Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune was the person who led to the coining of the term “Bleeding Kansas”. The events that took place in Bleeding Kansas directly presaged the American Civil War. Let’s focus on the origins of Bleeding Kansas. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 created the Kansas Territory and provided the reason to this guerilla warfare. Enshrined in this Kansas–Nebraska Act, which invalidated the Missouri Compromise, was the modern principle of “popular sovereignty”, the idea that was massively supported by U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas, the then chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories. He was greatly contested by the abolitionists.
An attempt was made by declaring popular sovereignty to offer concessions to the Southern states through making possible the slavery expansion into both northern and western territories. The Kansas–Nebraska Act led to the question of the expansion of slavery in the newly-born states of Nebraska and Kansas that would be decided by the inhabitants of both the states. It was assumed that free-state advocates would reside in Nebraska, and slave-owning Southerners would reside in Kansas. Everything worked out as stated in Nebraska, but not in Kansas. In August 1855, a group of free-staters gathered and resolved to reject the proslavery laws as passed by the territorial legislature. The drafting of the Topeka Constitution and the formation of a shadow government took place. To fight against slavery, John Brown came to Kansas Territory in October, 1855. After he Wakarusa War in November, 1855 and from then onwards the Bleeding Kansas gradually took shape. Nearly 56 people died in Bleeding Kansas till the time the violence entirely died away in 1859.
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