History often measures prominent individuals by what they did not accomplish as much as by what they did. Franklin Pierce, the 14th President of the United States, was one such person whose failings overshadowed his contributions. Irrevocably associated with the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) and “Bleeding Kansas,” Pierce is ranked by many historians as the worst of all the nation’s presidents. A strict constitutionalist and supporter of the Southern position on slavery, as well as an outspoken critic of Abraham Lincoln, Pierce earned the disdain of his contemporaries and the low esteem of history. But as is true with most famous figures, Pierce’s impact on the nation’s legacy was not so one-dimensional.

Preston B. Plumb was an antislavery “Free-Soil” advocate, a Union Army officer during the Civil War, a successful businessman, and a three-term senator from the state of Kansas, where he is considered a founding figure.

Popular sovereignty in 19th century America emerged as a compromise strategy for determining whether a Western territory would permit or prohibit slavery. First promoted in the 1840s in response to debates over western expansion, popular sovereignty argued that in a democracy, residents of a territory, and not the federal government, should be allowed to decide on slavery within their borders.

Sterling Price, a U.S. congressman, governor of Missouri, and Confederate major general, was born in Prince Edward County, Virginia, to a slave-owning planter family. He eventually became one of the most important Confederate generals operating in Arkansas and Missouri.

Beginning in April 1863, Union officers began rounding up females suspected of providing aid and support to Confederate guerillas in the Western border region and placing them in makeshift jails in Kansas City. When one of these overcrowded prisons collapsed on August 13, 1863, it killed and maimed several female relatives of the guerrillas. Although the direct cause of the collapse remains unclear, it is certain that the disaster helped seal the fate of many men in Lawrence, Kansas, eight days later.

William Quantrill’s raid on the Free-State town of Lawrence, Kansas (also known as the Lawrence Massacre) was a defining moment in the border conflict. At dawn on August 21, 1863, Quantrill and his guerrillas rode into Lawrence, where they burned much of the town and killed between 160 and 190 men and boys.

Although the name “Red Legs” is commonly conflated with the term “jayhawkers” to describe Kansas guerilla units that fought for the Free-State side during the Bleeding Kansas era or the Union side in the Civil War, Red Legs originally referred to a specific paramilitary outfit that organized in Kansas at the height of the Civil War.

As the entire nation went to war, slaves in Missouri, a border state where slavery was legal until 1865, remained in bondage. The story of Spotswood Rice illustrates the Civil War experience of one such slave and his personal battle to liberate himself and his family. Waged without certainty of success, within a legal framework that denied his freedom even as neighbor fought neighbor on the Missouri-Kansas border, Spotswood Rice and his family represent the courage of African American slaves who were willing to risk everything for freedom.

Following the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, Sara T.D. Robinson, and her husband, Charles, were two affiliates of the New England Emigrant Aid Company who accepted the challenge of settling in Kansas Territory to counter proslavery efforts and ensure that Kansas entered the Union as a free state. Sara brought her considerable talents as persuasive chronicler to the abolitionist fight and used her pen to document life in the new territory. Observant and articulate, she recorded her experience in Kansas: Its interior and Exterior Life, published in 1856.

The sacking of Osceola was a significant military engagement that took place during the early stages of the Civil War in Missouri. After losing the Battle of Dry Wood Creek near Fort Scott, Kansas, the Free-State leader, U.S. Senator and Brigadier General James Henry Lane guided his 3^rd, 4^th, and 5^th Kansas Volunteers in the looting and sacking of Osceola, Missouri.

Wilson Shannon was an attorney, the 14th and 16th governor of Ohio, United States minister to Mexico, U.S. congressman, and the second territorial governor of Kansas. He was a leading proslavery figure in early Kansas politics and, despite a short 9.5-month tenure, its longest continuously-serving territorial governor. Despite these successes, the disastrous violence of "Bleeding Kansas" began during his term as territorial governor.

Shelby’s Raid is one of the great unsung raids of the American Civil War. The raid lasted over 40 days and covered more than 800 miles of territory in west central and northwest Arkansas and southwest and west central Missouri in the autumn of 1863. While spectacular, the raid had little lasting result on the course and conduct of the war in Missouri or in other theaters. It did earn Joseph O. “Jo” Shelby a general’s star and cemented his reputation as one of the Civil War’s most daring cavalry commanders.

Benjamin “Pap” Singleton was a former bondsman who, later in his life, became known for leading African American migrations from the post-Reconstruction South into Kansas. African Americans feared that the end of federally enforced Reconstruction would mark the return of overt racial violence and discrimination in the South. These fears motivated a mass African American migration away from the former Confederacy and into sparsely populated Kansas, a state already iconic for its antebellum struggle for Free Soil.

Charles Sumner was a man known for political extremes in a time when the United States was flush with political extremists. As the nation hurdled toward Civil War over the issue of slavery, radicals like Sumner on both sides of the debate aggravated dissension with histrionic rhetoric inflammatory even for the period. Sumner used his powerful voice and speaking ability in support of the abolitionist cause and his acerbic intelligence against those who argued for expansion of slavery into Kansas and enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. His verbal attacks on Southern legislatures and their constituents led to his being physically attacked on the floor of the House in 1856; an attack which gained him sympathetic support in the North but left him permanently impaired.

Very few leaders in the American Civil War experienced the conflict on more levels than M. Jeff Thompson. Between 1861 and 1865 he was a guerrilla leader and a regular commander of Confederate forces, a combatant and a prisoner of war, a cavalryman and a sailor; Thompson was an actor in the military struggle for Missouri and a shrewd writer in the political fight to win the support of its people. For this, he was revered by the pro-secession citizens of Missouri, and reviled by those standing with the Union.

In an effort to help runaway slaves escape from slave states to the North and to Canada, white and African American abolitionists established a series of hiding places throughout the country where fugitives could hide during the day and travel under the cover of night. Although runaways tended to travel on foot and trains were rarely employed, all involved referred to the secret network as the “Underground Railroad,” a term which first appeared in literature when Harriet Beecher Stowe referred to a secret “underground” line in her 1852 book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

With a minimal level of actual violence, the Wakarusa War was not a war by traditional definitions - or even a battle. But it did threaten the outbreak of violence and reflect the growing political tensions that would lead to Kansas Territory being known as "Bleeding Kansas."