Before it became the Kansas capital, Topeka was the seat of a free-state government, an alternative to the official proslavery territorial legislature elected in 1855. These two bodies represented opposing factions in Kansas’ battle over slavery. Antislavery Kansans refused to recognize the official legislature because the elections had been heavily tainted by fraud: thousands of residents from proslavery Missouri crossed the border to cast illegal ballots in Kansas. The antislavery faction elected its own delegates in 1855 to draw up a state constitution. To prevent the situation from devolving into all-out civil war, President Franklin Pierce ordered federal troops to march into Topeka in July 1856 and shut down the free-state government. But the city remained a hotbed of antislavery agitation. When Kansas finally gained admission to the Union in 1861 as a free state, Topeka became the lawful capital. Topeka was also the birthplace of U.S. Vice President Charles Curtis (b.1860). Curtis was the first American Indian and the first Kansan to hold the office.
