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". According to Kansapedia of the Kansas Historical Society, 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 different capitals, two different constitutions, and two different legislatures. Both sides sought and received help from outside, with the proslavery side receiving aid from the federal government, as Presidents Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan openly supported the proslavery partisans. Both claimed to reflect the will of the people of Kansas. The proslavers used violence and threats of violence, and the free-staters responded in kind. After much commotion, including a congressional investigation, it became clear that a majority of Kansans wanted Kansas to be a free state, but this required congressional approval, which Southerners in Congress blocked.
Kansas was admitted to the Union as a free state during the secession crisis that led to the Civil War. The admission came the same day that enough Southern slave state Senators had left Congress to join the Confederacy to allow it to pass.
Partisan violence continued along the Kansas–Missouri border for most of the war, although Union control of Kansas was never seriously threatened. Bleeding Kansas demonstrated that armed conflict over slavery was unavoidable. Its severity made national headlines, which suggested to the American people that the sectional disputes were unlikely to be resolved without bloodshed, and it, therefore, acted as a preface to the American Civil War. The episode is commemorated with numerous memorials and historic sites.
Origins
As abolitionism became increasingly popular in the United States and tensions between its supporters and detractors grew, the U.S. Congress maintained a tenuous balance of political power between Northern and Southern representatives. At the same time, the increasing emigration of Americans to the country's western frontier and the desire to build a transcontinental railroad that would connect the eastern states with California urged incorporation of the western territories into the Union.The inevitable question was how these territories would treat the issue of slavery when eventually promoted to statehood. This question had already plagued Congress during political debates following the Mexican–American War. The Compromise of 1850 had at least temporarily solved the problem by permitting residents of the Utah and New Mexico Territories to decide their own laws with respect to slavery by popular vote, an act which set a new precedent in the ongoing debate over slavery.
In May 1854, the Kansas–Nebraska Act created from Indian lands the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska for settlement by U.S. citizens. The act was proposed by Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois as a way to appease Southern representatives in Congress, who had resisted earlier proposals to admit states from the Nebraska Territory because of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had explicitly forbidden the practice of slavery in all U.S. territory north of 36°30' latitude and west of the Mississippi River, except in the state of Missouri. Southerners feared the incorporation of Nebraska would upset the balance between slave and free states and thereby give abolitionist Northerners an advantage in Congress.
Douglas's proposal attempted to allay these fears with the organization of two territories instead of one, and with the inclusion of a "popular sovereignty" clause that would, like the condition previously prescribed for Utah and New Mexico, permit settlers of Kansas and Nebraska to vote on the legality of slavery in their own territories—a notion which directly contradicted and effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise, as both Kansas and Nebraska were located entirely north of parallel 36°30' north and west of the Mississippi.
Like many others in Congress, Douglas assumed that settlers of Nebraska would ultimately vote to prohibit slavery and that settlers of Kansas, further south and closer to the slave state of Missouri, would vote to allow it, and thereby the balance of slave and free states would not change. Regarding Nebraska, this assumption was correct; the idea of slavery had little appeal for Nebraska's residents and its fate as a free state was already solidly in place. In Kansas, the assumption of legal slavery underestimated abolitionist resistance to the repeal of the long-standing Missouri Compromise. Southerners saw the passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act as an emboldening victory; Northerners considered it an outrageous defeat. Each side of the slavery question saw a chance to assert itself in Kansas, and it quickly became the nation's prevailing ideological battleground, and the most violent place in the country.
The term "Bleeding Kansas" was popularized by Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune. The Tribunes first reference to "Kansas, bleeding", came on June 16, 1856, in a report on the North American National Convention. There, a Colonel Perry of Kansas reported that "Kansas, bleeding at every pore, would cast more votes indirectly for ... than any other State in the Union." The Tribunes first mention of "bleeding Kansas" is in a poem by Charles S. Weyman, published on September 13, 1856:
Early elections
Immediately, immigrants supporting both sides of the slavery question arrived in the Kansas Territory to establish residency and gain the right to vote. Among the first settlers of Kansas were citizens of slave states, especially nearby Missouri, many of whom strongly supported Southern ideologies and emigrated to Kansas specifically to assist the expansion of slavery. Proslavery immigrants settled towns, including Leavenworth and Atchison. The administration of President Franklin Pierce appointed territorial officials in Kansas aligned with its own proslavery views, and heeding rumors that the frontier was being overwhelmed by Northerners, thousands of nonresident slavery proponents soon entered Kansas with the goal of influencing local politics.Proslavery factions thereby captured many early territorial elections, often by fraud and intimidation. In November 1854, thousands of armed proslavery men known as "Border Ruffians" or "Southern Yankees", mostly from Missouri, poured into the Kansas Territory and swayed the vote in the election for a nonvoting delegate to Congress in favor of proslavery Democratic candidate John Wilkins Whitfield. In 1855, a congressional committee investigating the election reported that 1,729 fraudulent votes were cast compared to 1,114 legal votes. In one location, only 20 of the 604 voters were residents of the Kansas Territory. In another, 35 were residents and 226 nonresidents.
At the same time, Northern abolitionists encouraged their own supporters to move to Kansas in the effort to make the territory a free state, hoping to flood Kansas with so-called "Free-Soilers" or "Free-Staters". By far the most famous of these, and their leader, was John Brown of Leavenworth, who moved from Ohio. Many citizens of Northern states arrived with assistance from benevolent societies such as the Boston-based New England Emigrant Aid Company, founded shortly before passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act with the specific goal of assisting anti-slavery immigrants to reach Kansas Territory.
In a colorful story that may be legend, the abolitionist minister Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe's brother, shipped them Sharps rifles in crates labelled "Bibles"; they became known as Beecher's Bibles. Despite boasts that 20,000 New England Yankees would be sent to the Kansas Territory, only about 1,200 settlers had emigrated there by the end of 1855. Nevertheless, aid movements like these, heavily publicized by the Eastern press, played a significant role in creating the nationwide hysteria over the fate of Kansas, and were directly responsible for the establishment of towns which later became strongholds of Republican and abolitionist sentiment, including Lawrence, Topeka, and Manhattan, Kansas.
First Territorial Legislature
On March 30, 1855, the Kansas Territory held the election for its first territorial legislature. Crucially, this legislature would decide whether the territory would allow slavery. Just as had happened in the election of November 1854, "Border Ruffians" from Missouri again streamed into the territory to vote, and proslavery delegates were elected to 37 of the 39 seats—Martin F. Conway and Samuel D. Houston from Riley County were the only Free-Staters elected. Free-Staters loudly denounced the elections as fraudulent.Territorial Governor Andrew Reeder pleased neither side when he invalidated, as tainted by fraud, the results in only 11 of the 40 legislative races. A special election was held on May 22 to elect replacements, and the results were dramatically different; eight of the 11 delegates elected in the special election were Free-Staters. This still left the proslavery camp with an overwhelming 29–10 advantage.
The proslavery legislature convened in the newly created territorial capital of Pawnee on July 2, 1855. The legislature immediately invalidated the results from the special election in May and seated the proslavery delegates elected in March. After only one week in Pawnee, the legislature moved the territorial capital to the Shawnee Mission, on the border with Missouri, where it reconvened, adopted a slave code for Kansas modeled largely on that of Missouri, and began passing laws favorable to slaveholders.
Free-Staters quickly elected delegates to a separate legislature based in Topeka, which proclaimed itself the legitimate government and called the proslavery government operating in Lecompton "bogus". This body created the first territorial constitution, the Topeka Constitution. Charles L. Robinson, a Massachusetts native and agent of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, was elected territorial governor.
Reeder had not been elected but appointed by President Pierce, at whose pleasure he served. Pierce fired him on August 16, 1855, replacing him with the very pro-Southern Wilson Shannon. Reeder left the territory, and found it prudent to do so in disguise.
Pierce refused to recognize the Free-State legislature. In a message to Congress on January 24, 1856, Pierce declared the Topeka government "insurrectionist". The presence of dual governments was symptomatic of the strife brewing in the territory and further provoked supporters of both sides of the conflict.
On March 12, the Democrat-controlled Senate's Committee on Territories submitted a report authored by Stephen A. Douglas, which claimed Governor Reeder had established procedures for challenging fraudulent election results in the territory, and that these procedures had been followed for the March 30, 1855 election. It held that the Pawnee legisature were "legally and duly constituted" under the Kansas-Nebraska Act. On this logic, it therefore followed that the creation of the Topeka government was an act "in subversion of the Territorial government established under the authority of Congress."
On March 19, the House of Representatives, controlled by an Opposition coalition, appointed a three-man special committee to investigate. The committee's majority report, issued in July, found that if the election of March 1855 had been limited to "actual settlers", it would have elected a Free-State legislature. It also stated that the legislature actually seated in Lecompton "was an illegally constituted body, and had no power to pass valid laws".