Kansas and Missouri are two bordering U.S. states with a long and tumultuous history. The relationship between these two states has its roots in Bleeding Kansas, but mutual distrust has continued off and on since then, even in sporting contexts.[1] These states also share the Kansas City metropolitan area, where both states each have a city named Kansas City on either side of the Missouri River.
Missouri was formed out of the Missouri Territory as a slave state during the early 19th century in 1821. Northern states wanting to slow the westward spread of slavery released the Missouri Compromise with southern states keeping slavery legal. This compromise ensured that any state newly formed directly west of Missouri would be a free state where slavery would be illegal.
In 1854, Congress passed the Kansas–Nebraska Act that allowed the territory's residents to vote on whether slavery would be allowed.[2] This act repealed the Missouri Compromise and spurred interest in the territory. Both pro-slavery and anti-slavery boosters flooded into Kansas, but due to the state's proximity to Missouri, most were pro-slavery men from Missouri. They successfully stacked the vote to form a temporary pro-slavery government prior to statehood. These tensions led to Bleeding Kansas and the Kansas-Missouri border wars, a violent and bloody civil war that would foreshadow the much larger American Civil War.
Though Missouri was in the Union during the Civil War, "most of its population was pro-slavery". Forty years after Missouri statehood, in 1861, Kansas was admitted as a state of the Union, a free state, as the abolitionists had won in Kansas, as the larger Civil War had begun.
The violence and war deeply harmed the relationship between the two areas, even after Kansas attained statehood and the war had ended. Violence and guerrilla warfare continued for several years thereafter until the American Civil War ended in 1865, with many unjust killings and lootings performed by partisans on either side of the border.[3]
The bitterness sown during Bleeding Kansas lingers in the Border War between the University of Kansas and the University of Missouri.[4] The two states compete economically, mainly at the border which is also called a Border War.[5] In 2019, the governors of the two states signed an agreement to stop offering financial incentives to pull business across the border.[6] In 2022, the governor of Kansas said that agreement did not include enticement of the Chiefs football team moving its arena from Missouri to Kansas.[7]