In the wake of two separate mass shootings within 12-15 hours in the United States, both seemingly racially-charged (to put it as mildly as humanly possible), the History Nerd in me had been thinking about Bleeding Kansas.
1850s America was rough, man. Congress for, oh, about 80 years had refused to do anything definitive on the issue of slavery, preferring instead to kick the can down the road hoping for a solution from...literally anywhere/anyone else. Congress just couldn't afford to run the risk of taking a stand that would alienate a group of rich Southern land- and slave-owners. The Union had to preserved, I suppose.
In 1850 Henry Clay introduced legislation that would end up as five separate bills known as the Compromise of 1850. Another effort to thread the needle in keeping the pro- and anti-slavery crowds happy, it admitted California to the Union as a free state, but strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act. It organized the New Mexico and Utah territories, and allowed popular sovereignty to determine how each territory would address slavery, essentially leaving it up to the residents of the territory to vote on whether or not they would allow slavery.
The Compromise of 1850 also banned the slave trade in Washington, D.C. There were enough concessions to each group that a coalition of Whigs and Democrats gave the bills enough votes to pass. While Henry Clay introduced it, it was Senator Stephen Douglas (D-IL) who pushed it through Congress. And since California's admittance to the Union officially gave free states a majority, California agreed to send one anti-slavery senator (John C. Fremont) and one pro-slavery senator (William Gwin) to Congress to keep the balance.
The territory west of Missouri, which was admitted to the Union as a slave state as part of Henry Clay's Missouri Compromise in exchange for Maine's admittance to the Union as a free state and prohibited slavery north of 36° 30', was essential to Douglas' desire for a transcontinental railroad (which would obviously help the people of Douglas' Illinois). Ah! But this territory was north of 36° 30', and the Missouri Compromise dictated that those would have to be free states. Southern Congressmen just couldn't abide by that, as it would upset the precarious balance between free states and slave states they had worked so hard to maintain.
Enter the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, introduced by Douglas. Here's the gist of it:
-Organize the territory west of Missouri into two territories (Kansas, and Nebraska).
-Allow popular sovereignty to determine slavery's future in each territory, in which it was pretty much assumed that the Nebraska would oppose slavery, and Kansas would approve it, given its next-door status to Missouri.
But it wasn't enough for southern congressional leaders, particularly David Rice Atchison, a slave-owning lawyer/senator from Missouri who lived near the Missouri-Kansas border (Atchison's highest-profile client was Mormon founder Joseph Smith). Atchison led the charge for this compromise to repeal the Missouri Compromise and would go on to write "The Voice of Kansas, Let the South Respond," which urged Southerners to move to Kansas in order to pack the popular sovereignty vote in favor of slavery.
Because Douglas viewed the railroad as "the onward march of civilization," the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was ultimately included in the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Thank God someone thought of the railroads.
Douglas received some push-back. In "Appeal of the Independent Democrats" (January 1854), a coalition of congressmen - among them Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner - wrote:
At the present session a new Nebraska bill has been reported by the Senate Committee on Territories, which, should it unhappily receive the sanction of Congress, will open all the unorganized Territories of the Union to the ingress of slavery...
...We arraign this bill as a gross violation of a sacred pledge, as a criminal betrayal of precious rights; as part and parcel of an atrocious plot to exclude from a vast unoccupied region immigrants from the Old World and free laborers from our own States, and convert it into a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.
Douglas made an impassioned speech in favor of...railroads:
You must provide for continuous lines of settlement from the Mississippi Valley to the Pacific Ocean...[do not] fetter the limbs of this young giant.
Charles Sumner, one of the authors of the Appeal of the Independent Democrats, said of Douglas:
Alas! too often those principles which give consistency, individuality, and form to the Northern character, which render it staunch, strong, and seaworthy, which bind it together as with iron, are drawn out, one by one, like the bolts of the ill-fitted vessel, and from the miserable, loosened fragments is formed that human anomaly - a Northern man with Southern principles (emphasis his). Sir, no such man can speak for the North. (Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union: A House Dividing 1852-1857.)
The Kansas-Nebraska Act passed the Senate, 37-14. It passed in the House 113-100, with Southern Democrats voting in favor of it a 57-2 margin. President Franklin Pierce signed it into law on May 30, 1854.
Then things got really wild.
Pro-slavery advocates and abolitionist activists rushed to Kansas. You really had three different political groups: Pro-Slavery, Free-Staters (or Free-Soilers), and Abolitionists. The Pierce Administration appointed the pro-slavery Andrew Horatio Reeder as the first territorial governor. There were rampant rumors of abolitionists and other Northeners flooding into Missouri, which led to Southern pro-slavery activists also moving to Kansas in an effort to sway the elections, scheduled for November 1854. It worked.
About five thousand "Border Ruffians" - led by ol' boy David Rice Atchison (a sitting Senator, may I remind you) who said "The prosperity or the ruin of the whole South depends on the Kansas struggle." - descended on Kansas to intimidate Free-Staters and abolitionists. In the November 1854 election, pro-slavery candidate John W. Whitfield won. But there was a slight issue: out of 2,833 votes cast, 1,729 were cast illegally. According to William G. Cutler's History of the State of Kansas (1883), there was one location in which only 20 of the 604 votes were actually cast by residents of Kansas. When the findings of the report into the Kansas elections were presented to President Pierce, he ignored them and ordered the results to stand, and then removed Governor Reeder from office.
On March 30, 1855 Kansas held the elections for its first territorial legislature. Again the Border Ruffians came (again led by Atchison). They seized at gunpoint the ballot boxes, and again cast thousands of fraudulent votes. In one case, Border Ruffians simply destroyed the ballot box at Bloomington. Territorial Governor Reeder voided the results in six of the districts that protested and ordered new elections in May. When the first Kansas legislature convened, the other representatives ousted the May winners in favor of the March winners, leading the whole group to be known as the Bogus Legislature. Tensions weren't exactly easing in Kansas.
Two old coots - pro-slavery Franklin Coleman and Free-Stater Charles Dow - had argued for years about a plot of land that both had claimed. On November 21, 1855 Coleman shot Dow nine times in the back. That it seemingly wasn't about slavery was irrelevant - shots had been fired. This is the unofficial beginning of the Wakarusa War, and Bleeding Kansas as a whole. Douglas County Sheriff Samuel J. Jones - himself a pro-slavery man and the leader of the group that destroyed the aforementioned ballot box, which earned his appointment as Sheriff - arrested a Free-Stater named Jacob Branson for "disturbing the peace." Free-Staters quickly got Branson released, but were so alarmed by law enforcement that they raised a militia to strengthen the town of Lawrence, which had become a Free-State stronghold. Jones responded by raising 1,500 of his own men, most of them from Missouri, to invade Lawrence and get rid of the Free-Staters. The town planned for a war, but the governor was able to make peace in December 1855.
Sheriff Jones returned in April 1856 to rid Lawrence of the Free-State movement and George W. Brown's Herald of Freedom, a leading Free-State newspaper. Jones' very presence riled up the people of Lawrence, who surrounded Jones where he got "grabbed by the collar" and "punched in the face." (Schultz, Duane (1997). Quantrill's War: The Life & Times Of William Clarke Quantrill, 1837–1865)
On May 19, 1956 Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner began an epic two-day speech that became known as his "Crime Against Kansas" speech. He had been preparing for this speech for two months, and it showed. It was 112 pages long, he had memorized it, and no one was spared:
-Sumner exposed Atchison on the Senate floor for his role in the troubles in Kansas, comparing him to Roman emperor Catiline, who had betrayed his country to overthrow the existing order. Sumner had documentation from newspapers to back up his claims. (Despite Sumner's speech being published, Atchison had no idea he had been sonned. Two days later he gave his own speech to some men from Texas he had hired specifically to kill anti-slavery activists and loot Free-State towns. It wasn't a good look).
-The framer of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas was "a noise-some, squat, and nameless animal...not a proper model for an American senator."
-South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler, he said "[Butler] has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight, with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight I mean the harlot, Slavery." Sumner would go on to mock the way Butler spoke, though Butler had recently suffered a stroke.
This last one resulted in one of the most astounding acts in Congressional history: Preston Brooks, a congressman from South Carolina and Butler's second cousin, had taken offense to Sumner's words. Had Brooks considered Sumner a gentleman, he would have challenged him to a duel. Instead, Brooks picked a cane that he would use to discipline a dog, and on May 22, 1856 proceeded to beat the ever-loving piss out of Sumner. For over a minute Brooks hit Sumner over the head with a cane. Sumner, who lost his sight with the first blow, had fallen between his seat and his desk and couldn't get up, was helpless as the rest of the Senate was too stunned to move. Brooks calmly walked out of the Senate. Brooks survived a censure resolution in the House and resigned. He was immediately re-elected in a special election and served in the House until he passed away at age 37 of croup. Both Brooks and Sumner were hailed as heroes by their respective stances on slavery and the deep divisions of the country were solidified as even Congress couldn't find civil ground.
The day before Sumner's beating, Sheriff Jones Jones returned to Lawrence with a small outfit of soldiers and a gun battle ensued, leaving Jones partially paralyzed, but not before he destroyed the printing press of the Herald of Freedom as well as the Kansas Free State, burned the Free State Hotel, burned the house of Charles Robinson - the Free-State militia leader, and looted the rest of the town. This became known as the Sacking of Lawrence. Jones recovered and tried to win support from the governor to jail his adversaries but when it was clear that the governor was trying to win peace rather than further escalate tensions, Jones resigned and moved to New Mexico.
On the morning of May 26 an Ohio abolitionist named John Brown (who would father 20 children), four of his sons, and two additional men rode into Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas - a pro-slavery town. Brown and his posse forced five pro-slavery men out of their homes and proceeded to hack them to death with broadswords in front of their families.
Religious leaders started to get on board. Prominent clergyman Henry Ward Beecher started sending rifles to Kansas in crates labeled "Bibles" (the rifles became known as Beecher's Bibles, which is as solid a band name as you could ask for).
Nine years prior to the Pottawatomie Creek Massacre, John Brown met Frederick Douglass in Springfield, Massachusetts. Douglass said of Brown:
Though a white gentleman, [Brown] is in sympathy a black man, and as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.
At this 1847 meeting Brown outlined to Douglass his plan to lead a war to free the slaves.
On July 4, 1856 proclamations from President Pierce led 500 U.S. Army troops from Fort Leavenworth and Fort Riley to descend on Topeka, where the large Free-State Legislature had set up their own government. They approved a constitution and everything (rejected by Congress). The troops brought cannons and with lit fuses pointed at Constitution Hall in Topeka ordered the dispersal of the Free-State Legislature. Colonel Edwin Vose "Bull Head" Sumner - cousin of the recently-beaten Charles Sumner - led the effort to disperse the Free-Staters (nicknamed "Bull Head" due to the legend that a musket ball bounced off his head, Sumner would later serve as the oldest commander in the Union Army).
In August 1856 between 250-400 Border Ruffians led by John W. Reid, a lawyer, had information that John Brown was in Osawatomie and moved his men towards the town, which was largely deserted out of a fear of what was exactly about to happen. Brown's son Frederick was leading an advance party towards the town when a pro-slavery Baptist preacher named Martin White was leading a group of Border Ruffians as a guide. White shot and killed Frederick Brown. When John Brown heard his son had died, he led an attack of 40 abolitionists against the Border Ruffians that only ended when they ran out of ammunition. Four Free-Staters had died, as well as two Border Ruffians. After the Battle of Osawatomie, Brown wrote:
God sees it. I have only a short time to live - only one death to die, and I will die fighting for His cause. There will be no more peace in this land until slavery is done for. I will give them something else to do than extend slave territory. I will carry this war into Africa.
Brown would spend the rest of the year in Kansas, and then move back East and begin plotting what would become the raid on Harpers Ferry, resulting in his execution and yet another turning point that set out the country's path towards war.
After the Battle of Osawatomie, Pierce named John W. Geary, who had been the first mayor of San Francisco (and would later be governor of Pennsylvania), as the third territorial governor of Kansas in September 1856. Geary didn't stop the violence in Kansas in his six months as governor, but he rejected the pro-slavery contingent in the territory and spent the next few years in Washington warning people of the danger in Kansas. He served in the Union Army during the Civil War and died of a heart attack shortly after his term as Pennsylvania governor ended.
With the elections of 1856 the old Whigs had disintegrated as a political party and gave rise to a new party: the Republican Party, which would become the party of abolitionism, or at least the party to stop the spread of slavery in the United States. Please keep in mind how the Republican Party and the Democratic Party essentially switched platforms over the 100 years from the 1850s to the 1950s. The election of Abraham Lincoln brought about the actual split between the states, but the roots had been there for years.
