Bleeding Kansas

Many historians identify Bleeding Kansas as a fundamental cause of the Civil War, and this chapter demonstrates how violence in Kansas Territory not only inflamed sectional tensions but also represents the origins of military conflict between Northerners and Southerners. Antislavery or “free-state” settlers and pro-slavery settlers formed military companies in the late 1850s and fought each other in ways that would set the stage for the larger war. Average men and women answered their communities’ call to arms and actuated their political ideals with bullets, defending not only their homes but also their views about slavery and abolition. The words and gunfire exchanged by the people residing on the Kansas-Missouri border galvanized the nation and brought it to the brink of war in 1861, but settlers on the border had already been at war for years.

Down to the Crossroads

Southern Democrats wielded tremendous power over national policy in the mid-1850s, and Stephen Douglas’s efforts to harness his them to his program of northwestern development resulted in disaster. This chapter first reinterprets Jefferson Davis’s service as secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce (1853-1857), focusing on his use of camels for military transportation in the southwest. Far from a whimsical frontier tale, the camel episode became entwined with a shadowy network of slave traders and proslavery expansionists whose late antebellum schemes reveal the chilling consequences of slaveholders’ federal clout. This context elucidates Douglas’s infamous Kansas-Nebraska Act. Striving to align powerful southern Democrats behind his efforts to promote the Greater Northwest, Douglas pushed the Act through Congress—and unleashed a political cyclone that devastated the Democratic Party’s northern wing. By 1856, violence in Bleeding Kansas made a mockery of popular sovereignty and thwarted Douglas’s presidential ambitions, while Davis anticipated returning to his role as a proslavery sentinel in the Senate.