Bleeding Kansas - 9780700614929

Bleeding KansasContested Liberty in the Civil War Era\nAuthor(s): Nicole Etcheson\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: University Press of Kansas, United States\nImprint: University Press of Kansas\nISBN-13: 9780700614929, 978-0700614929\nSynopsis\nFew 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.\n\nMany 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 elections subverted the settlers' right to choose whether Kansas would be a slave or free state-fanned the flames of war. While other writers have cited slavery or economics as the cause of unrest, Nicole Etcheson seeks to revise our understanding of this .