Episode 3: Bleeding Kansas and the Utah War
A full transcript of this episode can be found here.
This week on The Past, The Promise, The Presidency: Presidential Crises we examine Bleeding Kansas and the Utah War.
So far this season, we've seen the nation solidify under George Washington's leadership. Then, we saw the city named for our first president nearly burned to the ground by British forces, little more than a generation later. The United States survived each of those crises, but by the 1850s, the new nation was starting to come apart.
This week, we took a look at two crises from the 1850s: the violent struggle between pro- and anti-slavery factions over the political fortunes of future states, known as "Bleeding Kansas,” and the less well-known fight between federal authorities, president James Buchanan in particular, and Mormon leaders over the governance of Utah.
To put the coming Civil War into context and better understand these intertwined crises of federal expansion in the 1850s, we spoke with professor Sarah Barringer Gordon--Sally, to her friends--the Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Barringer Gordon is one of the nation's leading experts on questions of constitutional religious freedoms. We then turned to professor Kellie Carter Jackson, who teaches in the department of Africana studies at Wellesley college. Dr. Carter Jackson’s work provides insight into the role of violence in the ongoing battle for slavery’s abolition.
Let's jump in.
Guests:
Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Africana Studies at Wellesley College.
Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. She was also the 2019-2020 Newhouse Faculty Fellow for the Center of the Humanities at Wellesley College. Carter Jackson's research focuses on slavery and the abolitionists, violence as a political discourse, historical film, and black women’s history. She earned her B.A at her beloved Howard University and her Ph.D from Columbia University working with the esteemed historian Eric Foner. Her book, Force & Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (University of Pennsylvania Press), examines the conditions that led some black abolitionists to believe slavery might only be abolished by violent force. Force and Freedom was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, winner of the James H. Broussard Best First Book Prize given by SHEAR (Society for Historians of the Early American Republic) and a finalist for the Museum of African American History (MAAH) Stone Book Prize Award for 2019.
Carter Jackson is also a co-host on the podcast, “This Day in Political Esoteric History” with Jody Avirgan and Nicole Hemmer.
Follow her on Twitter @kcarterjackson.
Dr. Sarah Barringer Gordon is the Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and a Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Sarah (Sally) Barringer Gordon is the Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and a Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Sally Gordon is well known for her work on religion in American public life and the law of church and state, especially for the ways that religious liberty developed over the course of American national history. Her current book project is Freedom’s Holy Light: Disestablishment in America, 1776-1876, about the historical relationship between religion, politics, and law. Dr. Barringer Gordon’s first book, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth- Century America (Univ. of North Carolina, 2002), won the Mormon History Association’s and the Utah Historical Society’s best book awards in 2003. Her second book, The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (Harvard, 2010), explores the world of church and state in the 20th century.