The Topeka legislature meets to draft a request to Congress for the admission of Kansas as a free state, but it is dispersed by federal soldiers under command of Colonel Edwin Vose Sumner.
Proslavery activists meet at Leavenworth, Kansas to form the Law & Order Party, which cites criminal violence as justification to target, attack, and arrest persons associated with the Free-State cause.
Missourians from Weston, Missouri, and some residents of Fort Leavenworth, in Kansas Territory, form the Leavenworth Town Company and found the first official city in Kansas.
As a response to the popular sovereignty provision in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society is founded by Eli Thayer and other antislavery advocates to help Free-Staters settle in Kansas Territory.
A skirmish breaks out in the Wakarusa River Valley near Lawrence, Kansas, following the murder of Charles Dow, a Free-State settler who is killed by the proslavery Franklin Coleman.
