Encyclopedia
Bleeding Kansas, sometimes referred to in
history as
Bloody Kansas or the
Border War, was a sequence of violent events involving Free-Staters and pro-
slavery elements that took place in
Kansas–Nebraska Territory and the western frontier towns of the
U.S. state of
Missouri between roughly 1854 and 1858 attempting to influence whether Kansas would enter the union as a free or slave state. The term "Bleeding Kansas" was coined by
Horace Greeley of the
New York Tribune was established by Horace Greeley [i] in 1841 [i] and was long considered one o ...
.
The events in Bleeding Kansas directly presaged the
American Civil War.
Origins
The
Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 created the territory and provided the cause of the ensuing
guerrilla warfare. Enshrined in the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which nullified the
Missouri Compromise, is the principle now known as "popular sovereignty", an idea heavily supported by
U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas, chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories and greatly contested by abolitionists. Popular sovereignty was an attempt to offer concessions to the southern states through making possible the expansion of slavery into both western and northern territories.
The act established that the question of the expansion of slavery in the new states of
Kansas and
Nebraska would be decided by the inhabitants of the states. It had been assumed that slave-owning Southerners would occupy Kansas and make it a slave state, while free state advocates would settle Nebraska. Things worked out as anticipated in Nebraska, but not in Kansas.
Meeting of North and South
Several anti-slavery organizations in the North, most notably the New England Emigrant Aid Company, organized and funded several thousand settlers to move to Kansas and vote to make it a free state. These organizations helped to establish Free-State settlements in
Topeka,
Manhattan, and Lawrence. The abolitionist preacher
Henry Ward Beecher collected funds to arm like-minded settlers with
Sharps rifles, leading the precision rifles to become known as "Beecher's Bibles". By the summer of 1855, approximately 1,200
New Englanders had made the journey to the new territory, armed and ready to fight.
There was also organized immigration to Kansas from southern states, most notably
Missouri, to secure the expansion of slavery. Proslavery settlements were established at
Leavenworth and Atchison.
Rumors had spread through the South that 20,000 Northerners were descending on Kansas, and in November 1854, thousands of armed Southerners known as "Border Ruffians", mostly from Missouri, poured over the line to vote for a proslavery congressional delegate. Only half the ballots were cast by registered voters, and at one location, only 20 of over 600 voters were legal residents. The proslavery forces won the election. More significantly, the Border Ruffians repeated their actions on March 30, 1855, when the first territorial legislature was elected, swaying the vote again in favor of slavery. The proslavery territorial legislature convened in Pawnee on July 2, 1855, but after one week it adjourned to the Shawnee Mission on the Missouri border, where it began passing laws to institutionalize slavery in
Kansas Territory. This was the touchstone for the commencement of open violence.
Open violence
In August 1855, a group of Free-Staters met and resolved to reject the proslavery laws passed by the Territorial Legislature. This meeting led to the formation of a shadow government and the Topeka Constitution. However, another branch of the movement took a more martial point of view. Notably, in October 1855 John Brown, a radical abolitionist, came to Kansas Territory to fight slavery. Already by November 1855, the "Wakarusa War" between the two sides had begun. In a message to Congress on January 24, 1856,
President Franklin Pierce declared the Free-State Topeka government to be in "rebellion."
On May 21, 1856, a group of Border Ruffians entered the Free-State stronghold of Lawrence, where they burned the Free State Hotel, destroyed two
printing presses, and ransacked homes and stores. The day after the sacking of Lawrence, on May 22, 1856, U.S. Congressman
Preston Brooks from
South Carolina physically attacked Senator
Charles Sumner of Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate chambers, in retaliation for a speech Sumner made that criticized Southerners for proslavery violence in Kansas. These acts in turn inspired John Brown to lead a group of men in Kansas Territory on an attack at a proslavery settlement at Pottawatomie Creek. The group, which included four of Brown's sons, dragged five pro-slavery men from their homes and hacked them to death with broadswords . These actions are often regarded as the first shots of the
Civil War.
Days later, on June 2, John Brown took future Confederate colonel Henry C. Pate and 22 other proslavery soldiers prisoner at the "Battle of Black Jack."
In 1856 the official territorial capital was moved to
Lecompton, a town only 12 miles from Lawrence. In April of that year a three-man congressional investigating committee arrived in Lecompton to look into the Kansas troubles. The majority report of the committee found the elections to be improperly influenced by Border Ruffians. President Pierce failed to follow its recommendations, however, and continued to recognize the pro-slavery legislature as the legitimate government of Kansas. In fact, on July 4, 1856, Pierce sent federal troops to break up an attempted meeting of the shadow government in Topeka.
In August, thousands of proslavery Southerners formed into armies and marched into Kansas. That same month, John Brown and several of his followers engaged three hundred proslavery soldiers in the "Battle of Osawatomie." The hostilities raged for another two months until John Brown departed Kansas Territory, and a new territorial governor,
John W. Geary, took office and managed to prevail upon both sides for peace. This was followed by a fragile peace broken by intermittent violent outbreaks for two more years. The last major outbreak of violence was touched off by the Marais des Cygnes massacre in 1858, where Border Ruffians killed five Free State men. In all, approximately 55 people died in Bleeding Kansas.
Constitutional fight
An adjunct to the guerrilla warfare in Bleeding Kansas was the fight over the Constitution that would govern the state of Kansas. Several constitutions were drafted, though the 1855 Topeka Constitution, which created the shadow Free-State government essentially by
fiat, was never a viable option.
In 1857, a Kansas constitutional convention was convened, which drafted what has become known as the "Lecompton Constitution", a pro-slavery document. The abolitionist forces
boycotted the ratification vote because it failed to offer them a means to vote against slavery. The Lecompton constitution was accepted by President
James Buchanan, who urged acceptance and statehood. Congress disagreed and ordered another election. In the second election the pro-slavery forces boycotted the process, allowing the anti-slavery forces to claim victory by defeating the document. In the end, the Lecompton Constitution died because it was never clear whether it represented the will of the majority.
In mid-1859, the Wyandotte Constitution was drafted; this document represented the by-then prevailing abolitionist view. It was approved by the electorate by a 2-to-1 margin, and Kansas entered the Union as a free state pursuant to its terms on January 29, 1861.
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