![]() The proslavers used violence and threats of violence, and the free-soilers responded in kind. Both claimed to reflect the will of the people of Kansas. Both sides sought and received help from outside, the proslavery side from the federal government Presidents Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan openly helped the proslavery partisans. It had two different capitals (proslavery Lecompton and antislavery Lawrence and Topeka), two different constitutions (the proslavery Lecompton Constitution and the antislavery Topeka Constitution), and two different legislatures (the so-called "bogus legislature" in Lecompton and the antislavery body in Lawrence). Kansas had a state-level civil war that would soon be replicated on a national basis. The term "Bleeding Kansas" was popularized by Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune. The conflict was fought politically, as well as between civilians, where it eventually degenerated into brutal gang violence and paramilitary guerrilla warfare. Missouri, a slave state since 1821, was populated by many settlers with Southern sympathies and proslavery views, some of whom tried to influence the Kansas decision by entering Kansas and claiming to be residents. Existing sectional tensions surrounding slavery quickly found focus in Kansas. 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. Senate, which was bitterly divided over the issue of slavery. The question was of national importance because Kansas's two new senators would affect the balance of power in the U.S. The conflict centered on the question of whether Kansas, upon gaining statehood, would join the Union as a slave state or a free state. It has been called a Tragic Prelude, or an overture, to the American Civil War, which immediately followed it. 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. 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 antislavery " free-staters". It emerged from a political and ideological debate over the legality of slavery in the proposed state of Kansas. ![]() Bleeding Kansas, Bloody Kansas, or the Border War was a series of violent civil confrontations in Kansas Territory, and to a lesser extent in western Missouri, between 18. ![]()
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