I think a few here is fond of the old Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but looking into the actions that he did during the years into the prelude of World War 2 was really interesting. At his behest, he supplied Joseph Stalin and the whole Soviet Union of military equipment and intelligence to prepare for the Nazis. I really don't think that Americans during at the time was on board with supplying another enemy, the communists, with their own handmade products just to hold off the Reich.
Let's not get started with the internment camps he did against Americans of Japanese lineage after the Pearl Harbor attacks, how the Democrats were tight-lipped about it to this day, and the communist project that the former First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt did in Arthurdale, Virginia, that was still left untold on how many people died due to starvation on that god forsaken experiment of hers.
Lets also not forget that due to the fuckery of the slave states and Buchanan, we here in Kansas were shooting each other over the issue before it was cool.
You think the accusations of voter fraud were bad in 2020? We voted on whether or not we were going to be a Slave-State or Free, and some counties that only had 20 residents saw over 1,000 votes because of people crossing the state line from Missouri to vote and make us a Slave-State. Pierce (and later Buchanan) just wanted to ignore the very obvious fraud so that they could put it all behind them and get it over with because, like you said, they didnt want to deal with it. Hell, Pierce went so far as to call the Free-State government in Topeka "insurrectionist" against the "true" Slave-State government in Lecompton.
But we decided that this was the hill we were going to die on, and started bringing in guns. Then when the first shot got fired (ironically, by the Pro-Slavery side, much like what would later happen), we started fighting, and fought like mad against the outsiders trying to overwhelm our state. It only stopped because us Kansas digging in our heels and fighting back had caused some other Northern states to start having some "dangerous" ideas and so the South had to start focusing on the National level instead of dealing with one state. Didnt stop the fact that we were locked out of the US Government until the succession happened because it was only at that point that there were finally enough votes to get us in as the Free-State we were supposed to be.
And of course, during the Civil War we were on the receiving end of several revenge attacks by the South, because they directly blamed us as the cause of all of this, since we had the utter temerity to not just lie down and take it when they cheated.
Sounds utterly fascinating. Got any good book recommendations?
None off the top of my head, but they exist since Bleeding Kansas is one of the causes of the Civil War. A lot of it is stuff I learned just from living here, doubly so because I live in the Eastern Kansas, which is where most of the fighting happened. I actually live near the Beecher Church (the abolitionist who brought the guns in). And yes, this is the same Beecher family that wrote Uncle Toms Cabin.
Oh yeah, Bleeding Kansas went on for years as ideological militias actually waged war over it.
I love how the Democrats have always tried to import or expel voters to win elections.
I did a cursory glance at the history of Kansas and the numbers pretty much speak for themselves. Kansas... when it wasn't even a state... contributed 20,000 soldiers to Unionist forces, including the first black unit to see Combat in the Civil War... and 1,000 to the Confederacy. If that isn't a case of "revealed preferences" I don't know what is.
For rural areas, that's absolutely enormous. The population of Kansas in 1860 was listed as 107,000 approximately. That's a little under a 20% mobilization for a voluntary service. Just to be clear how ridiculous that is: 20% mobilization in Hearts of Iron 4 can only be instituted with an edict called: "All Adults Serve".
That's clearly a bunch of Kansans screaming "You fuckers didn't learn your lesson the first time!"
Minor correction, but we were actually just barely a state in time for the Civil War. Our statehood was on Jan. 29, which was a few days after the first round of secession, because many of the Southern Slave states that had been blocking our statehood were no longer there to do it.
But yeah, Kansas gets overlooked a lot in the Civil War due to the fact that we were out of the way enough to not see any major fights. But as you said, we contributed one of the largest armies as a percentage of population of any state, and IIRC we also suffered the most civilian casualties as a percentage due to said Confederate revenge raids. The Sack of Lawrence was so brutal it got the Confederate government to suspend its guerrilla program. Officially, because it was not the sort of brutality they had authorized. Unofficial, I want to believe they heard the 1st Kansas screaming “Do you bastards have a death wish?!” in the distance and feared for their safety.
That would stand to reason, Civilian casualties in the Civil War were vanishingly small. The Battle of Gettysburg incurred only one civilian death by arms, and it was an errant shell that struck a farm-house. The only other places I could see possible statistically significant civilian casualties might be in Mississippi (counter-insurgency against union occupation), West Virginia (insurrection and counter insurgency against Virginia), and Missouri (which I believe was engaged in small scale local conflicts).
It wouldn't totally surprise me. Guerrilla campaigns can spiral out of control quickly, but reprisal attacks have a nasty habit of losing all fucking control together. Even from the Japanese bias perspective of The Rape of Nanking, the commanders basically admit that they lost all command and control once the troops started engaging in executions and looting. They actually report personally trying to restore order against some specific troops that were engaging in wanton destruction, but they admit to loosing so much command and control cohesion that they were left without the ability to even stop the destruction. It is not unheard of for an army to lose all cohesion when sacking a town to the point that there is not ability to command it. I wouldn't be surprised if you told me that partisans burned Lawrence and their commanders actually lost control, and then recalled any further operations due to the fact that they weren't sure they could successfully control their own army.