Bleeding Kansas, Bloody Kansas or the Border War was a series of violent civil confrontations in the United States between 1854 and 1861 which emerged from a political and ideological debate over the legality of slavery in the proposed state of Kansas.
Result: Kansas admitted to the Union as a free ...
Location: Kansas and Missouri
Date: 1854–1861
Explanation:
Bleeding Kansas, Bloody Kansas or the Border War was a series of violent civil confrontations in the United States between 1854 and 1861 which emerged from a political and ideological debate over the legality of slavery in the proposed state of Kansas. The conflict was characterized by years of electoral fraud, raids, assaults, and retributive murders carried out in Kansas and neighboring Missouri by pro-slavery "Border Ruffians" and anti-slavery "Free-Staters".
At the core of the conflict was the question of whether the Kansas Territory would allow or outlaw slavery, and thus enter the Union as a slave state or a free state. The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 called for popular sovereignty, requiring that the decision about slavery be made by the territory's settlers (rather than outsiders) and decided by a popular vote. Existing sectional tensions surrounding slavery quickly found focus in Kansas. Those in favor of slavery argued that every settler had the right to bring his own property, including slaves, into the territory. In contrast, while some "free soil" proponents opposed slavery on ethical and humanitarian grounds, at the time the most persuasive argument against introducing slavery in Kansas was that it would allow rich slaveholders to control the land, to the exclusion of white non-slaveholders who regardless of their moral inclinations did not have the means to acquire either slaves or sizable land holdings for themselves.
