If there was any man qualified to write a history of the bloody state of Kansas in the 1860s, it was Sam Crawford. He lived an extraordinary life as a Kansas legislator, a general in the American Civil War, and 3rd governor of the State of Kansas. Anyone who includes a subheading of "Farming with Dynamite" in their book has our vote. Crawford was a fervently "free-state" Kansas man, opposing slavery entirely and its introduction into Kansas. Bleeding Kansas was a flash-point that moved the country toward civil war. Much of the book is about Crawford's service in the Civil War. He was appointed by Abraham Lincoln to command the Second Kansas Colored Infantry.