Bleeding Kansas (1 Jan 1854 Jahr – 29 Jan 1861 Jahr)

Beschreibung:

AKA: Bloody Kansas
the Border War

A series of violent civil confrontations in the United States between 1854 and 1861 which emerged from a political and ideological debate over the legality of slavery in the proposed state of Kansas. The conflict was characterized by years of electoral fraud, raids, assaults, and retributive murders carried out in Kansas and neighboring Missouri by pro-slavery "Border Ruffians" and anti-slavery "Free-Staters".

At the core of the conflict was the question of whether the Kansas Territory would allow or outlaw slavery, and thus enter the Union as a slave state or a free state. The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 called for popular sovereignty, requiring that the decision about slavery be made by the territory's settlers (rather than outsiders) and decided by a popular vote.

In the election of 1857, free-staters out-voted the pro-slavery settlers in the territory, which meant that the territorial legislature fell into free-state hands. Then, on October 4, 1859, the Wyandotte Constitution was approved in a referendum by a vote of 10,421 to 5,530, and after its approval by the U.S. Congress, Kansas was admitted as a free state on January 29, 1861, shortly after the Southern legislators, who would never have permitted a new free state, had walked out.

Bleeding Kansas was demonstrative of the gravity of the era's most pressing social issues, from the matter of slavery to states' rights. Its severity made national headlines which suggested to the American people that the sectional disputes were unlikely to reach compromise without bloodshed, and it therefore directly presaged the American Civil War. Kansas was admitted to the Union as a free state in January 1861, but partisan violence continued along the Kansas–Missouri border for most of the war. The episode is commemorated with numerous memorials and historic sites.

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