hello and welcome to our lecture bleeding kansas and bleeding sumner and as you can see on the slide kansas is abbreviated ka that may be helpful to you when you're taking notes but remember on quizzes and exams you need to spell out the word today we'll be looking at what events and cultural institutions show how divided the nation became in the 1850s we'll also look at what was in each political party's platform in 1856 now their platform tells you what they stand for it's the way a party says this is what we believe in if you put us into office these are the things we're going to do the things that will matter to us and finally we'll look at which parties and candidates competed in the election of 1860 on which platforms what did they stand for what were they running to try to do so let's start with bleeding kansas a bitter contest erupted in the kansas territory between free soilers who wanted that territory to to be free of slavery and become a free state and pro-slavery settlers who wanted it to be a slave territory and later a slave state now if you remember this is the part of the the area both kansas and nebraska that were opened up to popular sovereignty which means the people in the territory are going to get to vote on whether it will be a slave or free territory but you can't have that vote until you have so many white male heads of household in that territory and that means that both sides slave and free funded people to go live there in order to throw the election so you'll have free soilers moving out there and they want to run farms themselves they don't want slavery uh to be something they have to compete with you'll also have planters who send their sons or actually pay people to go and take slavery into this territory and vote for it to be a slave territory so we've got these two different groups who are on complete opposite ends of the moral and political spectrum vying for control of kansas now in its first territorial election thousands of missouri residents called border ruffians crossed the border to vote illegally in kansas so they're pro-slavery they cross the border and claim to be settling in kansas but they're not really settling there they're going to go back to missouri they just want kansas to be a slave territory so these illegal votes delivered a decisive victory for pro-slavery forces and yet it was really obvious what had happened i mean it's not that easy to hide this kind of voter fraud and yet the kansas legislature that these people elected voted to legalize slavery and made it a crime to speak or act against slavery which of course is a complete violation of your first amendment right because that federal territory is still under control of the federal government so basically they can't do anything the federal government couldn't do the federal government under buchanan recognizes this pro-slavery government and this pro-slavery constitution but remember the majority of actual residents in kansas are free soilers who don't want slavery to be there so they take up arms and established a rival territorial government and a constitution that banned slavery and they argue that if you actually look at the votes and you take out those slave owners from missouri who shouldn't have been voting in a kansas election anyway this is the rightful government and constitution so we have two competing governments in kansas one pro-slavery one anti and basically a small-scale civil war breaks out which the national press called bleeding kansas it's basically the civil war before there's a civil war in may of 1856 pro-slavery men raided the free state capital in what was called the sack of lawrence and it included substantial property damage but no loss of life the leader of the kansas free soil forces was named john brown he was an underground railroad conductor and he orchestrated the response to the sack of lawrence brown and his six men dragged five pro-slavery men from their beds at potawatomi creek and in what became known as the potawatomi massacre of 1856 brown's gang shot some of them and hacked the others to death with axes now both southern supporters of slavery and northerners against its expansion were outraged at the wrong stun to their side and they pointed to the other one as being super violent and not being moral or ethical but both sides were engaging in this kind of violence by the time we get to the point that we're calling it bleeding kansas it really is a civil war before there was a civil war and not the last time we're going to talk about john brown today so in may of 1856 massachusetts senator charles sumner was giving a blistering anti-slavery speech about bleeding kansas in the senate he's arguing with south carolina senator andrew butler and basically sumner is arguing that it is the free government and the free constitution in kansas that the u.s government should be recognizing and legitimizing and not the slave government that was established through voter fraud now in response to this blistering speech butler's nephew south carolina congressman preston brooks comes over to the senate he approached sumner and struck him over the head with the rattan cane and it's literally this cane you see here that has been repaired brooks beat sumner almost to death on the floor of congress stopping only when the cane shattered in his hand sumner suffered permanent brain damage and was unable to resume his seat for three years massachusetts reelected him anyway as their approach to southern brutality and a way to show that they wouldn't back down southerners responded by reelecting brooks and mailing him dozens of replacement kings and we've talked about this a little bit in earlier lectures the south really is not a fan of majority rule once they realize that the majority of the united states doesn't support slavery and so we're going to see a lot of support both for violence or just anti-democratic measures in order to retain slavery and keep spreading it throughout the nation proceed to the next part of the lecture to learn a bit more about bleeding kansas