Explanation: During the years of ‘Bleeding Kansas’, pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces fought a series of vigilante actions against one another as part of a broader struggle over slavery in the pre-Civil War USA. One major antislavery figure - John Brown - committed a particularly famous (or infamous) killing of supporters of the fraudulent pro-slavery state government after ambushing them in their homes late at night, and then hacking them to bits with broadswords.

He would later go on to even greater fame in leading a (sadly failed) attempt at sparking a slave uprising just before the US Civil War, which inflamed tensions with the pro-slavery South and made him a martyr to the anti-slavery North.