Some of these Free Staters, known as “jayhawkers,” armed themselves in preparation for clashes with pro-slavery forces. Northerners and other anti-slavery settlers refused to accept this government and set up their own. Through illegal votes and intimidation of anti-slavery voters, they ensured the election of a slate of pro-slavery legislators. In March 1855, when elections took place for the first territorial legislature, thousands of heavily armed “border ruffians” showed up in Kansas again.

Pro-slavery candidate John Whitfield easily defeated two Free Soil candidates to become the territory’s delegate to Congress, with only half the ballots cast by registered voters. On the other side, thousands of pro-slavery Missourians flooded into the new territory to illegally vote in Kansas’ first territorial election in November 1854. In New England, a group of abolitionists formed the Emigrant Aid Company, which sent anti-slavery settlers to Kansas to ensure it would become a free territory. Over the next seven years, Kansas became a battleground over the future of slavery in the United States. While Nebraska was so far north that it was virtually guaranteed to become a free state, Kansas bordered the slave state of Missouri. The Kansas-Nebraska Act divided Douglas’ Democratic Party and inspired the formation of the Republican Party, which opposed extending slavery into new territory. Douglas believed that popular sovereignty, as this idea was known, would resolve the ongoing sectional debate between North and South over slavery’s extension into the territories.

Passed over fierce opposition in Congress and signed into law in 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska and gave each the right to decide whether or not to permit slavery when it joined the Union. To get crucial southern votes for the bill, Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois proposed an amendment that effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise, which had outlawed the extension of slavery north of the 36º 30’ parallel (Missouri’s southern border) except in Missouri itself. By early 1854, with the United States expanding rapidly westward, Congress had begun debating a proposed bill to organize the former Louisiana Purchase lands then known as the Nebraska Territory.

Bad Book by K.S. Brooks