Border War

Border War, also known as Bleeding Kansas, conflict in Kansas Territory between antislavery free staters and proslavery groups such as the Border Ruffians. Precipitated by the passage by the U.S. Congress in 1854 of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which left the question of slavery in Kansas and Nebraska to the vote of the settlers, the war continued intermittently for almost four years. The Border Ruffians, chiefly southerners who had moved to Missouri, conducted systematic raids into Kansas during the war, terrorizing and murdering antislavery settlers. Among the many bloody reprisals inflicted by free state settlers on the Border Ruffians and their supporters in Kansas was the attack in May 1856 by the abolitionist John Brown on settlers at Pottawatomie Creek. The antislavery forces finally triumphed in the Border War, but the bitterness of the struggle deepened the cleavage between North and South and accelerated the drift toward civil war.