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.

Storm over Kansas

This chapter describes the impact of the Kansas Nebraska Act on Northerner’s political assumptions. The violence in the Kansas Territory that resulted from the imposition of popular sovereignty drove Northerners to make difficult choices about the best path to securing political stability. The 1856 presidential election was therefore essentially a contest among candidates each of whom posed as a conservative.

Decisive Means

This chapter examines how political violence challenged the old Enlightenment faith that reason and right would guide the new nation-states. However, the nation-states themselves had been subverting that faith for almost a century. Events in Europe continued to confirm the disaffection of the Ourvrier Circle and its allies among the Universal Democratic Republicans in America. Armed conflict in the Kansas Territory had already forcibly refocused their Brotherhood of the Union whose agrarian, socialist, and abolitionist visions had relied so heavily on reasoned moral discourse. On the other hand, groups such as the Knights of the Golden Circle had always equated progress with the violent subjugation of the more primitive.