Editing Bleeding Kansas (section)

===Early elections===
Immediately, immigrants supporting both sides of the slavery question arrived in the Kansas Territory to establish residency and gain the right to vote. Among the first settlers of Kansas were citizens of slave states, especially nearby Missouri, many of whom strongly supported Southern ideologies and emigrated to Kansas specifically to assist the expansion of slavery. Proslavery immigrants settled towns, including [[Leavenworth, Kansas|Leavenworth]] and [[Atchison, Kansas|Atchison]]. The administration of [[President of the United States|President]] [[Franklin Pierce]] appointed territorial officials in Kansas aligned with its own proslavery views, and heeding rumors that the frontier was being overwhelmed by Northerners, thousands of nonresident slavery proponents soon entered Kansas with the goal of influencing local politics. Proslavery factions thereby captured many early territorial elections, often by [[electoral fraud|fraud]] and intimidation. In November 1854, thousands of armed proslavery men known as "[[Border Ruffians]]" or "Southern Yankees", mostly from Missouri, poured into the Kansas Territory and swayed the vote in the election for a nonvoting delegate to Congress in favor of proslavery [[History of the United States Democratic Party|Democratic]] candidate [[John Wilkins Whitfield]].<ref name=Politics>{{cite web |title=Territorial Politics and Government |url=http://www.territorialkansasonline.org/~imlskto/cgi-bin/index.php?SCREEN=pol_govt&option=more |publisher=Territorial Kansas Online |access-date=June 18, 2014 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140714143420/http://www.territorialkansasonline.org/~imlskto/cgi-bin/index.php?SCREEN=pol_govt&option=more |archive-date=July 14, 2014 |url-status=live }}</ref> The following year, a congressional committee investigating the election reported that 1,729 fraudulent votes were cast compared to 1,114 legal votes. In one location, only 20 of the 604 voters were residents of the Kansas Territory; in another, 35 were residents and 226 nonresidents.<ref>Cutler, William G. ''History of the State of Kansas'', A.T. Andreas, (1883), "Territorial History, Part 8".</ref>
[[File:Frémont_Club_banner.png|thumb|Digital remake of the Fremont Club banner hung in [[Lancaster, New Hampshire]] to show support for Kansas.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Frémont Club banner - Kansas Memory |url=https://www.kansasmemory.org/item/209858 |access-date=2024-11-21 |website=www.kansasmemory.org}}</ref>]]
At the same time, Northern abolitionists encouraged their own supporters to move to Kansas in the effort to make the territory a free state, hoping to flood Kansas with so-called "[[Free Soil Party|Free-Soilers]]" or "[[Free-Stater (Kansas)|Free-Staters]]". By far the most famous of these, and their leader, was [[John Brown (abolitionist)|John Brown of Leavenworth]], who moved from Ohio.<ref name=LOC>{{cite web | title=Kansas Affairs | page=685 | url=https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/public/gdcmassbookdig/kansasaffairsspe00wald/kansasaffairsspe00wald_djvu.txt }}</ref> Many citizens of Northern states arrived with assistance from [[benevolent society|benevolent societies]] such as the [[Boston, Massachusetts|Boston]]-based [[New England Emigrant Aid Company]], founded shortly before passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act with the specific goal of assisting anti-slavery immigrants to reach Kansas Territory. In a colorful story that may be legend, the abolitionist minister [[Henry Ward Beecher]], [[Harriet Beecher Stowe]]'s brother, shipped them [[Sharps rifle]]s in crates labelled "Bibles"; they became known as [[Beecher's Bibles]].<ref>{{Cite web |url=https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/beecher-bibles/11977 |title=Beecher Bibles - Kansapedia - Kansas Historical Society |access-date=February 21, 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190210152637/https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/beecher-bibles/11977 |archive-date=February 10, 2019 |url-status=live }}</ref> Despite boasts that 20,000 New England [[Yankee]]s would be sent to the Kansas Territory, only about 1,200 settlers had emigrated there by the end of 1855.<ref>William Frank Zornow, "Kansas: a history of the Jayhawk State" (1957), p. 72</ref><ref name="Rawley" /> Nevertheless, aid movements like these, heavily publicized by the Eastern press, played a significant role in creating the nationwide hysteria over the fate of Kansas, and were directly responsible for the establishment of towns which later became strongholds of [[History of the United States Republican Party|Republican]] and abolitionist sentiment, including Lawrence, Topeka, and [[Manhattan, Kansas]].<ref name="Rawley" /><ref name=Frontier>{{cite book | last = Olson | first = Kevin | title = Frontier Manhattan | publisher = University Press of Kansas | year = 2012 | isbn = 978-0-7006-1832-3}}</ref>