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The core dispute concerned the eligibility of voters who lived in the slaveholding state of Missouri, who feared a third free state and safe haven for escaped slaves on Missouri’s borders, and who would soon cross the border to cast ballots in Kansas Territory.
- Topeka
Civil War on the Western Border: The Missouri-Kansas...
- Franklin Pierce
Winning both the popular and the electoral vote, Pierce...
- Andrew Reeder
Kansas thus became a fulcrum in the larger national slavery...
- Maps
Civil War on the Western Border: The Missouri-Kansas...
- Topeka
Most Missouri voters favored a course of moderation in the 1860 election and hoped to preserve both the federal constitution and the rights of slaveholders. A rare exception was Vernon County, site of John Brown’s recent raids, where disunionist candidates prevailed.
In Kansas, however, the assumption of legal slavery underestimated abolitionist resistance to the repeal of the long-standing Missouri Compromise. Southerners saw the passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act as an emboldening victory; Northerners considered it an outrageous defeat.
- “Osawatomie John Brown” and The Raid on Harpers Ferry
- Harpers Ferry’s Impact on The 1860 Election
- Abraham Lincoln’s Trip to Kansas, December 1859
- Stephen Douglas, The Democrats, and The Kansas Question
- The Democratic Party Splits in Charleston
- Lincoln Outmaneuvers The Field at The Republican Convention
- A Four-Man Race
- The Campaign
- The Results
When the abolitionist John Brown arrived in Kansas Territory in 1855, he joined a growing band of settlers from the North who hoped to keep slavery and slaveholders out. Yet unlike most antislavery partisans, who wielded words, petitions, and moral suasion to attack the South’s “peculiar institution,” Brown arrived with weapons and a willingness to...
Political pundits gave Abraham Lincoln, a practicing lawyer and Illinois politician who had not held a political office since 1849, very little attention at all. Largely as a result of “Bleeding Kansas” (and its mismanagement by Democratic Presidents), the brand-new Republican Party had a very real shot at capturing the main prize in the 1860 elect...
Lincoln was in Leavenworth, Kansas Territory, when he heard the news of John Brown’s execution. A trip to Kansas Territory in December 1859, Lincoln reasoned, would allow him to travel to the center of the nation’s continuing political storm, ingratiate himself with Kansas Republicans by helping with an upcoming local election, and rough out new id...
The other national figure damaged by John Brown’s raid and the further sectional polarization that followed in its wake was Lincoln’s longtime rival from Illinois, Senator Stephen Douglas. Brown’s assault on the South further emboldened disunionists in the region and drove a wedge between these Fire-Eaters and Douglas, the presumed Democratic front...
On April 23, 1860, Democrats convened in what was probably the worst possible place for a Douglas coronation: Charleston, South Carolina, easily the most proslavery city in the entire country. The Fire-Eaters packing the hall demanded the adoption of an explicitly proslavery platform that would endorse Dred Scott and urge Congressional legislation ...
If the site of the Democratic convention was disastrous for Douglas, the location of the Republican convention in Chicago could not have been more opportune for his arch-rival and fellow Illinoisan, Abraham Lincoln. As the convention began, William Seward remained the odds-on favorite for the nomination, even though his candidacy was weakened by th...
Meanwhile, the Democrats tried again to reach consensus in Baltimore on June 18, six weeks after their debacle in Charleston. Once again, Southern delegates led by Fire-Eaters walked out of the convention when Northerners refused to adopt a resolution supporting the imposition of slavery on territorial residents. After two ballots, the remaining, d...
The split in the Democratic Party meant that there were essentially two separate presidential campaigns waged in the fall of 1860: one in the South between Breckinridge and Bell (although Douglas had some support in Southern cities among Irish immigrants), and another in the North between Lincoln and Douglas. Following a long tradition in American ...
Turnout for the election was massive – 82 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot, making it the second highest percentage in American history, behind 1876. Lincoln won just under 40 percent of the popular vote nationwide, but he took a commanding majority of the votes in the Electoral College (180 out of 303; 28 more than he needed to prevail) wi...
Infuriated by the tactics of violence, coercion, and fraud used by the proslavery side to win the first Kansas Territorial elections, abolitionists and New England newspaper editors clamored for new elections.
Jun 12, 2006 · Two hundred people died in the border dispute between November 1855 and December 1856 alone. The Civil War was not merely a seamless extension of the agony of ‘Bleeding Kansas,’ it was a direct result of it. One of the most notorious individual units operating in Kansas was the 7th Kansas Volunteer Cavalry Regiment.
People also ask
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Though most blacks and abolitionists strongly opposed the Compromise, the majority of Americans embraced it, believing that it offered a final, workable solution to the slavery question.
