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henkster: "Sheriff Jones represented the lawful authority in his county, and was being openly defied by a large and growing number of armed men.
Sounds like an insurrection to me, and it was the governorâ€™s duty to suppress same.
The toxic mixture of slave and free-state politics was hijacking a local problem, and was merely an example of the toxic mix that was consuming the country at large."

Local Kansas politics reflected the national Big Picture in 1855.
The Big Picture: In 1855 slavery in the Deep South was growing and prospering like never before, thanks to the insatiable world-wide demand for the King of Crops: cotton.
Slave prices were doubling and slave numbers were growing at least as fast as the overall population.
The biggest problem was: there weren't enough slaves, and importing slaves from Africa was outlawed.
So huge numbers of slaves were being "exported" from Southern Border states (Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri) where, absent cotton, slavery was weaker, even dying out.

So, ironically, the very prosperity which made slavery so strong in the Deep South, made it weaker and unattractive in Southern Border States.

At the same time, floods of anti-slavery European immigrants were landing in Northern states and spreading across the country, including those Southern Border states, where slavery was already weakening.
So anti-slavery Northerners were a growing majority in officially slave Missouri, and would eventually prevent Missouri from joining the Confederacy.

These are the men who are flooding across the border into the Kansas territory, and disrupting politics there.

Nationally, in 1855, the Southern Slave-Power (which is to say, the Democrat Party) had dominated all of Washington from it's beginning, with no serious interruptions, and was nearing the election of another Dough-Faced Northern Democrat President, James Buchanan, in 1856.
Opposition to Democrats then (as, sadly, now) was weak and ineffective.
John Adams' old Federalists had evaporated in a scandal over threats of secession during the War of 1812, and even Adams' own son, John Quincy, had joined Jefferson's party.
The new Whigs did manage to elect two presidents (Harrison & Taylor), but they were both slave-holders, and soon died in office.
So, in 1855, there had never been an anti-slavery political party, or an anti-slavery government in Washington.

Many people today say, "slavery was America's original sin", but no, that misunderstands the basic situation.
From the US beginnings, slavery was a precondition for Union -- without slavery there would be, could be no union.
And the constitutionally protected Slave-Power dominated Washington politics.

So Kansas in 1855 was a northern territory, ruled over by Slave-Power appointees, but being flooded by anti-slavery northerners.

That's the Big Picture, playing out in Homer's news articles of the day.

Very nice summary. Yes, it wasn’t the Connecticut Compromise that created the Constitution of 1789 (lower house representation based on populuation, upper house representation based on statehood). Instead, it was the Three-Fifths Compromise that gave southern slave states 3/5 representation for their slave population for the purposes of the electoral college and for Congressional Representation. That clause enabled the racist democrats (who remain racist to this day) to dominate national politics.

But the forces that prompted the southern states to push for the Three-Fifths Compromise, the growing industrialization and population of the North, where overwhelming the effect of the compromise. Looking at your shifting maps, you can see that trend of the national electorate was swinging away from slavery and would never come back. The line drawn by the Missouri Compromise made that apparent. By the time Chief Justice Taney declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional in Dred Scott v. Sanford, it was too.

The money, industry and people were in the north. And with it would come political power. Matching the industrialization of the north was an impossibility in 1855, and the south would not really industrialize until the advent of air conditioning a century later.

Perceptive southerners realized that Secession was the only way they could maintain their political and social system, and the window of opportunity was closing.