These two broadsides, owned by the State Historical Society of Missouri-Columbia, date from August 1854 and document a heated personal and political grudge between the proslavery Benjamin F. Stringfellow and H. Miles Moore, who would come to side with the antislavery cause and fight for the Union in the Civil War. Despite widespread 21st century complaints about “dirty politics,” modern political disputes have, to date, been considerably milder than their counterparts in the antebellum period, when such arguments not infrequently escalated from cutting personal insults into actual duels. The “Bleeding Kansas” violence that resulted from the debate over whether Kansas Territory would enter the Union as a free or slave state even extended to the U.S. Senate chambers, where Representative Preston Brooks caned Senator Charles Sumner to the brink of death.