Seeding Civil War: Kansas in the National News, 1854-1858 Book

I found this book problematic, and the weakest work Miner has written in some time.

The premise of this book is Miner's examination of the newspaper reporting about events in Kansas Territory from 1854 to 1858. The United States was caught up in a passionate debate over whether Kansas ought to be admitted as a slave or a free state. The Kansas issue brought to the fore a simmering division in the country over slavery. Passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 can be seen as the first concrete step the nation took towards Civil War.

Miner does a good job of gathering newspaper quotes on the Kansas issue over this four-year period. He assembles material from North and South, East and West, and from across the changing political spectrum. He makes a good case that the vitriolic opinions expressed contributed to the inability of political leadership to find compromise on the Kansas issue.

But that same complete research also makes for a rough read. Newspaper passages quoted in great length begin to blur together into sentences without end. Many passages and quotations feel redundant, as if Miner was afraid one source would not seem typical enough. The book feels as though it needed a tighter focus or more editing.

Additionally, while the work has some merit, it doesn't add much to the overall history of this period of Kansas history. In a way this is the ultimate outsider work: lots of reporting on events, but nothing new on the events themselves. Certainly the reporting and opinions contributed to the growing divide between North and South. Without links between the coverage and events in Kansas, the book seems to be missing something.

Put simply, "Seeding Civil War" adds to the literature about the events of the 1850s that led to the Civil War, but doesn't add anything new about the Kansas issue itself.