With Kansas in their control, the proslavery state legislature implemented laws that imposed stringent penalties for individuals who spoke out against slaveholding, including hard labor or death for anyone who helped enslaved fugitives. In response to these laws, the Northerners established a Free State legislature in Topeka, resulting in Kansas housing two competing governments. President Franklin Pierce only acknowledged the fraudulent pro-slavery government.
Although Kansas became the national epicenter of the slavery question, most settlers cared more about land ownership than the issue of human bondage. “Free soilers are looking to limit slavery’s expansion, not necessarily for moral or ethical reasons, but really more as a way to limit competition from free Black labor and from slave labor,” Epps says.
Dueling Governments
As the Free Staters, abolitionists and proslavery forces fought for control of Kansas, more outbreaks of violence occurred, including shootouts between the factions, guerilla warfare and the imprisonment of Free-Staters by the federal government, Etcheson says.
These incidents prompted a congressional committee in April 1856 to head to the new home of the pro-slavery government in Lecompton, Kansas. The committee found evidence of widespread election fraud in the territory and determined that most settlers supported a free Kansas. The federal government, however, ignored these findings, and violence continued.
After proslavery forces burned the Free State Hotel in Lawrence on May 21, 1856, among other offenses, abolitionist John Brown and his four sons infamously massacred five slavery supporters at Pottawatomie Creek.
“John Brown is not a typical Free-Stater,” Etcheson says. “He shows up in Kansas late. He doesn't participate in creating the Free State movement. He is not part of this extra legal government. He doesn't much believe in voting anyway. He’s a loose cannon.”
Free-State leaders such as Charles Robinson, an abolitionist and Massachusetts doctor who settled in Kansas, feared the use of violence among his faction would lead the federal government to squash the movement, so Free-Staters initially tried to engage in nonviolent resistance, according to Etcheson. Brown did not represent this ideology with his egregious acts of violence.
Even Congress was not spared from the viciousness associated with Bleeding Kansas. After giving a speech called “The Crime Against Kansas” that called out proslavery senators, including Andrew Butler of South Carolina, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachussetss was savagely caned by Butler's nephew on May 22, 1856.
“It takes him a while to recover and he's not quite himself for a few years after that,” Epps says.