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Anti-slavery settler victory
Bleeding Kansas, Bloody Kansas, or the Border War was a series of violent civil confrontations in Kansas Territory, and to a lesser extent in western Missouri, between 1854 and 1859. It 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 murders carried out in the Kansas Territory and neighboring Missouri by pro-slavery "border ruffians" and anti-slavery "free-staters". According to Kansapedia of the Kansas Historical Society, there were 56 documented political killings during the period, and the total may be as high as 200. It has been called a Tragic Prelude, or an overture, to the American Civil War which immediately followed it.
The conflict centered on the question of whether Kansas, upon gaining statehood, would allow slavery, like neighboring Missouri, or prohibit it and join the Union as a slave state or a free state. The question was of national importance because Kansas's two new senators would affect the balance of power in the U.S. Senate, which was bitterly divided over the issue of slavery. The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 called for popular sovereignty: the decision about slavery would be made by popular vote of the territory's settlers rather than by legislators in Washington. Existing sectional tensions surrounding slavery quickly found focus in Kansas.