[Mizzou B-ball fan]

I think it's important to note just how despicable a breed these Jayhawkers really are................

There are some KU fans that believe the Jayhawk is nothing more than a “cute little bird”, and do not realize the Jayhawk moniker can be directly traced to the jayhawkers that were part of the violence and warfare along the Missouri-Kansas border during the Kansas territorial period and later during the Civil War (collectively known as the Border War). Among the KU fans that recognize the historical basis of the moniker, a sizeable portion believe the term “jayhawkers” refers to noble and honorable men that fought to keep Kansas from becoming a slave state, and that then fought for the freedom of all men during the Civil War. That sounds good, but the historical reality isn’t that pretty.

The reality of the Border War was obscured to a significant degree by two waves of propaganda. The first was the propaganda campaign waged during the territorial period, when the northern press gave the public (and to an extent also gave posterity) a politicized and highly biased version of the nature of the conflict that accompanied Kansas statehood. For example, many associate the territorial period with “Bleeding Kansas”, a term coined by Horace Greeley of the Ney York Times to inflame the passions of the times, and a term that contributed to a distortion of the reality that persists to this day. A careful review of violence during the Kansas territorial period (1854 to 1860) indicates there were 56 deaths that can be attributed to the fight over slavery. Compared to the 1,200 that died in the frontier violence in San Francisco in the period 1850 to 1853, Bleeding Kansas was not very bloody. The second wave of propaganda came after the Civil War, when the history was being written by the victors, and the actions of those associated with the Union cause were glorified (or white-washed), and those of the defeated vilified.

What was the historical reality of the jayhawkers? To understand the truth, one must understand the time and place the term came into use. The term "jayhawking" first appeared in the Kansas press in November 1958. This was AFTER the battle for Kansas statehood was essentially over (e.g., the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution went down to its third defeat in mid-1958).

The place that the term “jayhawker” and Kansan first began to be associated was in southeast Kansas (Linn and Bourbon counties). The vast majority of the political bloodshed in Kansas was over by the end of 1856, but violence in southeast Kansas flared up later, and extended more or less into the Civil War. Why? It is important to understand that most emigrants that settled Kansas Territory did not come to make any statement about slavery, but to acquire land. When southeast Kansas was initially settled, it was primarily by pro-slavery settlers, and they claimed the best lands (those with water and timber). When John Brown unleashed political bloodshed in southeast Kansas with the massacre at Pottawattamie Creek, some pro-slavery settlers drove free-state settlers off their claims. The pro-slavery movement in Kansas Territory was basically defeated by the flood of emigrants from what is now the Midwest (Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, etc) and their embrace of the superiority of a free labor system over slavery. This wave of emigrants that embraced the fee-state cause overwhelmed any advantage that was initially held by the pro-slavery forces. That tide of emigration reached southeast Kansas in 1958, and as pro-slavery settlers became a minority, they were driven off their land claims by militants aligned with the free-state cause. “Jayhawkers” was the term used to describe these militants. Additionally, as with any frontier, there were banditti about, and they used the free-state movement as en excuse for horse theft and plundering. These banditti also went by the name of jayhawkers. In the words of an early Kansas historian, “Confederated at first for defense against pro-slavery outrages, but ultimately falling more or less completely into the vocation of robbers and assassins, they have received the name --- whatever its origin may be -- of jayhawkers”.

Pro-slavery settlers in Kansas Territory were not the only victims of the jayhawkers. The moderate free-state settlers that believed pro-slavery settlers should be allowed to remain on their legally valid claims were also targets of the jayhawkers’ campaign of violence and intimidation. As the jayhawkers consolidated their control of southeast Kansas, they also began to launch raids into Missouri. The objectives of these raids varied. For John Brown, the raids were a chance to experiment in guerilla warfare, and to practice and hone the techniques he would later employ at Harpers Ferry. For others, the raids, while ostensibly for the purpose of freeing slaves, were primarily an opportunity to plunder.

When the Civil War broke out, the “jayhawking” term came to encompass the mode of total war unleashed on the civilian population of western Missouri in the first year of the war. Men who had been leaders or champions of the jayhawkers during the territorial period, men like Jim Lane and Doc Jennison, became leaders of the Union forces raised by Kansas. They and their troops descended on western Missouri in a campaign of theft, arson, torture, and murder. Between September 1861 and the end of January 1862, a whole string of Missouri towns were plundered and burned. Among the population centers reduced to ashes were Morristown, Osceola (about the same size as Lawrence, Kansas), Papinsville, Butler, Dayton, and Columbus. Additionally, hundreds of families were burned out of their homes in the country side around Pleasant Hill, Rose Hill, Kingsville, and Lexington. In their predations, the jayhawkers made little effort to distinguish between Union and Secessionist among the Missouri residents.

The Union military belatedly moved to bring the jayhawkers into control and to stop their predations. The U.S. military declared martial law in an "anti-jayhawking" proclamation in early 1862, helped to maneuver Lane out of his military command, and banished Jennison's Seventh Volunteer Kansas Cavalry (also known as Jennison’s Jayhawkers) from the region. With the Seventh to be moved out of striking distance of Missouri, Jennison and his sidekick Hoyt quit the 7th Kansas, encouraged their fellow brigands in the regiment to desert, and started a new jayhawking organization that came to be called the redlegs. Predations on the citizens of western Missouri continued, leading to Quantrill’s retaliatory raid, and culminating in Order No. 11, the forced depopulation of several Missouri counties in an effort to put down the guerilla warfare fomented by the predations of the jayhawkers and redlegs.

Many KU fans will dismiss the above portrayal of the jayhawkers and redlegs as “revisionst history”. Well, don’t take the word of an MU fan on this topic, let’s see what Charles Robinson had to say about it. Robinson was the leader of the abolitionists that founded Lawrence, and served as first governor of the new state of Kansas. Following are excerpts from his book The Kansas Conflict, in the chapter on the Civil War subtitled “Lane's Brigade and Jay-Hawking.” Describing his feelings about the jayhawking at the time his term as Governor expired in 1863, Robison states that “Enough had been seen and experienced of the management of the war in the West, permitting the most brutal and inhuman outrages, all to gratify personal greed, malice, or ambition, to disgust any person not entirely given over to subsisting upon human misery.” In describing the consequences of the “war of rapine…under Lane and his red-leg thieves”, Robinson concludes that "Order No. 11 would have never been needed, and Quantrell's raid at Lawrence would never have occurred.”

So next time you hear the lines about the jayhawk being about a “cute little bird” or its heritage going back to the honorable men that fought to make Kansas a free state, don’t buy it. The KU athletic teams are named after an unsavory assortment of rogues, thugs, and outright criminals that hastened and steepened the descent of the Missouri-Kansas border region into the horrors of total war. They were a scourge to innocent civilians of both Missouri and Kansas, even if that fact failed to register with many Kansans of that era and continues to be glossed over by the KU fans of today.