In 1859, John Brown, a settler from Kansas Territory, invaded the state of Virginia with plans to raid the Harpers Ferry arsenal and incite a slave rebellion. Among his small band of insurgents were several young men who had also carried out vigilante violence in Kansas in hopes of abolishing slavery in that territory. The raid itself failed, and those who did not escape or die in the raid were later executed, including John Brown.
In many respects, Kansas—and the question of whether slavery, legal in neighboring Missouri, would be allowed to spread to the territory—was the central issue of the 1860 presidential election, the most significant in U.S. history. Curtailing slavery’s expansion and admitting Kansas as a free state was a key plank in the Republican Party’s platform that year, just as it was during the party’s first presidential election in 1856. The seemingly unanswerable “Kansas Question” and the issue of slavery’s expansion split the venerable Democratic Party into Northern and Southern factions, allowing the Republican Abraham Lincoln to win the election without a single Southern electoral vote.
In 1846, Dred Scott, a slave living in St. Louis, sued in a Missouri court for his and his family’s freedom. Eleven years later, the case reached the highest federal court in Dred Scott v. Sandford, where the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Scott’s claim to freedom by a vote of 7-2. While the verdict had a personal impact on Scott and his family, it also had legal, political, social, and economic ramifications that reverberated throughout the country in the years immediately preceding the Civil War.
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.
Why do Little Dixie battle flags still flap in some Missouri cemeteries? What on earth is a jayhawker? Or a bushwhacker? Why does the name “Quantrill,” for some Missourians, evoke a legacy almost equal to that of the raging abolitionist John Brown on the Kansas side? The history behind all of this speaks to divisions that persist in the Kansas City area.
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.
The New England Emigrant Aid Company (NEEAC) formed in response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. That bill declared that eligible voting residents in Kansas Territory would determine whether the future state would allow or prohibit slavery as a requisite for admission to the Union, creating what became known as popular sovereignty. Antislavery Northerners denounced the act because it essentially repealed the Compromise of 1820, which barred slavery in the lands attained from the Louisiana Purchase above the 36°30’ parallel, including the area that would become Kansas.
In 1854, amid sectional tension over the future of slavery in the Western territories, Senator Stephen A. Douglas proposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which he believed would serve as a final compromise measure. Through the invocation of popular sovereignty, Douglas’s proposal would allow the citizens of the Kansas and Nebraska Territories, rather than the federal government, to decide whether to permit or prohibit slavery within their borders.
A proponent of westward expansion and a prominent proslavery Democrat in the state of Missouri, David Rice Atchison led the call for slavery’s extension into the Kansas and Nebraska territories. Following the passage of the divisive Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, Atchison directed efforts of Missourians to cross the border in order to stuff ballots during Kansas’ first territorial election in 1855 and personally led Missouri “border ruffians” in their often-violent efforts to secure Kansas as a slave state, including an attack on Lawrence, Kansas in 1856.
