The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 created Kansas and Nebraska territories and opened thousands of acres of fertile farmland to settlers and facilitated construction of a transcontinental railroad.
The popular sovereignty segment of the act prompted anti- and pro-slavery sympathizers to pour into Kansas.
The outcome, Grant Glenn told Iola Rotarians Thursday, was the historical period known as Bleeding Kansas.
Glenn, an attorney and president of the Topeka Rotary Club, has made it his avocational calling to study and illuminate the early history of Kansas. He spoke at the behest of Iola Rotarian Gary McIntosh, who came to know him in his research on Constitutional Hall in Topeka.
Glenn spent a few minutes at the end of his presentation talking about the hall, which stands much as it did a century and a half ago, although a brick facade has replaced its original rock front. Efforts are being made to preserve the hall, which is in danger of being “replaced with a new building or a parking lot,” Glenn said. The Kansas Historical Society does not have funding to take on the task.
Constitution Hall is historically significant because it was the site of legislative sessions when Kansas was forming, and two bodies were elected, one on each side of the slavery issue.
Bleeding Kansas, a term coined by Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, was a time of frequent clashes between anti-slavery advocates and free-staters, who feared rich slave owners would dominant farmland worked by slaves.
The Civil War began with a “thunderclap,” as historian Alan Nevins framed it, at Fort Sumter, S.C., in April 12-13, 1861, just over two months after Kansas became a state on Jan. 29.
However, Glenn proposed animosity was so intense in Kansas between 1854 and statehood, the Civil War could have started here.
State’s violent origins recalled
