1854-Bleeding Kansas

“Fair Kansas, bleeding at thy feet,A trophy lies;

And murdered men and widowed wives,

And gory looks and scalping knives,

In heaps arise.”
-Wilder’s Annals of Kansas, 1856

Bleeding Kansas, 1854- The name given to the full-scale violence that arose between free-soiler (anti-slavery because it oppressed small yeoman farmers) settlers and pro-slavery settlers in the new territory of Kansas.

The Kansas-Nebraska act had earlier decided that popular sovereignty would decide whether or not the new states would become slave or free, but it had anticipated that due to the land not being ideal for large plantations, not many pro-slavery settlers would go there and there would be relatively little conflict. They were WRONG. The eastern part of Kansas territory attracted many slave owners, and both slave-owners and free-soil abolitionists fought violently for the control of the region.

It was in Bleeding Kansas that staunch abolitionist John Brown made his infamous raid on Osawatomie Creek, a pro-slavery settlement, where he and his men captured, murdered, and mutilated five pro-slavery men. The conflict continued in the form of guerilla warfare even after the start of the civil war, and the violence itself never completely stopped until 1859.

This pic was based off a doodle in my APUSH notes, since reading about it gave me chills…I don’t know about you, but I’ve always thought of Kansas as a really chill place, what with the whole Wizard of Oz stereotyping and all…(“We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto!”) And this just goes to show that Northernerst≠good guys, automatically! John Brown was quite the hero/martyr to other abolitionists in his day, but seriously? Hacking men to death with broadswords? That’s just about as uncivilized as the system of slavery itself… So here’s a bloody Alfred with his 2p club (even though it’s regular Al.) Kansas is sort of right in the middle of the US, so that’s why he’s bleeding there, and if he looks psychotic here, it’s because things are just about to get crazy.

In case you haven’t figured out, we’ve finally gotten to the Civil War in APUSH, so expect a deluge of Civil War themed pics some time or another.

On a completely different note my friend thought he looked like he was from the Walking Dead. I guess I’m sorry, or not.