6.3Bleeding Kansas and mounting violence

Kansas became a battleground. Pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers poured in, each determined to control the territory's future, and rival governments claimed authority. Fraud, intimidation, and armed clashes gave the territory a grim nickname: "Bleeding Kansas."

The violence reached Congress itself. In 1856, a South Carolina congressman beat Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner unconscious with a cane on the Senate floor after Sumner denounced slavery—an act cheered in much of the South and condemned in the North. The caning showed how far the sections had drifted apart. Compromise, the habit that had held the Union together, was breaking down into raw hostility.