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Border ruffians also engaged in general violence against Free-State settlements. They burned farms and sometimes murdered Free-State men. Most notoriously, border ruffians twice attacked Lawrence, the Free-State capital of the Kansas Territory. On December 1, 1855, a small army of border ruffians laid siege to Lawrence, but were driven off.
An immediate rush of migrants on both sides of the issue rushed in to settle and to determine the fate of the new territory. Almost immediately, tensions erupted into a full-blown border war waged mostly between civilians known as "Free-Staters", mostly from New England and other northeast states, and pro-slavery "Border ruffians" from Missouri.
As a result of the new potential for slavery in Kansas, pro-slavery activists infiltrated Kansas Territory from the neighboring slave state of Missouri. To abolitionists and other Free-Staters, who desired Kansas to be admitted to the Union as a free state, they were collectively known as Border Ruffians. Pro-slavery Missourians flocked to ...
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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 Kansas.
G. Murlin Welch, a historian of the territorial period, described the Jayhawkers as bands of men that were willing to fight, kill, and rob for a variety of motives that included defense against pro-slavery "Border Ruffians", abolition, driving pro-slavery settlers from their claims of land, revenge, and/or plunder and personal profit. [19]
On that date, Missourians who had streamed across the border (known as "Border Ruffians") filled the ballot boxes in favor of pro-slavery candidates. As a result, pro-slavery candidates prevailed at every polling district except one (the future Riley County ), and the first official legislature was overwhelmingly composed of pro-slavery delegates.
Washington served as a Border Ruffian in a company under the command of Captain Henry Clay Pate. [ 28 ] [ 29 ] [ 30 ] On June 2, 1856, Washington and his company were attacked at their encampment near Baldwin City, Kansas by anti-slavery Free-Stater forces under the leadership of abolitionist John Brown .