In 1854, the governor of Kansas, Andrew Reeder, oversaw new elections. Free Soil candidates won the majority of local elections, “but when the legislature met in July 1855 it contemptuously seated the original proslavery victors” (147). Reeder tried to get President Franklin Pierce to denounce the proceedings, but instead Pierce replaced Reeder with the pro-enslavement Wilson Shannon, who enacted laws that punished anyone who helped enslaved persons escape or revolt with the death penalty. Resistance to such laws culminated in a violent clash between free-soil settlers and pro-enslavement settlers, some of whom came from Missouri, with pro-enslavement settlers attacking and plundering the town of Lawrence, Kansas. Two rival governments, one free-soil and the other pro-enslavement, emerged and tried setting up rival state constitutions.

An abolitionist senator, Charles Sumner, gave a speech denouncing not only the pro-enslavement settlers in Kansas and Missouri, but Democratic members of Congress. Later, Representative Preston Brooks from South Carolina violently beat Sumner with his cane. The assault and the fact Southerners praised Brooks only made more Northerners sympathetic to abolitionism.

The Republican Party met to choose its first presidential candidate for the 1856 election. Attempts to nominate a nativist but anti-enslavement candidate failed, and instead the Republicans nominated John C.