Here is one more excerpt (sans endnotes, which I couldn't figure out how to attach). When I first read Weber's article, I found myself thinking, how could Border War memories NOT be a fundamental aspect of the KU-MU rivalry after KU elected to call their football team the Jayhawkers? So I spent a bit of time trying to assess the meaning of the jayhawker term on the two sides of the border back in that era.

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Football involves opposing squads of uniformed men in a violent contest for supremacy waged over an open field. Reflecting on these aspects of the sport, an 1888 magazine article describing the intricacies of American college football opened with the simple observation, “Football is a mimic game of war.” In retrospect, it seems almost inevitable that the 1891 game in Kansas City would have invited comparison to the warfare waged between Kansans and Missourians just thirty years previously, and that is precisely what the Columbia Missouri Statesman did in the opening paragraph of its game coverage. Furthermore, it seems that historical memory would have become an unavoidable aspect of the athletic competition once Kansas named its team the Jayhawkers (shortened to Jayhawks over the subsequent decades), a term loaded with Border War significance.

“Jayhawker” is a name that has varied in meaning over space and time, and it held very different meanings on the two sides of the border in the late nineteenth century. A recent analysis of its origin states that “over time, the (jayhawk) image was used to tie together political, military, and even ethical motivations for the fight against slavery, and in doing so gained its true force.” From the start, however, the term also had a different, darker connotation. Its entry into the region’s lexicon during the early years of the Border War was whimsically described by Kansas politician and writer John J. Ingalls:

At this time patriotism and larceny had not entirely coalesced, and upon the debatable frontier between these contending passions appeared a race of thrifty warriors, whose souls were rent with conflicting emotions at the thought of their bleeding country’s wrongs and the available assets of Missouri. Their avowed object was the protection of the border. Their real design was indiscriminate plunder. They adopted the name of “Jayhawkers.”

After raids by Kansas senator James Lane’s Kansas Brigade and Charles Jennison’s Seventh Kansas Volunteer Cavalry in the opening months of the Civil War, Missourians began to apply the name to any troops from Kansas, and then as an insult for Kansans in general. Some Kansans embraced the insult and began to take pride in the word.

In an editorial written in 1868, Kansas newspaperman David McReynolds advocated use of the nickname, stating, “If our enemies applied it as an epithet, the God of Right, Justice and Honor gave victory to those who adopted it as a symbol of hatred to slavery, and it is only now recognized as a term that signifies the most heroic and enduring people that ever struggled for freedom.” During the Civil War and Reconstruction, Radical Republican politicians and newspaper editors like McReynolds began to reshape the memory of the free-state struggle, framing it as not only a struggle for white political and economic freedom, but also a fight for the liberation of African Americans. Historians might emphasize “the bald fact that local and personal economic objectives had commonly overshadowed the national and moralistic antislavery crusade in governing the behavior of individual colonists (settlers of Kansas Territory),” but “the general populace did not overly concern itself with such refinements.” The evolution in Kansas of the jayhawker term from lawless marauder to heroic civil rights champion is consistent with the emergence of this romanticized free-state narrative.

That Kansans and Missourians held differing opinions on the term is illustrated by the opposing perspectives on Charles Jennison, the man who perhaps more than any other gave “jayhawker” a lasting place in the region’s vocabulary. Jennison was regarded in western Missouri as a scoundrel owing to his role in the jayhawking raids of the early 1860s and his suspected involvement in the criminal enterprises of the “redlegs” (a variant of the jayhawkers). The stone chimneys that were the last intact feature of the many homes burned in western Missouri were called “Jennison’s Tombstones.” Near the end of the war, Jennison was court-martialed over charges that included various offenses against civilians and was dishonorably discharged from the US Army. Writing in 1910, William Elsey Connelley, a Border War historian from Kansas, concluded that “Jennison should have been hung for his crimes there [in Missouri], no doubt.” However, in his editorial extolling the jayhawker nickname, David McReynolds made little mention of, much less offered any apology for, the jayhawkers’ excesses. According to him, “no Union men in Kansas have ever found fault with jayhawking Missouri bushwhackers by Jennison or his regiment.” Jennison was elected to the Kansas state legislature in 1865 and again in 1867. When it was pointed out that he was constitutionally ineligible to hold office due to his dishonorable discharge from the service, the legislature passed a measure removing the constitutional disqualification by a vote of 70 to 12. Jennison was subsequently elected to the state senate in 1871. These events suggest a general acquiescence with, if not an endorsement of, the war crimes of Jennison and other jayhawkers among a majority of Kansans.

For its part, the University of Kansas Athletic Department website states, “when the KU football team first took the field in 1890, it seemed only natural to call them Jayhawkers.” But in the years between the war’s end and the advent of the university’s football team, not all Kansans thought “jayhawker” was a complimentary nickname. In his 1868 editorial, McReynolds acknowledged he was addressing an effort underway to institute a new, presumably less controversial, nickname for Kansans. Similarly, an 1881 newspaper article in Saline County noted attempts to change the state nickname from “Jayhawker State” to “Sunflower State,” commenting, “We don’t know but that the change would be good, as the young, rising generation who are soon to control the destinies of Kansas know no merit in the term of ‘Jayhawker,’ except that it seems to have been applied to those who did some lively foraging upon the enemy in Missouri and Arkansas.”
And neither were Kansans unanimous in their support of the men who gave rise to the name. Even in Lawrence, there was debate over the jayhawkers’ legacy.

In the summer following the inaugural KU-MU football game, Lawrence residents gathered to commemorate the twenty-ninth anniversary of Quantrill’s raid. The first speaker was the Reverend Richard Cordley, who quoted from a speech he gave in the immediate aftermath of the raid in which he took the popular position that “Opposition to slavery has been the conspicuous feature of our history. For this we are known, for this we are loved, for this we are hated. For this we have been singled out for this terrible tragedy.” Following Cordley was Charles Robinson, head of the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society colony that founded Lawrence, leader of the free-state movement, first governor of Kansas, and eyewitness to the raid. According to Robinson, Lawrence had not been targeted for its noble abolitionist achievements, but because of the sordid sins of some of its citizenry. Robinson explained, “Before this raid the entire border counties of Missouri had experienced more terrible outrages than ever the Quantrill raid at Lawrence…There was no burning of feet and torture by hanging in Lawrence as there was in Missouri, neither were women and children outraged.” And why did Quantrill target Lawrence? Because, Robinson stated, “professedly free state men” commenced their reign of terror “as soon as war broke out,” and Lawrence was “headquarters for the thieves and their plunder.”

If there was a dispute in Kansas on the merit of the jayhawkers, there is little doubt regarding how most western Missourians would have viewed them. A history of Missouri published in the early twentieth century defined the term as “A name applied to a set of marauders and robbers in Kansas, who…acted on the assumption that the people of Missouri were their enemies, whom they had a perfect belligerent right to plunder at discretion.” KU adopting the jayhawker moniker would almost certainly have been viewed as an insult by the Missouri families and communities that had suffered at the jayhawkers’ hands.