In many respects, Kansas—and the question of whether slavery, legal in neighboring Missouri, would be allowed to spread to the territory—was the central issue of the 1860 presidential election, the most significant in U.S. history. Curtailing slavery’s expansion and admitting Kansas as a free state was a key plank in the Republican Party’s platform that year, just as it was during the party’s first presidential election in 1856. The seemingly unanswerable “Kansas Question” and the issue of slavery’s expansion split the venerable Democratic Party into Northern and Southern factions, allowing the Republican Abraham Lincoln to win the election without a single Southern electoral vote.
In 1846, Dred Scott, a slave living in St. Louis, sued in a Missouri court for his and his family’s freedom. Eleven years later, the case reached the highest federal court in Dred Scott v. Sandford, where the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Scott’s claim to freedom by a vote of 7-2. While the verdict had a personal impact on Scott and his family, it also had legal, political, social, and economic ramifications that reverberated throughout the country in the years immediately preceding the Civil War.
Two days after James Buchanan was inaugurated the 15th president of the United States, the Supreme Court issued the Dred Scott decision, opening all American territories to slavery until the time came to seek admission as a state. Buchanan, sympathetic to the Southern cause despite being Northern born, wanted a ruling that supported “popular sovereignty,” a concept introduced in the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) that allowed the settlers of Western territories—rather than the U.S. Congress—decide their status as slave or free states upon admission to the Union.
The Mormon War, otherwise known as the Utah War or Mormon Rebellion, describes the violence surrounding an armed confrontation between Mormon settlers in Utah Territory and the U.S. Army, which lasts from March 1857 to July 1858.
By Tony O’ Bryan, University of Missouri—Kansas City
The Wyandotte Constitution was the fourth and final proposed Kansas constitution following the failed attempts of the Topeka, Lecompton, and Leavenworth conventions to create a state constitution that would pass Congress and be signed as a bill by the president. For its time, the constitution expressed progressive ideas of liberty by explicitly prohibiting slavery, granting a homestead exemption to protect settlers from bankruptcy, and offering limited suffrage to women. When the lame duck President James Buchanan signed the bill approving the Wyandotte Constitution on January 29, 1861, Kansas was admitted to the Union as the 34th state, and it marked the end of five years of bitter conflict over slavery in Kansas Territory.
As Kansas Territory marched toward statehood following the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, its citizens, deeply divided along pro- and antislavery lines, rushed to construct a viable state constitution. Four constitutions were eventually proposed, with the second and most controversial emerging from a territorial convention held in Lecompton in 1857, in which the delegates intended to protect the institution of slavery.
Proslavery Democrat James Buchanan defeats John C. Frémont (the first Republican presidential nominee) and former-President Millard Fillmore (now of the American or "Know-Nothing" Party) in the 1856 elections.
President James Buchanan signs the bill approving the Wyandotte Constitution, and Kansas becomes the 34th state after almost seven years of political and sometimes violent conflict.
John W. Geary, former mayor of San Francisco, takes office as Kansas territorial governor. Geary is appointed by President Franklin Pierce to replace Wilson Shannon and attempt to bring peace to "Bleeding Kansas."
