The "Bleeding Kansas" consisted of small but violent civil wars fought in the new Territory of Kansas created under the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), legislation that held the principle of sovereignty (giving residents the right to determine whether the area became a free state or a slave state) while opposing the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which was an agreement that excluded most of the Louisana Purchase, including Kansas, from slavery. This series of violent confrontations, then, were related to the legality of slavery in the new state.
