“Bleeding Kansas” 355parochial schools, lay control of church policies, the
prohibition of alcoholic beverages, and increasing the
time before an immigrant could apply for citizenship
(the Know-Nothings favored twenty-one years) were
matters of major importance to them. Since these
were divisive issues, the established political parties
tried to avoid them—hence the development of the
new party.
The American party was important in the South
as well as in the North, and while most Know-
Nothings disliked blacks and considered them inher-
ently inferior beings, they tended to adopt the
dominant view of slavery in whichever section they
were located. In the North most opposed the Kansas-
Nebraska Act.
Operating often in tacit alliance with the antislav-
ery forces (dislike of slavery did not prevent many
abolitionists from being prejudiced against Catholics
and immigrants), the northern Know-Nothings won
a string of local victories in 1854 and elected more
than forty congressmen.
Far more significant in the long run was the for-
mation of the Republican party, which was made up
of former Free Soilers, Conscience Whigs, and “Anti-
Nebraska” Democrats. The American party was a
national organization, but the Republican partywas
purely sectional. It sprang up spontaneously through-
out the Old Northwest and caught on with a rush in
New England.
Republicans presented themselves as the party of
freedom. They were not abolitionists (though most
abolitionists were soon voting Republican), but they
insisted that slavery be kept out of the territories.
They believed that if America was to remain a land of
opportunity, free white labor must have exclusive
access to the West. Thus the party appealed not only
to voters who disapproved of slavery, but also to
those who wished to keep blacks—free or slave—out
of their states. In 1854 the Republicans won more
than a hundred seats in the House of Representatives
and control of many state governments.
The Whig party had almost disappeared in the
northern states and the Democratic party had been
gravely weakened, but it was unclear how these two
new parties would fare. The Know-Nothing party
had the superficial advantage of being a nationwide
organization, but where slavery was concerned,
this was anything but advantageous. And many
Northerners who disliked slavery were troubled by
the harsh Know-Nothing policies toward immigrants
and Catholics. If the Know-Nothings were in con-
trol, said former Whig congressman Abraham
Lincoln in 1855, the Declaration of Independence
would read “all men are created equal, except
negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.”
“Bleeding Kansas”
“Bleeding Kansas”
The furor over slavery might have died down if settle-
ment of the new territories had proceeded in an
orderly manner. Almost none of the settlers who
flocked to Kansas owned slaves and relatively few of
them were primarily interested in the slavery ques-
tion. Most had a low opinion of blacks. Like nearly all
frontier settlers, they wanted land and local political
office, lucrative government contracts, and other
business opportunities.
When Congress opened the gates to settlement
in May 1854, none of the land in the territory was
available for sale. Treaties extinguishing Indian titles
had yet to be ratified, and public lands had not been
surveyed. In July Congress authorized squatters to
occupy unsurveyed federal lands, but much of this
property was far to the west of the frontier and practi-
cally inaccessible. The situation led to confusion over
property boundaries, to graft and speculation, and to
general uncertainty, thereby exacerbating the diffi-
culty of establishing an orderly government.
The legal status of slavery in Kansas became the
focus of all these conflicts. Both northern abolition-
ists and southern defenders of slavery were deter-
mined to have Kansas. They made of the territoryKan
sasR.Missou
riR.OsageR.MISSOURIKANSAS
TERRITORY Major outbreaksNEBRASKA
TERRITORYLawrence
May 21, 1856Pottawatomie Creek
May 24, 1856
(John Brown Leads Attack
on Slave-Staters)Osawatomie
Aug. 31, 1856
(Atchison Attacks Free-Staters)Marais des Cygnes
May 19, 1858
Pro-Slavers Massacre
Five Free-StatersTopeka
(Seat of Free-State
Government)Kansas CityLecompton
(Seat of Slave-State
Government)Free state
Slave state
Disputed”Bleeding Kansas”In the late 1850s, one Kansas government (located
in Topeka) abolished slavery; the other (located in Lecompton) legalized
slavery. As proslavery settlers poured into Kansas from Missouri, and
antislavery settlers from the North, clashes were inevitable.