Bleeding Kansas

Bleeding Kansas, Bloody Kansas, or the Border War, was a series of violent civil confrontations in the Kansas Territory, and to a lesser extent in western Missouri, between 1854 and 1859. It emerged from a political and ideological debate over whether slavery should be permitted in the proposed state of Kansas. The conflict was characterized by years of electoral fraud, raids, assaults, and murders carried out in the Kansas Territory and neighboring Missouri by proslavery border ruffians and retaliatory raids carried out by antislavery free-staters. 56 political killings were documented during the period, and the total may be as high as 200. It has been called a "tragic prelude" or overture to the American Civil War, which immediately followed it. The conflict centered on the question of whether Kansas, upon gaining statehood, would join the Union as a slave state or a free state. The question was of national importance because Kansas's two new senators would affect the balance of power in the U.S. Senate, which was bitterly divided over the issue of slavery. The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 called for popular sovereignty: the decision about slavery would be made by popular vote of the territory's settlers rather than by legislators in Washington, D.C. Existing sectional tensions surrounding slavery quickly found focus in Kansas. Missouri, a slave state since 1821, was populated by many settlers with Southern sympathies and pro-slavery views, some of whom tried to influence the Kansas decision by entering Kansas and claiming to be residents. The conflict was fought both politically and between civilians, where it eventually degenerated into brutal gang violence and paramilitary guerrilla warfare. Kansas's state-level civil war would soon be replicated on a national basis. It had two capitals (proslavery Lecompton and antislavery Lawrence, then Topeka), two constitutions (the proslavery Lecompton Constitution and the...