What was responsible for violence in bleeding kansas

Congress passed the Compromise of to settle the question of the Mexican Cession and, in his Kansas-Nebraska bill, Douglas claimed that the Utah and New Mexico provisions of that compromise were essentially precedents for popular sovereignty. Senators Salmon P. The Kansas-Nebraska Act passed in , paving the way for settlement of those territories.

Events in Kansas Territory contributed to the Republican Party's growth and exacerbated the sectional conflict. Iowans crossed the border into Nebraska and voted in territorial elections, but their numbers were small and Nebraska was expected to be a free state. In Kansas, a small civil war broke out between proslavery Missourians and settlers from the free states, rooted in the flawed implementation of popular sovereignty.

Problems appeared in the first territorial election, for a delegate to Congress, in November Missourians crossed the river to vote in the territory. At polls throughout the territory, armed Missourians threatened voters and election officials from the free states. Although a territorial census had shown that there were 2, eligible voters in the territory, proslavery candidates were elected to the so-called " Bogus Legislature " with majorities of over 5, votes. Many of the Missourians who crossed the state line to vote did later settle in the territory.

Many Northern settlers who felt deprived of their political rights abandoned Kansas, overcome by frontier hardships. Nonetheless, the proslavery victory seemed to many a blatant violation of the polls. The newly elected territorial legislature passed a slave code for Kansas. But although Benjamin Stringfellow , publisher of a proslavery newspaper, boasted that Kansas now had slave laws as solid as any in the country, resistance was building.

The small number of New Englanders in Kansas now combined with the much larger number of Midwestern settlers to form a Free-State movement. In September , they assembled at Topeka and wrote a constitution for a free state of Kansas. Although many Northerners backed this Topeka movement, it was extra-legal and lacked legitimacy with the federal government.

For the next several years, the Free-Staters carried out a precarious balancing act. The Free-Staters engaged in a propaganda war. But fear of retaliation from the federal government, which called the Free-Staters traitors and recognized the proslavery territorial legislature as the legal government of Kansas Territory, restrained Free-Staters from going too far. Events during the winter of gave the Law and Order movement its chance. In an altercation over a land claim, a Missourian killed a Free-State settler.

While the murderer fled back to Missouri, Free-Staters terrorized the neighborhood, warning out settlers and burning houses. Jones called for help, and territorial governor Wilson Shannon , a tippling Democrat from Ohio, called out the militia. Soon Lawrence was surrounded by proslavery forces in what came to be called the Wakarusa War.

Free-State women, including Lois Brown and Margaret Wood, smuggled arms into the besieged town under their petticoats. Inside Lawrence, Jim Lane drilled Free-State forces while like-minded women, including Lois Brown and Margaret Wood, smuggled arms into the besieged town under their petticoats. Several shots were fired into the hotel and surrounding homes, but the hotel was saved.

Violence such as this caught the governor's attention. On June 15, , he held a meeting at the Western Hotel in order to settle political unrest. While this meeting nearly devolved into a riot, it was successful. Peace and quiet reigned for a brief five-month period.

Montgomery and his raiders struck again in December of when he rescued Benjamin Rice, a Free-Stater. Rice had been arrested for murder and was imprisoned in the Fort Scott Hotel. Montgomery claimed that Rice had been jailed illegally, so he came to Fort Scott to free him.

In the struggle following Rice's rescue, former Deputy Marshal John Little, a pro-slavery advocate, fired shots into the ranks of the Free-Staters. Little peered out of a window of his father's store the former post headquarters to observe the effects of the shooting.

His movement was noted by a Free-Stater, who shot and killed him. Today I heard that you said in a speech a few days ago that you were not sorry you had killed John Little. That he was not killed too soon.

Can you before God say so? Oh, the anguish you have caused. He was one of the noblest men ever created, brave and true to his country and to his word. You can't prove that he ever injured an innocent person. A few days more and we were to have been married, then go south to trouble you no more. Known as the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the controversial bill raised the possibility that slavery could Douglas in a series of seven debates. Thousands of spectators and newspaper reporters from around the country watched as Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries people were kidnapped from the continent of Africa, forced into slavery in the American colonies and exploited to work as indentured servants and labor in the production of crops such as tobacco and cotton.

By the midth century, An ambiguous, controversial concept, Jacksonian Democracy in the strictest sense refers simply to the ascendancy of Andrew Jackson and the Democratic party after In , amid growing sectional tensions over the issue of slavery, the U. During this era, America became Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Recommended for you.

Kansas-Nebraska Act. Andrew Carnegie. The act provided that each territory would decide the issue through the constitution under which it would enter the union. Kansas Territory, because of its proximity to Missouri, a slave state, became a political and literal battleground for proslavery and antislavery forces.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act set in motion a plan that was supposed to decide the Kansas question through a peaceful, democratic process. The nation was ready to expand into the vast interior that had previously been reserved, for the most part, for American Indian peoples.

Just let the people decide, said Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois and other supporters of popular sovereignty.