Most great college sports rivalries emerge from memorable moments on the field, coaching feuds or recruiting battles, but the annual football game between the Kansas Jayhawks and the Missouri Tigers, to be played tomorrow night in Kansas City, Mo., with unusually high import, taps into a mutual animosity born of a flashpoint in American history.

Two programs not known for being football powers, Kansas (11-0, 7-0) and Missouri (10-1, 6-1) are vying for a berth in the Big 12 Conference title game next weekend and then a possible spot in the Bowl Championship Series title game. Kansas is No. 2 in the B.C.S. standings; Missouri is fourth.

But before there were football teams, there was hatred and bloodshed along the border between Missouri and Kansas. From 1854 until the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, “Bleeding Kansas” lay at the heart of the United States’ crisis over slavery. Nearly 200 people died in what was itself a civil war.

Many in Missouri, a slave state, were unwilling to allow the newly organized territory of Kansas to prohibit slavery without a fight. They crossed the border, first to vote, and then to sack, burn and kill to determine the fate of Kansas.

In 1855, Missourians crossed the border in droves to vote in the first Kansas election, and 6,000 votes were somehow cast by a total voting population of 2,905 to elect a proslavery government. New Englanders opposed to slavery organized to send settlers, money and guns to the antislavery residents there. Amos Lawrence, a New England textile magnate whose name was given to the city where the University of Kansas now stands, helped ship hundreds of rifles to aid the fight against the “border ruffians” from Missouri and the proslavery settlers in Kansas.

Kansas and Missouri have been rivals since the states did battle over slavery in the 1850s. Credit L. G. Patterson/Associated Press

It did not take long for violence to erupt. On May 21, 1856, parts of Lawrence were destroyed when Missourians marched on the town with five cannons in tow. A day later, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was beaten almost to death on the floor of the United States Senate by a Southern congressman upset by Sumner’s speech, “The Crime Against Kansas.” A week later, John Brown and several abolitionists hacked five proslavery Kansans to death with swords.

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The nation was watching, and it turned into outright war. Through much of the summer and fall of 1856, armies of Missourians and Kansans marched across eastern Kansas, meeting in battles like Black Jack and Osawatomie that captivated the nation. Dozens died in the fighting.

One of the great paradoxes of the Missouri-Kansas conflict was how little its outcome actually mattered. It was a local contest between rival factions whose victories and defeats mattered far less than the national propaganda war, a news media circus complete with heroes, villains and conspiracies. The image of “Bleeding Kansas” captivated a nation uneasy about its own future. It was an image that would help put Abraham Lincoln in the White House, and one that would help rally a nation to wage war.

Relative peace was restored in Kansas by the beginning of 1857. But when the Civil War broke out in 1861, many in Kansas sought revenge, sending regiments into Missouri to plunder and to liberate slaves in the name of putting down the rebellion. The most notorious group called itself the Jayhawkers, a name echoed in Kansas’ mascot, a blue and red Jayhawk. The Confederate guerrilla William Quantrill responded by bringing a force from Missouri to destroy Lawrence in 1863, and more than 150 residents were killed. The animosity showed no signs of fading.

The next generation found other means of resolving any lingering bitterness. In 1891, about 3,000 people attended the first Missouri-Kansas football game, at Exposition Park in Kansas City. In 1896, the Missouri student John Burnham wrote in the university’s yearbook that “Missouri and Kansas are rivals in so many things that each would rather defeat the other than gain victories over all the rest of the world.”

This year, the winner may get both. Tomorrow’s victor could soon be the national champion.

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