Project Questions

1. Many of the sources talk about what kind of people easterners and Missourians, northerners and southerners, are. How do people from different sections of the country describe one another? How do you think these attitudes about people from other parts of the country influenced the political problems in Kansas Territory and the nation?
2. Several of the sources talk about the fighting during the summer of 1856. Who do they blame for the outbreak of fighting? How are the accounts of the fighting in Kansas Territory similar or different?
3. The Kansas-Nebraska Act followed two major compromises about slavery: the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise of 1850. What arguments do the proponents and opponents of Kansas-Nebraska make about that legislation and its effect on or relationship to those earlier compromises?
4. How are slavery and abolitionism described in the different documents? On what grounds are both attacked or defended?
5. Central Question: Why did settlers in Kansas Territory fight a small civil war? What does Bleeding Kansas tell us about the slavery issue in nineteenth-century U.S. politics and the causes of the national Civil War?