“Bleeding Kansas” has furnished the newly formed…

“Bleeding Kansas” has furnished the newly formed Republican Party with a much needed antislavery issue in the national election of 1860.

The Southerners, rejecting the northerner Stephen Douglas, author of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, because he had accepted the Kansas referendum against slavery, field their own candidate, John Breckinridge, while the “border states” of Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia support a third candidate, John Bell, oriented, like Douglas, towards compromise.