Bleeding Kansas

Yeah.

What would it have been like in the 1850s in a border territory, and it's Bleeding Kansas, and people are killing each other? What it would have been like to be a pastor in those places.

And so people have been so moved.

And when we treat things only as cognitive propositions, which we need, that's part of being human as well, we miss out on that full orbit.

Got 19-- 1776, the Boston Revolution, the Civil War.

We had Bleeding Kansas, 186-56.

Uh, Senator Sumner was caned on the Senate floor in 50-- 1856.

The Dred Scott case, uh, court loses half the country in this, the battle in '57.

The fear of.

Slave expansion dominating the national elections because Pierce, as we'll talk about here, was totally linked to bleeding Kansas because of his decision to send in U.S. marshals there inside with the slave owners there, the would-be slave state people there.

And Buchanan, James Buchanan, a guy who in presidential polls frequently gets voted the, you know, one of the least popular, least effective presidents.

He gets the nod in 1856.

Yeah, and this is the era, before this is the era of filibustering.

You know, Pierce had the idea of giving an informal nod to some filibusters who were these American adventurers that would go in, not officially as U.S. agents, overthrow the government, seize power, and then petition for statehood to be annexed.

What happens with Bleeding Kansas burns all his social capital, so he has to back off from that.

But that does actually happen in Nicaragua, where William Walker, which we've talked about before on the show, takes over.

Well, you knew what was going to happen.

So the South flooded southern Ka-Kansas from Missouri, and the North came into northern Kansas, and the re-the rest was under his tenure, bleeding Kansas.

And then you had the Mormon, quote-unquote, "revolt," where Brigham Young basically for a while said Utah and-- Because there were two things that the Northern abolitionists and the Northern Democ-- uh, Whigs and then the new Republican Party said were not compatible with the United States.

One was slavery, and the other was polygamy.

And by January of 1856, the beginning of the next year, in a sense, in essence, there were two fledgling territorial governments in Kansas, one free soil, one pro-slavery.

And it was then that spring of 1856 that what we call Bleeding Kansas, this border frontier civil war, this village against village, river ravine against river ravine, broke out.

Before it played out over about a year and a half, about 250 people would be killed, many of them in nighttime raids and vigilante violence, and millions in I will come back to John Brown later, next week in fact.

Our friend John Brown from upstate New York, or somebody's friend, he wasn't easy to be had already sent out some of his sons, more on that later, and John Brown arrived himself in the winter of 1856.

It was news of the beating of Sumner on the floor of the Senate that apparently made John Brown snap, and within forty-eight hours he led what's called the Pottawatomie Creek Massacre, where he murdered five pro-slavery advocates in cold blood, with broadswords, in the dark of the night.

We will return to John Brown's Now, that year was, though, a presidential election year, and the problem is still just laying there out on the landscape.

What is to happen with Kansas, Nebraska? What's to be done with bleeding Kansas? What's to be done with Now, in that election of 1856, this is terribly important, The Republican Party will mount its first effort at the presidency, in it all but one.

This has never happened in American history till then.

Yeah, interesting.

The, the only exception that I'm aware of was Kansas, which was punished for Bleeding Kansas, the kind of dress rehearsal for the Civil War, about six years, I think, prior to the actual outbreak of Civil War.

The US government modified the statute that said 60,000, said, "You have to get to 90,000.

We want more people in there before you can become a state." So Kansas was admitted to the Union later than it otherwise would have been.

I didn't know that.

Bleeding Kansas?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that was just in the

background of what was going on.

And as you mentioned, this whole period of time was called Bleeding Kansas.

And And essentially, it was like the beginning of the Civil War.