On the morning of May 21, 1856 an armed force of as many as 800 men descended upon the newly formed town of Lawrence in the Territory of Kansas and proceeded to systematically destroy it. With this act, the town of Lawrence became the first casualty in America's Civil War that would officially be declared five years later.
A contemporary drawing The motivation for this attack was rooted in an issue that had been a smoldering source of contention since the establishment of the Union - slavery. For years, Congress had been gingerly constructing compromises in an effort to calm regional tensions by maintaining the balance of the number of Slave and Free states admitted to the Union as the country expanded westward. Congress's latest attempt was the Compromise of 1850. Among other stipulations, this act specified that California would be admitted as a Free State and established the Fugitive Slave Act (see Return of a Fugitive Slave, 1854).
However, the antipathy between pro and anti-slavery advocates was heightened by plans to build a railroad that would stretch westward from the Mississippi River to California. Before this could be accomplished, the territory through which the railroad was planned would have to be organized, particularly the Nebraska Territory that included Kansas. Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois orchestrated the passage in 1854 of the Nebraska-Kansas Act that created the territories of Nebraska and Kansas and further stipulated that a new state's status as Free or Slave would be determined by the popular vote of its residents. Although Senator Douglas's intention was to ameliorate pro and anti-slavery differences, the seeds of national conflict were sown and “Bleeding Kansas” was born.
"Bleeding Kansas" was the term coined by Horace Greeley, publisher of the New York Tribune, to describe the violence that racked the territory and turned it into a battleground for pro and anti-slavery adherents in the mid 1850s. Missouri, Kansas's neighbor, was a slave state and many pro-slavers, labeled as "Border Ruffians," crossed from Missouri into Kansas to assure the territory would enter the Union as a Slave state. The Northern states also sent contingents of anti-slavery supporters into the region while abolitionists such as the Reverend Henry Beecher Stowe supplied them with arms. Not all of the anti-slavery migrants to Kansas were abolitionists, however. The majority were "Free Soilers" who opposed slavery not on moral grounds, but because the plantation system that slavery supported threatened their ability to establish their own small farms.
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