Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era

Few people would have expected bloodshed in Kansas Territory. After all, it had few slaves and showed few signs that slavery would even flourish. But civil war tore this territory apart in the 1850s and 60s, and “Bleeding Kansas” became a forbidding symbol for the nationwide clash over slavery that followed.

Many free-state Kansans seemed to care little about slaves, and many proslavery Kansans owned not a single slave. But the failed promise of the Kansas-Nebraska Act-when fraud in local el...