Kansas‐Nebraska Act

Kansas‐Nebraska Act (1854).The 1840s brought a rising tide of foreign immigrants and internal migrants to the trans‐Mississippi West, generating interest in promoting orderly settlement of the Great Plains. However, the Mexican Cession of 1848 became the focus of fierce sectional debates over the spread of slavery. Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois played a crucial role in congressional adoption of the Compromise of 1850, which implicitly opened new southwestern territories to slavery on the principle of “congressional nonintervention” and “popular sovereignty,” whereby the people of a territory, like those of a state, would decide the issue for themselves. To Douglas and his Democratic party, this principle was superior to the 1820 Missouri Compromise's federal dictate that slavery could not exist in the Louisiana Purchase territory north of the 36°30′ line of latitude. Extending “popular sovereignty” to the still unorganized northern portion of the Louisiana Purchase, they believed, would represent a victory for local self‐government; further, it would promote national political unity and economic development by securing the Democratic party against the threat of sectional fracture and by expediting settlement and railroad construction on the Great Plains.

Hence, in January 1854, Senator Douglas's Committee on Territories reported a “Nebraska Bill” that, with subsequent amendments, became the Kansas‐Nebraska Act. Bowing to pressure from his party's powerful southern wing, but fully expecting that climate would exclude slavery from the Great Plains, Douglas agreed that the act should explicitly repeal the Missouri Compromise line and provide for the organization of two territories, Kansas and Nebraska. The bill passed the Senate by a vote of 37–14 and the House of Representatives by a much closer vote of 113–100, with northern Democrats evenly split. President Franklin Pierce signed it into law on 30 May. Douglas hoped that the Kansas‐Nebraska Act would settle the slavery issue in the territories, coalesce national Democratic support for “popular sovereignty,” and further his presidential aspirations. In reality, the law triggered a violent struggle in Kansas between pro‐ and antislavery forces; deepened antislavery sentiment in the North; and set the stage for a new Republican party opposed to the expansion of slavery, whose 1860 presidential nominee, Abraham Lincoln, frustrated Douglas's bid for the White House.
See also Antebellum Era; Brown, John; Civil War: Causes.

Bibliography

Michael A. Morrison , Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War, 1997.

Shearer Davis Bowman