A brief history of the Civil War (Or: How the midwest could've been a liberal bastion)

In the summer of 1856, Lawrence Kansas was sacked by pro-slavery southerners. Then, on August 21, 1863, William Quantrill led a raid on Lawrence. Together, the raidings killed more than 200 Kansans, and burnt down nearly half of the entire city. Prior to these events, Lawrence was a leading abolitionist town in the entirety of the midwest. Denver, Colorado, was founded by Lawrencians with the intent of spreading abolitionist ideas. The ransacking of the town had dramatic consequences: prior to its burning, Lawrence was a large, influential town in the midwest and was considered the likely place for the State Capitol. After the town was burnt to the ground, abolitionists scattered across the midwest, and the concentration and influence of abolition in the midwest was diminished.

I posit that had Lawrence not burnt to the ground, it would have become a thriving cultural and manufacturing hub in the Midwest. The Sante Fe, California, and Oregon trails originate in nearby Jackson county, Mo, and I envision that the KC-Lawrence metro area would have grown to be as large, if not larger, than Detroit in its prime. Kansas was a perfect location for the manufacture and distribution of goods because of its central geographical orientation in the country, and because of the convergence of many different rail lines and trails.

This is all speculative, but I think Kansas would be a vastly different state had Lawrence survived the Civil War unscathed. Kansas was an experiment by the rest of the country (with regards to popular sovereignty), and Kansas remained a very progressive state up until the 1930s (it was the first state to institute a Security and Exchange Commission, environmentalism was very popular early on). Had Lawrence remained intact. I like to think of politics as a diffusion of ideas from a central hub, and having a large, liberal town would have served to infuse progressive ideals with much more of the midwest.

Those bastard Missourians. They had to go and ruin everything.