Episode Details

In 1854 Senator Stephen A. Douglas, seeking to organize territory for a transcontinental railroad, pushed through the Kansas-Nebraska Act, replacing the Missouri Compromise line with popular sovereignty. Settlers would vote on slavery themselves, and both sides raced to fill Kansas: border ruffians from Missouri and Free Staters backed by groups such as the New England Emigrant Aid Company. This episode covers the fraudulent territorial elections of 1854 and 1855, President Franklin Pierce's firing of Governor Andrew Reeder, and the rival legislatures at Lecompton and Topeka.

Political conflict turned violent with the Wakarusa War in November 1855, the sack of Lawrence on May 21, 1856, and Preston Brooks's caning of Senator Charles Sumner in the Senate days later. John Brown answered with the Pottawatomie killings, and the Marais des Cygnes massacre followed in 1858. Meanwhile, four constitutions, Topeka, Lecompton, Leavenworth, and Wyandotte, competed for approval in Washington. Southern senators blocked statehood until their states seceded, and Kansas entered the Union as a free state on January 29, 1861. The episode notes that up to 200 people may have died.

• Henry Ward Beecher reportedly shipped Sharps rifles in crates labeled Bibles.
• A congressional committee counted 1,729 fraudulent votes against 1,114 legal ones, and one district had 226 nonresident voters and 35 residents.
• Pro-slavery forces at Lawrence burned the Free State Hotel and brought a stolen cannon called Old Kickapoo.
• Supporters mailed Brooks new canes, one inscribed Hit him again.
• In a monitored 1858 vote, Kansans rejected the Lecompton Constitution 11,812 to 1,926.