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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 .
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 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
The Battle of Black Jack took place on June 2, 1856, when antislavery forces, led by the noted abolitionist John Brown, attacked the encampment of Henry C. Pate near Baldwin City, Kansas. The battle is cited as one incident of "Bleeding Kansas" and a contributing factor leading up to the American Civil War of 1861 to 1865.
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.
In 1856, during the "Bleeding Kansas" crisis, Sumner denounced the Kansas–Nebraska Act in his "Crime against Kansas" speech, delivered on May 19 and May 20. The long speech argued for the immediate admission of Kansas as a free state and went on to denounce the "Slave Power"—the slave owners and their political power:
This 1856 map shows slave states (gray), free states (pink), U.S. territories (green), and Kansas (white). Bleeding Kansas, Bloody Kansas, or the Border War was a series of violent political confrontations in the United States between 1854 and 1861 involving anti-slavery "Free-Staters" and pro-slavery "Border Ruffian", or "Southern" elements in ...