The First Kansas Colored Volunteer Regiment in Midwestern Memory

Recalling his experience with the 1^st Kansas Colored Volunteers, white officer Ethan Earle described a scene in which his men departed from Leavenworth after being presented with a special homemade flag with only nine stripes. After presuming that the makers of the flag considered the stripes to be “emblems of the Stripes then borne on their backs,” rather than the 13 colonies, he explained the soldiers’ sendoff from local residents. “The parting salutes given us,” he wrote, “were: ‘Sneezing and jeers, good by nigger, good riddance.’”

This episode offers a glimpse into the deep emotional bonds shared between the flag makers and the soldiers in their quest for liberation. It also brings the racial conflicts of the Civil War, usually thought to be a North-South problem, into a Midwestern context. Compared with the heroic sendoff of the Massachusetts 54^th nine months later, this reaction reveals the unique interplay of opportunity and exclusionism that Midwestern African Americans encountered. The purpose of this paper is to trace the legacy of the 1^st Kansas by examining its effects on direct participants, through memoirs and pension records, and by demonstrating its lasting impact on those who remembered them. It will keep the 1^st Kansas within the frame of national discussions about the meaning of the West that developed throughout the 19^th century. Earle’s vignette about Leavenworth residents saying “good riddance” to the departing black soldiers, and his comments about 1^st Kansas commander James Lane’s plans to re-colonize blacks after the war, both suggest the Midwestern aspects of the Civil War black liberation struggle. A 1998 attempt to create a mural in the state capitol dedicated to Lane and the 1^st Kansas shows that the effort to preserve the soldiers’ legacy continues, but the question of what is being remembered remains unsettled.