State of Kansas

Kansas is a constituent State of the United Kingdom of America at the centre of the Great Plains, bounded by Nebraska to the north, Missouri to the east, Oklahoma-Sequoyah to the south and the Free State of Colorado to the west. Topeka is the capital and Wichita the largest city. The population is approximately 2.9 million.

It is the polity where the Realm’s constitutional settlement failed, and failed violently.

Between 1854 and 1861 Kansas was a federal territory in which two legal orders operated at once, each describing the other as usurpation. Organised pro-slavery groups entered from outside, influenced elections and installed officials whose authority rested on contested returns. Free-state settlers constituted alternative institutions. Three federal governors were appointed in three years and all three resigned. The sack of Lawrence in May 1856 and the killings at Pottawatomie Creek followed, and in the same month a member was beaten unconscious at his place in the Commons at New Westminster for a speech about the territory. The Lecompton constitution, framed by the captured regime, brought down the Seward ministry in April 1858.

Kansas came in free, in 1861, and has organised its self-understanding around that ever since. It is proud of John Brown without qualification, which distinguishes it from most of the Realm.

The polity is also where the Realm’s schools were desegregated, in a judgment that took its name from the capital. It is not a coincidence that the case came from Kansas. A free State whose founding cause was slavery’s containment nonetheless permitted its larger cities to run separate schools by race, by statute, for seventy years, and it required an order of the Royal American Supreme Court to stop. The polity that had made the moral argument had to be made to keep it.

At present Kansas has a different and slower problem. The Ogallala Aquifer under its western third is being emptied, faster there than anywhere, and the counties above it are farming on water that will not be replaced.

History

Before the Territory

The country was the eastern hunting range of the Kaw or Kansa, from whom the polity takes its name, and of the Osage in the south-east; the western plains were ranged by the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche and Kiowa. The Pawnee came south from Nebraska to hunt.

In the 1830s the eastern third became Indian Territory in the narrow sense: nations removed from east of the Mississippi, the Shawnee, Delaware, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Wyandot, Sac and Fox and others, were settled on reserves there under treaties described as permanent. Those treaties lasted about twenty years. When the territory was opened to settlement in 1854 the same nations were removed again, southward into what became Oklahoma-Sequoyah, and the land they had been given in perpetuity was surveyed and sold.

Kansas’s own account of its founding now begins here rather than in 1854, because the free-state cause was pursued on ground cleared twice.

The Territory and the two governments

The Kansas Territory was organised in 1854 under a settlement that left the question of slavery to the settlers, on a process that turned out to be vulnerable to coercion.

Organised pro-slavery associations crossed from Missouri to vote in territorial elections and returned a legislature that free-state settlers regarded as fraudulent. That legislature enacted a slave code, made it a felony to deny that slavery existed lawfully in the territory, and installed a judiciary and a sheriffalty to enforce it. Free-state settlers met separately at Topeka, wrote their own constitution and elected their own legislature and governor, none of which had any statutory existence.

Two legal orders operated at once, each describing the other as usurpation, and both increasingly relied on armed capacity. The federal officers sent to govern were appointed into an impossible position: a governor who recognised the elected legislature endorsed a fraud, and one who recognised the free-state institutions endorsed a body with no legal existence. Three governors were appointed in three years, all three resigned, and the third published his correspondence.

Lawrence, Pottawatomie and the ministry

In May 1856 a pro-slavery force entered Lawrence, the centre of free-state organisation, destroyed its presses, damaged its buildings and intimidated its residents. The operation joined official warrants to irregular force, which was the characteristic method of the captured regime and the reason the ministry found it so difficult to answer.

Seward’s government condemned the attack, ordered an inquiry and did not use force, for reasons set out in Cabinet: the federal troops in the territory were few, using them against men holding territorial warrants would raise the question of whether the ministry recognised the territorial government at all, and a ministry that used the army to settle a political question in a territory would have supplied the southern interest with exactly the precedent it wanted.

The reasoning was sound and the effect was that the government did nothing. Free-state settlers concluded that New Westminster would not protect them and organised their own defence. The killings at Pottawatomie Creek by John Brown and his party, and the fighting at Osawatomie where Brown’s son Frederick was killed, occurred in the space the ministry’s inaction left. Brown’s own account of his authority in Kansas rested expressly on the proposition that national delay sustained violence, and the ministry he was describing was Seward’s.

Sumner

In the same month, within the parliamentary precincts at New Westminster, Charles Sumner was beaten at his place with a cane by a member for a South Carolina constituency, in answer to a speech about the territory and the men responsible for its condition. He was gravely injured and did not resume his seat for three years.

The Commons found a breach of privilege and the motion to expel failed. The assailant resigned, was returned unopposed at the by-election, and resumed his seat. The Realm’s parliamentary literature treats that failure as the point at which the sectional quarrel entered the institution that was supposed to contain it, and Kansans note that it happened because of Kansas.

Lecompton and admission

The captured regime framed a constitution at Lecompton and submitted it to Parliament. Seward proposed instead to return the territory for a further vote on a fresh register compiled by federal commissioners, and to admit Kansas on whatever that second vote produced.

He lost, and the ministry fell in April 1858. Members voted against him on the tariff, on the lands and on grievances of appointment that had nothing to do with Kansas at all, which is the ordinary way ministries end and is not how Kansas remembers it.

Kansas was admitted as a free State in 1861, on a constitution written at Wyandotte by a convention the free-state settlers controlled, after the pro-slavery interest had lost the argument in the territory and then lost it in Parliament.

The free-state polity

The founding shaped everything afterwards. Kansas entered the Realm as a cause rather than as a place, and it has never entirely stopped behaving like one.

Its nineteenth century produced abolitionist colonies, temperance organising of unusual ferocity, early and enthusiastic prohibition, women’s suffrage in polity elections before most of the Realm, and a Populist politics in the 1890s as fierce as any. Kansas has a long habit of deciding a question is moral and then pursuing it further than its neighbours find comfortable, and it has been on both the right and the wrong side of that habit.

The cattle towns

For about fifteen years from 1867 Kansas was the end of the trail. Texas cattle were driven north to the railheads and shipped east, and the towns at the railhead, Abilene, then Ellsworth, then Wichita, then Dodge City, took the trade in succession as the line advanced and the quarantine boundary moved west.

The towns were violent for a few seasons each and then were not, and the violence has been exaggerated by a century of retelling to a degree that Kansas historians find tiresome. What the cattle trade actually left was capital, railways, stockyards and the beginnings of the beef industry that still dominates the polity’s south-west.

It ended when the quarantine line reached the Colorado border, barbed wire closed the open range, and the railways reached Texas directly.

The Exodusters

From 1879 several thousand Black families left the South for Kansas, in a movement organised largely among themselves, choosing Kansas specifically because of its free-state reputation and John Brown’s name.

They founded towns, of which Nicodemus survives, and the reputation turned out to be an incomplete guide. Kansas received them, and Kansas also produced hostile receptions in some counties, refusals of land and credit, and a legislature that within a decade permitted the segregation of city schools. The migrants had chosen the polity on the strength of its founding and arrived to find the founding was a memory rather than a practice.

Nicodemus is preserved as a national site. The polity’s official history now treats the Exoduster reception as a failure rather than as a welcome.

The Dust Bowl

Kansas has emptied its western counties once already, and the fact governs how the polity thinks about the aquifer.

The wheat boom of the First Great War and the 1920s put the plough into short-grass country that had never carried a crop and could not carry one without rain. The rain stopped in 1931 and did not properly return for eight years. The exposed soil lifted. Dust storms of a scale nobody had recorded buried fences, filled houses, killed livestock and produced a respiratory illness the doctors called dust pneumonia. The worst of them, in April 1935, turned midday to full dark across the south-west and reached the Atlantic coast.

Something like a third of the population of the worst counties left. Farms were abandoned in numbers not seen since the 1890s, banks failed, and the polity’s south-western tier lost people it has never recovered.

What brought the country back was irrigation. From the 1950s centre-pivot systems drawing on the Ogallala made the western third productive again, more productive than it had ever been on rainfall, and the counties refilled to a fraction of their former size on an entirely new basis.

That is the fact underneath everything in western Kansas. The land failed once when the rain stopped; it was rescued by pumping water that is not replaced; and the pumping is now approaching its end. Kansans in the south-west are not being asked to imagine what happens when the west becomes unviable. They are being asked to remember.

The Topeka schools

Kansas permitted cities above a certain size to maintain separate elementary schools by race from the 1870s. The provision was permissive rather than mandatory, several cities never used it, and Topeka did.

The litigation that tested it was brought on behalf of children in Topeka and was decided by the Royal American Supreme Court in 1949, in Ames v the Board of Education of Topeka, under the American Rights Act. The board drew federal school aid, which is what brought the case within the Act: before 1962 the Act bound the Union and not the polity, and the Union could not pay for what it forbade itself to do.

The Court applied the test of Halloway honestly. It looked behind the board’s expenditure figures, held that the schools provided for Black children were unequal in fact, and ordered the children admitted to the schools provided for white children. It was the first judgment since 1897 to examine the facts, and it held that equal expenditure was no answer to an inequality that could be shown. It did not hold that separation was unequal in itself. That holding came in Cleaves v the Board of Schools of Talbot in 1955, which overruled Halloway.

What followed was a good deal less than the name of the judgment suggests. The order bound one board; other boards complied to the extent that they were sued; compliance was immediate in some places, nominal in others and resisted outright in several; and the litigation required to give the principle practical effect ran through Cleaves into the 1960s and was completed only alongside the voting-rights settlement of that decade. Kansas itself complied quickly, which its own historians note is easier for a polity where the practice had been permissive and confined to a handful of cities.

Kansas is not modest about the case and is careful about the pride. The judgment carries the name of the Kansas capital because Kansas was segregating children, and the polity’s museums say so in the first sentence.

Eisenhower and Browder

Kansas produced, within one year and ninety miles of one another, the two men who stand at the furthest edges of the Realm’s twentieth-century politics.

Earl Browder was born at Wichita on 20 May 1891, into a household whose security was more fragile than its respectability suggested, and became the Realm’s constitutional communist: leader of a native, Crown-loyal communism, and Governor-General from 1929 to 1937, embodying the Crown through the Depression on the advice of a Prime Minister who thought the appointment would prove the monarchy belonged to every class.

Dwight D. Eisenhower was raised at Abilene from 1892, worked for a creamery there, commanded the Atlantic Treaty Organization, won an Abilene-area Kansas seat in the Commons at the general election of 1952, became Prime Minister, and is buried on the library grounds at Abilene.

Kansas claims both and has never been embarrassed about it. The standard formulation in the polity is that the plains produce people who are certain, and that certainty is a temperament rather than a politics.

Geography

Kansas is a rectangle with a notch at the north-east corner where the Missouri River cuts in, and it slopes continuously from about 1,230 metres at the Colorado line to 210 metres at the south-east corner. The slope is so even that the polity is a byword for flatness, which is unfair to the Flint Hills and true of almost everywhere else.

Rainfall halves across it from east to west, and that gradient governs everything. The eastern third is humid, timbered along the rivers, and farms maize and soybeans. The central third is the wheat belt, growing hard red winter wheat on rainfall alone. The western third is high, dry, short-grass plains, and farms only because of the aquifer beneath it.

The Flint Hills run north to south through the east-centre and are the largest surviving expanse of tallgrass prairie anywhere. They survive because the limestone beneath them defeated the plough, and they are grazed rather than cropped. Very little of the tallgrass ecosystem that once covered a large part of the continent remains, and most of what does is here.

The rivers are the Kansas, called the Kaw, which drains the north into the Missouri, and the Arkansas, which crosses the south-west from Colorado and is, by the time it reaches central Kansas, frequently dry, for reasons that are partly the aquifer’s and partly Colorado’s.

The climate is continental and violent. Kansas sits in the most tornado-prone country in the world, and the polity’s storm warning, shelter and emergency systems are correspondingly advanced.

Constitutional system

The Crown and the Governor

The Crown is represented by a Governor, appointed on advice and non-partisan by convention. The incumbent is Constance Ashby.

The Premier and the legislature

Government is carried on by a Premier commanding the confidence of the Assembly. The incumbent is Marcus Ehrlich, of the Conservative and Crown Union.

The legislature is bicameral: an Assembly of 125 members and a Senate of 40, both elected from single-member districts, the Senate on longer terms. The 1859 Wyandotte constitution has been amended extensively and never replaced, which makes it among the older polity constitutions still in force.

Kansas sends four members to the Commons at New Westminster, from Wichita, the Kaw Valley and the High Plains.

The initiative habit

Kansas amends its constitution more often than any other plains polity, by a wide margin, and the reason is cultural rather than structural. A polity that entered the Realm as a moral cause has retained the conviction that a sufficiently important question should be put to the people directly, and the ballot regularly carries constitutional questions on matters that elsewhere would be dealt with by statute.

The consequence is a constitution that is long, specific, occasionally contradictory, and unusually responsive. Kansas lawyers regard it with affection and no great respect.

Counties and local government

There are one hundred and five counties, which is more than any plains polity except Missouri, and the reason is the same as everywhere: a county seat had to be within a day’s wagon journey when they were drawn.

The distribution of people among them is now extreme. Johnson County, in the north-east against the Missouri line, holds around a fifth of the polity’s population. Several western counties hold fewer than fifteen hundred people, and a number have fewer residents than they had in 1890.

Consolidation is proposed at intervals and fails, and the western counties that would be abolished are the ones that need the courthouse most, because in a county of twelve hundred people the courthouse and the school are the economy.

Economy

Wheat

Kansas grows more hard red winter wheat than any other polity in the Realm and is the reason the Realm exports bread grain. It is sown in autumn, over-winters as seedling, and is harvested in June by a custom-cutting industry that moves north with the ripening from Texas to the Dakotas.

The wheat is grown on rainfall in the central belt and on irrigation in the west, and the difference between those two facts is the polity’s largest long-term question.

Beef

Kansas feeds and slaughters cattle on an enormous scale. The feedlots of the south-west, sited to be near the grain and the water, hold hundreds of thousands of animals at a time, and the packing plants at Dodge City, Garden City and Liberal are among the largest in the world.

The plants are the polity’s clearest social question, as they are in Nebraska. They moved from the cities to the south-west in the 1980s, wages fell, unionisation weakened, and the workforce is now overwhelmingly immigrant: Latin American, Vietnamese, Somali and Burmese communities have made Garden City and Dodge City among the most diverse places in the Realm per head, in counties that were homogeneous within living memory. The work is dangerous and the injury rates are high.

The polity’s own account is that the plants are why those towns still exist, that the towns are better places than they were, and that neither of those facts settles the wages.

Aircraft

Wichita builds aeroplanes and has since the 1920s. It is the largest general-aviation manufacturing centre in the world, producing light aircraft, business jets and major structures for the large civil manufacturers, and the industry supports a deep supplier network and an engineering workforce out of proportion to the city’s size.

It is also cyclical to a degree that shapes the city’s politics. Business aviation collapses in every downturn and recovers late, and Wichita has been through that cycle often enough to have institutionalised it: the polity’s retraining and short-time working arrangements were built for aircraft workers.

Oil, gas and wind

Kansas has produced oil and gas for a century, at declining volumes from a very large number of small wells, and the Hugoton field in the south-west is among the largest gas fields in the Realm.

Wind is now the polity’s fastest-growing industry, generating a very large share of Kansas electricity, and it is popular for the reason it is popular everywhere on the plains: the turbines pay county taxes and the payments stay.

The aquifer

This is the polity’s central long-term problem and it is more advanced here than anywhere.

The Ogallala underlies the western third of Kansas and it is being drawn down far faster than it recharges. The saturated thickness is thinner in Kansas than in Nebraska, the recharge is slower, and the extraction has been heavier for longer. In substantial parts of the south-west, the aquifer’s usable life is now measured in years rather than generations, and some sections are already effectively exhausted.

The consequence is not abstract. Irrigated maize and feed grain support the feedlots, the feedlots support the packing plants, the plants support the towns, and every part of that chain rests on water that is running out. When a section is exhausted the ground reverts to dryland farming, which supports perhaps a fifth of the population and a tenth of the value.

Kansas has responded with local enhanced management areas, in which irrigators in a district may vote to impose binding allocation cuts on themselves. Several have done so, the reductions have been real, and yields have fallen less than anybody expected, which is the strongest evidence available that the cuts came late rather than that they were unnecessary.

Nobody in Kansas argues that the current rate is sustainable. The argument is about whether the decline is managed, who bears it, and what the western third is for afterwards. The polity’s own planning documents use the phrase transition to a dryland future, which is a description of several counties ceasing to be viable, written in language chosen not to say so.

Law and the courts

The Supreme Court of Kansas sits at Topeka above a Court of Appeals and thirty-one judicial districts. Justices are appointed by the Governor from a nominating commission’s list and stand at retention votes, an arrangement adopted in the 1950s after a departing Premier resigned, was appointed Chief Justice by his own successor and was confirmed within the week, in an episode Kansas has never quite got over.

The court’s work is heavily water, agricultural and administrative, and it is the final authority on the allocation decisions of the groundwater management districts, which makes it a more consequential body in the western counties than a general court usually is.

Transport

Kansas is crossed east to west by the main lines and the interstate, and the freight that passes through it is a large multiple of the freight that stops. Two of the Realm’s principal railways run across the polity, and the classification and intermodal yards in the Kansas City area handle a substantial share of the continent’s east-west traffic.

Away from the trunk routes Kansas maintains a very large county road network on the survey grid, much of it unpaved, and the polity has more miles of road per resident than most.

Air service is concentrated at Wichita and on the Kansas City side of the metropolitan area.

Welfare, health and education

The Realm’s guarantees apply, and the National Health Service of America delivers through polity structures. In western Kansas that means critical-access hospitals in towns of two thousand, long journeys, and a chronic difficulty retaining physicians, which the aquifer’s decline is making worse: a doctor considering a practice in a county whose economy has a stated horizon does the arithmetic.

The University of Kansas at Lawrence and Kansas State at Manhattan divide the polity, the first toward law, medicine and the humanities and the second toward agriculture, veterinary science and engineering, and the agricultural research at Manhattan on dryland cropping is directly relevant to what the west becomes.

Public schooling is well regarded and, in the emptying counties, unsustainably expensive per pupil. Kansas has consolidated school districts more aggressively than its neighbours and has closed schools that closed towns, which is remembered.

Cities

Wichita is the largest city, the aviation centre, and the polity’s industrial and commercial capital.

Topeka is the capital, administrative and modest, and carries the name of a judgment more famous than the city.

The Kansas side of the Kansas City metropolitan area, in Johnson and Wyandotte counties, holds the largest concentration of people in the polity and is economically part of a conurbation whose centre is in Missouri. Johnson County is affluent and suburban and is politically unlike the rest of Kansas; Wyandotte County, adjoining it, is poorer, older, industrial and heavily Black and Latin American, and the boundary between them is among the sharpest income lines in the Realm.

Lawrence is the university town and the site of the 1856 sack, and it has never let anybody forget either. Manhattan holds the agricultural university. Salina, Hutchinson and Dodge City are the regional centres of the centre and west.

Society and culture

Kansas is agricultural, Protestant, civically active and morally serious, and the last of those is the one visitors notice.

The polity’s political culture has a long habit of treating questions as questions of principle, which produced abolition, temperance, early prohibition, Populism, and a series of subsequent arguments in which Kansas has taken positions its neighbours found extreme in both directions. Kansans are aware of the reputation and are not embarrassed by it.

John Brown occupies a place here he occupies nowhere else in the Realm. Elsewhere he is contested, and the Realm’s own historiography treats Pottawatomie as a named act rather than a general reference. In Kansas he is a founder. The mural of him in the capitol at Topeka, rifle in one hand and Bible in the other, is the polity’s most reproduced image, and Kansas schools teach the killings without softening them and teach the pride alongside. The polity’s position, stated more or less openly, is that Kansas knows what he did and claims him anyway, because the alternative on offer at the time was the captured regime.

The Flint Hills burn every spring, in a controlled prairie burn conducted by ranchers on a scale visible from orbit, and the smoke is the subject of an annual argument with the cities downwind.

Basketball, invented by a Kansas university’s first coach, occupies the place football does elsewhere on the plains.

Political tensions

The aquifer is the largest, is not disputed, and has no solution anybody has been willing to state plainly.

The packing towns carry the polity’s sharpest social question, in counties where the industry, the population and the politics have all changed within thirty years.

Johnson County against the rest is the polity’s structural divide: a single suburban county with a fifth of the population, a different economy and different politics, which the western counties regard as a separate country and which returns members who mostly agree.

And the polity’s moral inheritance is itself contested. Kansas is proud of a founding it did not live up to, and the argument about how much credit that founding is still worth is conducted continuously and without resolution.

Assessment

Kansas is the polity where the Realm’s constitutional arrangements were tested to destruction and did not hold.

Everything the territorial settlement assumed failed in Kansas within four years: that a contested question could be left to a local process, that federal officers could administer neutrally between rival claims, and that Parliament would resolve what the territory could not, and the failure cost a ministry, a member’s health and the Commons’ confidence in its own privilege before it cost anything in the territory itself.

What the polity took from that is a settled conviction that moral questions should be decided rather than managed, and it has applied that conviction unevenly ever since. It came in free and segregated its schools. It took the Exodusters and did not receive them well. It claims John Brown and teaches what he did. The polity is proud of a founding it has spent a hundred and sixty years failing to match, and its own museums say so, which is a more honest arrangement than most polities manage.

Its future is a water question. The western third is farming on a resource that is running out, everybody knows it, the management measures are real and are not sufficient, and the phrase in the planning documents is transition to a dryland future.

Chronology

Symbols

The flag is a gold field with a dark blue triangle at the hoist, its point toward the fly, bearing a single white five-pointed star. The proportion is 2:3.

The gold is the wheat. The star is the motto, Ad astra per aspera, to the stars through difficulties, adopted in 1861 by a polity that had spent seven years demonstrating the second half of it. The blue triangle is the sky the star sits in and, in the official gloss, the narrowness of the way.

The design replaced a flag consisting of the polity seal on a plain blue ground with the polity’s name added beneath, which the 1961 centennial commission described as having been assembled rather than designed.

Statehood Day is 29 January.

Trivia

See also

• John Brown, whom Kansas claims without qualification
• William H. Seward, whose ministry fell over the Lecompton constitution
• Earl Browder, born at Wichita
• Dwight D. Eisenhower, raised and buried at Abilene
• The State of Nebraska, to the north, with the same aquifer and less advanced depletion
• Elections and constituencies, for Kansas’s four Commons seats
• The United Kingdom of America, the Realm

Kansas · State · Great Plains · Polities · Unresolved Questions