Today brings yet another stamp marking an historic milestone that relates (in less-than-visible -ways) to this week’s horrific events.

In this case it’s a 3-cent stamp issued on May 31, 1954 to mark the 100-year anniversary of the creation of the Kansas Territory. Acquired by the US in 1903 as part of the Louisiana Purchase, the Kansas Territory became a flashpoint in the mid-19th century tensions about whether and where slavery would be allowed as the United States grew.

Here’s a quick primer: Under the Missouri Compromise of 1820, slavery was banned in the so-called “Unorganized Territory,” the land to the west and northwest of the new slave state of Missouri. Located just west of Missouri, the land that would become Kansas Territory, lacked trees, was dryer than land to the east, and was considered to be so infertile that it was sometimes called the Great American. Technically, it was part of the vast grasslands that make up the North American Great Plains and supported giant herds of American bison. After the invention of the steel plow and more sophisticated irrigation methods, the thick prairie soil could be broken for agriculture and there was growing pressure to make it a named territory and provide for a more formal governance structure that would facilitate its growth and possible admittance as a state. In addition, there was growing pressure to provide public support (such as land grants) that would spur construction of a privately-built railroad that, presumably, would expand markets for produce from the new lands.

However, all these changes required Congressional authorization. And key senators and representatives from slaveholding states refused to do so unless the law was changed to allow slavery in the areas that would be served and made more attractive by the new rail lines. Senator Stephen A. Douglass, an Illinois Democrat who was a strong backer of the rail plans, brokered a compromise. To win the support of key Southerners he agreed to back the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, with the status of slavery instead decided on the basis of “popular sovereignty” in Kansas and Nebraska, two new territories in the unorganized territory. In this approach, the citizens of each territory, rather than Congress, would determine whether or not slavery would be allowed. The bill, which easily passed the Senate and narrowly passed the House, was signed into law by President Franklin Pierce, on May 31, 1854.

After the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed, pro-slavery and anti-slavery supporters rushed in to settle Kansas to affect the outcome of the first election held there after the law went into effect. Pro-slavery settlers carried the election but were charged with fraud by anti-slavery settlers, who refused to accept the election results. The anti-slavery settlers held another election, however pro-slavery settlers refused to vote. Instead, the warring forces established of two opposing legislatures within the Kansas territory. The disputes were increasingly violent spurred in part by the activities of abolitionist John Brown and, as the death toll rose, the territory earned the nickname “bleeding Kansas.” President Franklin Pierce, in support of the pro-slavery settlers, sent in Federal troops to stop the violence and disperse the anti-slavery legislature. Another election was called. Once again pro-slavery supporters won and once again they were charged with election fraud. And Congress refused to recognize the constitution adopted by the pro-slavery settlers and Kansas was not allowed to become a state.

Disagreement with the new law and the growing violence also led to the formation of the new anti-slavery Republican Party whose recruits included Abraham Lincoln, a former one-term Congressman who unsuccessfully challenged Douglass for the Illinois senate seat in 1858 before defeating Douglass, and two others, in the 1860 presidential election. For its part, Kansas was admitted to the Union as a free state in 1861, after southern senators and representatives had left Congress because their states had seceded from the Union.

So the stamp marks a key milestone in the long national debates about slavery and, by extension, race, debates that I don’t have to say, are amazing resonant this week. And the history is a sad tale of a society’s inability to come to terms with a fundamentally evil institution and the extent to which people can—and will go—to defend their economic and psychological dependence on such an institution.

Of course the stamp itself doesn’t portray any of this bitter history. (And I’m sure they weren’t on my father’s mind when he sent away for the first-day cover for this stamp from his garden apartment in Stamford CT where he was living with his wife and two young children.) Rather, it merely depicts a field of wheat and a set of farm buildings in the foreground, with a wagon train of pioneers in light silhouette forming the background. Not a word of the racial tensions, violent history, and deep seated differences that continue to fester. But they are there, hidden in the background, out of sight but still very present.

Be healthy and stay well.