Ruffians at bay. The town of Lawrence bought some time to become established.

Partisan newspapers kept tallies of the atrocities perpetrated by each side and exhorted their supporters to action. Offended readers often stormed the presses and threw them in the nearest river. The New York Tribune reported of the axe murder of free-soiler Reese Brown by whiskey-crazed Ruffians. “One of the wretches...stooped over the prostrate man, and, with a refinement of cruelty exceeding the rudest savage, spit tobacco juice in his eyes.” The Lawrence Herald of Freedom described the tar-and-feathering of free-soil lawyer William Phillips in Leavenworth: he was paraded through the streets and then “sold” by a Negro for a dollar before being thrown into the Missouri. Unchastened by the violence, pro-slavery agitator David Atkinson’s Squatter Sovereign threatened to “continue to lynch and hang, to tar and feather, and drown every white-livered abolitionist who dates to pollute our soil.”

Law enforcement was often compromised. For instance, Indian agent George Clarke was accused of leading an ambush that killed Thomas Barber, one of a group of abolitionist settlers returning to their farms from Lawrence to cut firewood. “I have sent another of these damned abolitionists to his winter-quarters,” said Clarke, according to a news report from Sara Robinson. Sara also reported how Missouri sheriff Sam J. Jones was the leader of an armed “motley gang” of ballot stuffers from Westport, who tried to force their way into the cabin that served as a poll. When unsuccessful, “[a] pry was then put under the corner of the log cabin, letting it rise and fall…. The two judges still remaining firm in their refusal to allow them to vote, Jones led on a party with bowie-knives drawn, and pistols cocked. With watch in hand, he declared to the judges, ‘he would give them five minutes in with to resign, or die….’” U.S. Marshall Israel Donelson was equally partisan. It was he who led a posse of Border Ruffians intending to destroy Lawrence in May of 1856. With such bias at the highest level of law enforcement, Col. Edwin Sumner, Lee and Stuart’s commander at Fort Leavenworth, was left to issue Federal protection to abolitionist and pro-slavery agitators alike. An impossible task: Missourians were determined to wipe Lawrence and its inhabitants off the map.

In December of 1855, Dr. Charles Robinson was made commanding general of the Free State Militia to defend Lawrence against an armed posse of Missourians camped outside the city. Governor Shannon had been unable to control them. Although Robinson had sworn his men to non-violence, they had loaded their Sharps rifles and a smuggled howitzer and were armed to fight, in no small measure helped by the gunpowder their women had cached under their skirts from outlying storehouses. The position of the town — at the edge of the Kansas River in the middle of a plain, flanked by an overlook — made it impossible to defend. But the Ruffians’ knowledge of the inhabitants’ weapons — and a sudden winter storm with sleet and gale force winds — had kept attackers at bay. The only casualties that time had been a pro-slavery fighter who had shot himself in the foot, another felled by a fallen tree, another killed by his own sentry, and a fourth killed in a barroom brawl. The attackers would wait until spring to make their next assault.

Meanwhile, word of the election fraud and the siege of Lawrence was telegraphed back to Washington. In January of 1856, President Pierce sent a worried message to the House about the situation in Kansas and asked that money be set aside for the “maintenance of public order in the Territory of Kansas.” In March the House decided to assemble a committee to see the situation first hand, take testimony from both sides, and get an account of the territorial election. The committee would consist of three congressmen: Mordecai Oliver of Missouri; John Sherman of Ohio; and Chairman William A. Howard of Michigan. Accompanying them were a stenographer and a guard. They would travel by train to St. Louis, arriving April 12^th, then continue by steamer and over land, taking testimony at both free-soil and pro-slavery settlements. They then would return the way they came, arriving in Detroit by June 17^th to compile the report formally.

John Sherman picks up the story here:

I accepted the position assigned me with much diffidence. I knew it was a laborious one, that it would take me away from my duties in the House, expose me to a great deal of fatigue and some danger, yet I felt that the appointment on so important a committee was a high compliment when given to a new Member, and at once made preparations for the task before me...

Mrs. Sherman expressed a strong desire to accompany me. I tried to frighten her from going, but this made her more resolute, and I consented. She remained with or near us during our stay in Kansas and Missouri, and for a time was accompanied by Mrs. Oliver, a charming lady, to whom we were much indebted for kindness and civility where most of her sex were unfriendly...

We arrived by steamer at a place called Westport Landing near the mouth of the Kansas River. As I remember the place it was a mere hamlet, composed of three dwellings, a store, a tavern and a blacksmith shop. We passed over the high rolling prairie, where but a few and scattered cabins then existed, but which now is the site of Kansas City…about six miles from the landing we entered Westport, the headquarters of the Santa Fé trade. This important trade in 1854 was conducted with “prairie schooners,” wagons of great dimensions rudely but strongly built, each hauled by four to six mules or Indian ponies, and all driven by as rough a set of men of mixed color, tribe and nativity as could be found anywhere in the world. Their usual dress was a broad brimmed felt hat, a flannel shirt, home-spun trousers, without suspenders, and heavy cowhide boots outside their trousers, with a knife or pistols, or both, in their belts or boots. They were properly classed as border ruffians, and as a rule were whisky soaked.

Mrs. Sherman and myself started in advance for Lawrence in an open buggy drawn by one horse, and were told to follow the trail, and this we had no difficulty in doing. We passed through one or more Indian reservations, over as beautiful a country as the sun shines upon, but without house or habitation, except Indian huts. We arrived at Lawrence, a town less than two years old, and were cordially received. The people there were fearing a raid by the “border ruffians,” but this was fortunately postponed until our departure for Leavenworth.

Cecilia Sherman in 1897

Cecilia writes to her sister-in-law Fanny, who is in Mansfield, Ohio. John’s younger sister, Fanny was married to Charles Moulton, a prominent Cincinnati lawyer and businessman who looked after John’s political interests in that Democratic city.

John continues:

The committee proceeded immediately to take testimony. Governor Reeder acted in behalf of the Free State side, and General [John] Whitfield in behalf of the pro-slavery side, this being the conceded line of demarcation between the opposing factions. The town [of Lawrence] was in embryo, nothing finished, and my wife and I were glad to have a cot in a room in the unfinished and unoccupied Free State Hotel... There was no difficulty in obtaining witnesses or testimony, but, as a rule, the witnesses on one side would only testify in Lawrence, and those on the other in Lecompton or Leavenworth. They were like soldiers in hostile armies, careful to keep outside of the enemy’s camp.

Dr. Robinson, afterward Governor Robinson [in 1861], was then by far the ablest and bravest leader of the Free State cause....When the committee visited Lecompton to take testimony, it was a surprise to us that he not only offered, but insisted upon going to that place, the headquarters and capital of the pro-slavery party. It was then scarcely a hamlet, and its existence depended entirely upon the success of that party. Dr. Robinson and I rode together into the place. It was easy to see that he was not a welcome visitor. Everyone but the committee carried arms. Several murders and affrays had recently occurred, in regard to which we had taken evidence. Here we had access to the poll-books of the contested election and met on friendly terms with the officers of the territory, the chief of whom were Judge [Samuel D.] Lecompte, chief justice of the territory, after whom the town had been named, and [Samuel J.] Jones [sheriff of Douglas County, Missouri]....Governor [Wilson] Shannon was I think also there for a time. The quarters for lodging were even more limited here than in Lawrence. I slept in a cot side by side with the one occupied by Judge Lecompte, who, though a terror to the Free State men, seemed to me to be a good humored gentleman, more violent in his words than in his acts. We had no unpleasant incidents while there, though much had been prophesied in Lawrence.

Cecilia:

John:

From Lecompton the committee went to Topeka, then quite a small village.... It was already ambitious to become the Free State capital of Kansas, by reason if its central position. There was then no settlement of any importance west of Topeka. Some testimony was taken, but we soon returned to Lawrence, and from thence went to Leavenworth. A large part of the distance between these places was an Indian reservation. Mrs. Sherman and I rode over it in a buggy, and found no white man’s habitation on the way. Its great value and fertility was easily perceived, and it in now well settled by an active and prosperous population of white men. On the road we met an Indian seated near his wigwam, with a gun in his hand, and for a moment I feared that he might use it. He uttered some Indian gibberish, which we construed as an invitation to enter his hut. We tied our horse, entered, and found no one there but an old squaw. I gave the Indian some silver which he greedily took, but indicated by his motions that he wanted a drink of whisky, but this I was not able to give him.

Cecilia:

John:

Leavenworth was a new town near Fort Leavenworth, the then western military post of the army of the United States. We placed ourselves in communication with Colonel Sumner, then in command, but we had no occasion to summon his official aid, though authorized by the resolutions under which we were acting to call for such assistance from any military force which was at the time convenient to us. However, our meetings there were more disturbed than at any other place.

Cecilia:

John:

...Dr. Robinson was arrested on a steamboat on the way with his wife to St. Louis. We had confided to him a copy of the testimony taken, to be delivered to Mr. Banks, the speaker of the House. We believe that a knowledge of that fact caused the arrest, but, fortunately, Mrs. Robinson, who had the testimony safely secured in her clothing, was allowed to proceed to Washington. Dr. Robinson was taken back to Leavenworth and placed in prison, where I called upon him, but was rudely threatened, and was only allowed to speak to him in the presence of a jailer...

Cecilia:

John:

We were frequently threatened through anonymous letters. On one occasion, upon going in the morning to the committee room, I found tacked upon the door a notice to the “Black Republican Committee” to leave Kansas “upon penalty of death.” I cut it from the door and called upon a bystander to testify to the contents and the place from which it was taken.

On one Sunday morning, while sitting in my lodging, a very rough looking man entered, and I indicated to Mr. W. Blair Lord, our stenographer, to take down what he said. With many oaths and imprecations he told us that he had been robbed by ruffians of his horses and wagon a few miles from Leavenworth; that he had offered to fight them, but they were cowards; that he was born in Richland county, Ohio, near Mansfield, and he wanted me to help him get his traps. I knew his family as famous fighters. I asked him if he would swear to his story. He said he would. Lord read it to him, oaths and all, from his stenographic notes. He stared at Lord and demanded “Where in hell did you get that?” He was handed the stenographic notes and, after looking at them, he exclaimed: “Snakes, by God; but it is all true!” Whether he got his outfit and traps I never knew.

Cecilia:

John:

The trouble commenced at Lawrence shortly after our arrival at Leavenworth. A company of about 700 armed men, the great body of whom were not citizens of the territory, were marched into the town of Lawrence under Marshal Donaldson [sic] and Sheriff Jones, officers claiming to act under the law, and they then bombarded and burned to the ground a valuable [Free State] hotel and one private house, and destroyed two printing presses and material. The posse, being released by the officers, proceeded to sack, pillage and rob houses, stores, trunks, even taking the clothing of women and children. The people of Leavenworth were much alarmed, as threats were made to clean out the “Black Republican Committee” at Leavenworth.

Cecilia:

We were roused this morning by sad intelligence from Lawrence which as been confirmed by others who have arrived since. On yesterday morning, as stated by one of our sergeant at arms who had been out, witnessing, between 8 & 9 oclock, while the citizens of Lawrence were peacefully pursuing their different avocations or going to their work, horsemen and footmen all armed with muskets with fixed bayonets & other arms were seen collecting on Capitol Hill & the mount overlooking the town. About 11 oclock [U.S. Deputy] Marshall Donaldson [sic-Donelson] & eight men as a posse came down into the town and summoned two of their principal military men to assist them & then proceeded to make their arrest [of two free state fugitives] without the least resistance from anyone. After making the arrests they dined at the Free State Hotel after which they with their prisoners retired up to Gov Robinson’s house on the hill where the others were still stationed.

O! how basely Gov. Shannon uses the powers invested in him by the President. He refused to call upon the station troops near Lawrence to protect it when requested by the citizens, but now when he knows they are justly exasperated at the repeated outrages upon life and property and he feels he maybe in some danger, he calls upon them. He need have no fear of personal violence for they regard him as an old imbecile who is wholly at the mercy of the mob & must act as they dictate, else his life is in danger, for they have repeatedly declared if he acted otherwise than they will have him, they will kill him. Mr. Townsend says a man in [Missouri] said that the way in which they got powers to destroy the hotel & printing presses was by representing them to the grand jury as nuisances. There is not a Free State man on the grand jury and of course they had no difficulty in getting the color of law to act under. But they had no law for burning Gov. Robinson’s house & sacking all the rest.

John:

...The evidence at Leavenworth being closed, the committee returned to Westport, Missouri. When we were there we saw an armed and organized body of residents of Missouri march across the line into Kansas to retaliate, as we were told, for the murder of five pro-slavery men at Osawatamie.² While they were marching into Westport from the east, Governor Shannon, in obedience to the summons of the committee, came into Westport from the territory, and in his presence they filed off in regular array into the territory. It was difficult to ascertain the precise causes of these murders, but it was shown that they were in retaliation for those of certain Free State men, one of whom was the son of John Brown, later the famous leader of the attack on the fort at Harper’s Ferry, and who had acted for the committee in summoning witnesses to Lawrence. The testimony in respect to these murders was vague, and the murderers were not identified. Two years afterwards I met John Brown in Chicago, and asked him about the murder of the pro-slavery men at Osawatamie; he replied with spirit that they were not murdered, but that they had been arrested, tried by a jury, convicted and executed. The arrest, trial and execution must have been done during one night. He did not disclose the names of the executioners, but his cool statement was a striking picture of the scenes then enacted in Kansas by both sides; both appealed to the law of force and crime, and crime was justified by crime.

Cecilia:

After stopping in Detroit, John and Cecilia returned to Washington with the report, which ran over a thousand pages. Committee chairman William Howard presented it to the House on July 1, 1856, and after much debate, John read it to the assembly. The Congress continued to argue the Kansas question weeks past its customary recess from the sweltering heat of Washington summer, and did not finally adjourn until the end of August. John threw himself into

...a futile effort to restore the prohibition of slavery in Kansas, according to the Missouri Compromise, but the struggle made was fruitful in good. It strengthened the Free State sentiment in Kansas, it aroused public sentiment in the north, and drove the south to adopt new and strange theories which led to divisions in the Democratic party and its disruption and overthrow in 1860. The compromise made was understood to the be work of Mr. Seward, and, though not satisfactory to the Republicans of the House, it was at least a drawn battle, and, like Bunker Hill to Yorktown, was the prelude to the Revolution that ended at Appomattox.

When they went to “hear and witness” the shocking events of 1856, John and Cecilia experienced first-hand a new culture of violence and unilateral action prevalent in the American West. Today, as America readies itself for war, I am struck by the similarities in tone between the frontier war talk of the 1850s and of today. Its origins are in the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which protected the right of Americans to form militias to keep law and order in the absence of an army. In the frontier, the paucity of courts and the ubiquity of firearms thus encouraged Americans to settle disputes themselves, without benefit of legal mediation. The historian Richard Maxwell Brown calls this extra-legal principle “no duty to retreat.” It was a departure from the medieval British common law requiring a person under threat to retreat until his back is to the wall before he could use deadly force; this would encourage people to settle quarrels in court and to protect the sanctity of human life. “No duty to retreat,” on the other hand, was best expressed by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953 Cold War speech: If you “meet anyone face to face with whom you disagree…and took the same risk as he did, you could get away with almost anything as long as the bullet was in front.” — that is, as long as you were the quicker draw.

This was the modus operandi of the post-Civil War Western gunfighter, including Eisenhower’s avowed hero and fellow Kansan, Wild Bill Hickok, who had been an eighteen-year-old sheriff in Leavenworth in 1854, and later, a Union scout. His “walkdown” with Dave Tutt at fifty yards in 1865 in a Missouri public square epitomized the American view of murder in self-defense, in which a “true man” under threat can be acquitted for standing his ground. In Texas, where the rule was carried to its extreme, justifiable homicide extended to defense of one’s self, one’s property or even one’s values; “no duty to retreat” became known as the Texas rule in 1885. A man could fight and even pursue an adversary until the threat was over. “A man is not born to run away,” wrote Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1921, when he made the Texas rule federal law. Holmes had been a Union junior officer in of some of the Civil War’s bloodiest battles – Antietam, Chancellorsville, and the Wilderness among them.

In the chaos of the post-Civil War West, the “good guys”—lawmen like Hickok and Wyatt Earp—represented the authority of capital: the owners of cattle ranches and mining companies and railroads, grasping for the wealth of the West, in what Brown and historian Alan Trachtenberg call the Western Civil War of Incorporation. The bad-guys were Southern-sympathizing outlaw homesteaders like Jesse James, or unaffiliated cowboys bent on mayhem and a fast buck—of the same ilk as the Border Ruffian. Our national mythology seized on the dichotomy. In foreign policy, we applied the prerogative of American police action abroad to protect corporate interests. We would stand our ground, wherever we determined we needed to. In 1947, the Truman Doctrine, intended to contain Soviet power, kept a U.S. military presence on the ground around the world, threatened war over Cuba, and sent forces to fight in Korea and Viet Nam, and countless other smaller skirmishes. The most militant impulses in American foreign policy have had their strongest advocates in Presidents from the Southwest.

Now we have a Texan in the White House, proposing a war of preemption against what we fear the enemy might do—war in the subjunctive tense, typical of the spirit of “no duty to retreat.” President George W. Bush talks of terror, generalized and pervasive. “We must chose between a world of fear and a world of progress,” he told the U.N. General Assembly. That is to say, a world of orderly democracies fit for business instead of a backward, chaotic world in the thrall of outlaw, non-democratic leaders. “We are the leader,” he said, who must “combine the ability to listen to others, along with action.” This has meant arming our allies of the moment—Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, for instance—with new shipments of high-tech weapons, and threatening unilateral action as we position our troops around Iraq, our enemy of the moment. Bush argues in abstractions—freedom, terror— but his target is personal and material: the bad man who tried to kill his dad, and, incidentally, the oil reserves that bad man represents.

George W. Bush and I are the same age. I am from Washington, D.C.; Bush is a Texas transplant, his family of bankers and businessmen having moved from the moneyed lawns of Greenwich, Connecticut, to the oil fields of Midland, Texas. He has called himself  “a child of Vietnam,” but in fact, he and I are children of the Eisenhower era. I grew up—as I’m sure he did—cheering for the Lone Ranger on TV, and wearing my Roy Rogers cowboy boots and hat to kindergarten and brandishing my toy guns at the bad guys to be the fastest draw. So I can empathize with him when he described himself recently to Bob Woodward as a “West Texas tough guy” who wants to be seen as a liberator of the oppressed (even though this “tough guy” was a football cheerleader at Yale).

It was another Texan we have to thank for the formative war of our generation. Lyndon Johnson in 1964 seized the pretext of an attack on U.S. warships on “routine patrol” in the Gulf of Tonkin to bomb North Vietnam and launch the Vietnam War. America would stand its ground and fight the expansion of communism, and Johnson did not intend to be the first President to lose a war. “Let’s hang the coonskin on the wall,” he said. But once in Vietnam, fighting a formidably determined enemy, he could not figure a way to get out without having to retreat. Americans heard and witnessed on TV the horrors of an ill-considered war on the other side of the world that was miring us in defeat. When in March of 1968, TV brought the image of Lyndon Johnson announcing that he was resigning from the presidency, I remember the shattered look on his face. His career was in ruins, his war spun out of control, his country in open rebellion. I hope George W. Bush, self-styled “child of Vietnam,” remembers that also.

Notes:

1 Childless themselves for the first years of their marriage, John and Cecilia took active interest in their many nieces and nephews. Mary Hoyt Sherman was the daughter of John’s brother Charles. In 1868, she married General Nelson A. Miles, who made his career in the West and spent much of it in Fort Leavenworth.

2 On May 24, John Brown, enraged by the sacking of Lawrence, led a posse of vigilantes consisting of five of his sons and three accomplices to murder five pro-slavery settlers in cold blood.

Brown, Richard Maxwell. NO DUTY TO RETREAT: Violence and Values in American History and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992

Goodrich, Thomas. WAR TO THE KNIFE: Bleeding Kansas 1854-1861. Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1998

______ _______. BLOODY DAWN: The Story of the Lawrence Massacre. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University, 1991

Nichols, Alice. BLEEDING KANSAS. New York: Oxford University Press, 1954

Sherman, John. JOHN SHERMAN’S RECOLLECTIONS OF FORTY YEARS IN THE HOUSE, SENATE AND CABINET, AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY New York: The Werner Company, 1895

Smiley, Jane. THE ALL-TRUE TRAVELS AND ADVENTURES OF LIDIE NEWTON. New York: Fawcett Books, 1998 (Fiction)

Stiles, T. J. JESSE JAMES: LAST REBEL OF THE CIVIL WAR. New York: Knopf, 2002

Trachtenberg, Alan. THE INCORPORATION OF AMERICA: CULTURE AND SOCIETY IN THE GILDED AGE. New York: Hill and Wang. 1982

Woodward, Bob. BUSH AT WAR. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002

 see also:

Living with Guns - An Introduction
“Why They Shot Us,” a poem by Marilyn A. Johnson.