Bleeding Kansas

Bleeding Kansas, also called Bloody Kansas or the Border War, was a run of violent civil confrontations in the Kansas Territory and, to a lesser degree, western Missouri between 1854 and 1859. It grew out of the dispute over whether the future state of Kansas would permit slavery, a question made urgent by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which left the decision to a vote of the territory's settlers. Proslavery border ruffians and antislavery free-staters traded electoral fraud, raids, assaults and murders, and the territory briefly had rival capitals, constitutions and legislatures. The source counts 56 documented political killings, with a possible total as high as 200. The fighting shaded into paramilitary guerrilla warfare, and Kansas entered the Union as a free state in 1861. Writers have long treated it as a prelude to the American Civil War.