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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 1854 and 1859. It emerged from a political and ideological debate over the legality of slavery in the proposed state of Kansas .
Kansas Territory was established on May 30, 1854, by the Kansas–Nebraska Act.This act established both the Nebraska Territory and Kansas Territory. The most momentous provision of the Act in effect repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and allowed the settlers of Kansas Territory to determine by popular sovereignty whether Kansas would be a free state or a slave state.
Benjamin Franklin Stringfellow (September 3, 1816 – April 26, 1891) was a pro-slavery border ruffian in Kansas, when the slavery issue was put to a local vote in 1855 under the Popular Sovereignty provision.
Douglas and Pierce hoped that popular sovereignty would help bring an end to the national debate over slavery, but the Kansas–Nebraska Act outraged Northerners. The division between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces caused by the Act was the death knell for the ailing Whig Party, which broke apart after the Act.
Popular sovereignty, developed by Lewis Cass and Stephen Douglas as the position of the Democratic Party, was to let the (white male) residents of each territory decide by vote whether to allow slavery. It was implemented in the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854, giving rise to the violence of the "Bleeding Kansas" period.
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Douglas applied popular sovereignty to Kansas in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which passed Congress in 1854. The Act had two unexpected results. By dropping the Missouri Compromise of 1820 under which said slavery would never be allowed in Kansas, it was a major boost for the expansion of slavery.
Childers, Christopher. "Interpreting Popular Sovereignty: A Historiographical Essay," Civil War History 57#1 (2011) pp. 48–70 online; Etcheson, Nicole. "The Great Principle of Self-Government: Popular Sovereignty and Bleeding Kansas," Kansas History 27 (Spring-Summer 2004):14-29, links it to Jacksonian Democracy