Missouri slaveholders, envisioning Kansas as an extension of their state, swarmed into the Kansas Territory and squatted on the fertile lands. The town of Leavenworth was established in the shadow of Fort Leavenworth. Farther south, Wyandotte City sprang up on the banks of the Kansas River.
At the same time, abolitionists Eli Thayer and Amos A. Lawrence formed the New England Aid Company. They hoped by convincing free-soil advocates to settle in Kansas, they could wrest control of the government from the proslavers.
The Emigrant Aid Society founded the town of Lawrence, Kansas and free-soil squatters came to Kansas in droves. But they hadn't counted on the Missourians' rabid desire to make Kansas a slave territory.
That fall, ballots were cast to choose a delegate to Congress. To ensure that man was proslavery, David Atchison led Missourians across the border and stuffed the ballot boxes. Though half of the 2,871 ballots were bogus, Governor Reeder proclaimed the proslavery delegate the winner.
Drunk with success, the proslavery Missourians returned in March of 1855 and made certain the next election went their way. It did. The governing faction enacted new laws that shifted all the power to the proslavers, going so far as to guarantee death to anyone who helped slaves escape.
Governor Reeder finally protested to President Pierce, but word of Reeder's shady land dealings in Kansas had already reached the President's ear. Pierce removed Reeder from office and appointed Wilson Shannon, another proslavery proponent, as governor.
The Free-Staters scrambled to attain statehood with a December 1855 election, but without the vote of the proslavers, President Pierce refused to recognize the election and consider Kansas a state. With the proslavers controlling the territorial government, Kansas would remain a slave state.
That fact spurred the Northern antislavery supporters into action. By sending an armed militia into Kansas, they would out vote the proslavers in the next election and abolish slavery.
Proslavers had a foothold and they weren't about to give up without a fight.
In answer to the twenty-five Bibles and Sharps rifles Preacher Henry Ward Beecher gave the abolitionists, Alabama Colonel Jefferson Buford armed his militia with Bibles and Sharps rifles and marched to Kansas to put an end to the antislavery faction once and for all.
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