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Kansas-Nebraska Act

 
US Military Dictionary: Kansas-Nebraska Act
 
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A bill creating the states of Kansas and Nebraska and allowing popular sovereignty in the territory. Passed on May 30, 1854, it was proposed by Illinois Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas in an attempt to gain support from southern senators for his organization of the territory. It annulled the prohibition against slavery north of 36°-30′ that was passed in the Missouri Compromise.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Kansas-Nebraska Act
 
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(1854) Legislation that organized the territories of Kansas and Nebraska according to the doctrine of popular sovereignty. Introduced by Sen. Stephen A. Douglas to stop the sectional division over slavery, the act was criticized by antislavery groups as a capitulation to proslavery advocates. Groups on both sides rushed to settle Kansas Territory with their adherents, leading to the chaotic Bleeding Kansas period. Passage of the act led to the formation of the Republican Party as a political organization opposed to the expansion of slavery to any U.S. territory.

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US History Encyclopedia: Kansas-Nebraska Act
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Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 organized the northern Great Plains into the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. It also repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had prohibited slavery's expansion into the territories northwest of the border between the states of Arkansas and Missouri. Under the terms of the act, the residents of the Kansas and Nebraska territories would decide for themselves whether they would enter the Union as free or slave soil states. By repealing the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska Act reopened the divisive issue of slavery's expansion and brought the United States closer to civil war.

After the passing of the Compromise of 1850, which settled the slavery issue in New Mexico and Utah, many Americans hoped that further controversy over slavery would be avoided. But it soon arose again, largely because of plans for building a transcontinental railroad to the Pacific coast. Because the settlement of the western territories depended upon the construction of a transcontinental railroad, the railroad's location took on tremendous importance. Naturally, northern congressmen advocated a northern route, while southern congressmen supported a southern route. The sectional debate over the railroad's path threatened to block its construction, until Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois entered the fray. An ardent supporter of western expansion and a tireless promoter of the Midwest's development, Douglas understood that a transcontinental railroad was indispensable for that region's political and economic future. Douglas also realized that if the transcontinental railroad took a northern route, Chicago would most likely serve as its eastern terminus. The resulting political and economic benefits that would accrue to Douglas's home state of Illinois were obvious. But Douglas also had national interests in mind. He genuinely believed that a populous and prosperous Midwest would be able to mediate sectional conflicts between North and South, and thus would promote sectional harmony and national unity.

Douglas recognized, however, that a transcontinental railroad running from Chicago to San Francisco would be possible only after the settlement of the vast midwestern lands between the Rocky Mountains and the Missouri River. Douglas thus introduced a bill to organize the land into the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, a move he believed would encourage settlers to migrate into the northern Great Plains.

In his effort to secure support for the Kansas-Nebraska bill, Douglas found an important ally in Missouri's influential senator, David R. Atchison, who was seeking reelection in 1854. Atchison's reelection campaign pitted him against Senator Thomas Hart Benton, a prominent opponent of slavery's westward expansion. Unlike Benton, Atchison was a staunch supporter of slavery's expansion, and he saw in the Kansas-Nebraska bill an opportunity to expand slavery's domain. Atchison promised Douglas that he would support the creation and settlement of the Kansas and Nebraska territories, but with one critical condition. He insisted that the Missouri Compromise be repealed so that his slaveholding constituents would be allowed to move into the new Kansas and Nebraska territories with their human property.

In an effort to mollify Atchison's concerns, Douglas introduced a bill for the territorial organization of Kansas and Nebraska, a bill that included a provision that effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise. The bill asserted that the Compromise of 1850 had superseded the 1820 principle that slavery would not be extended north and west of the Arkansas-Missouri state border. The bill also stated that the question of slavery in the territories should be settled by the people living in them, an idea known as Popular Sovereignty.

This language conveniently favored Atchison in his senatorial campaign, for it confronted his opponent, Thomas Hart Benton, with a difficult dilemma. If Benton voted for the bill, he would betray his antislavery sympathies; but if he voted against it, he would be defaulting on his promise to work for expansion into Kansas and Nebraska. He voted against the bill and suffered defeat in the race with Atchison. The final bill explicitly repealed the Missouri Compromise, and the possibility of slavery in the new territories was made real.

The political ramifications of the enactment of the Kansas-Nebraska bill reached deeply into the general political climate in which it was passed. Support for it from southern members of Congress was nearly unanimous. Northern Democrats were seriously split, half of their votes in the House going for the measure and half against it. Nearly all northern Whigs opposed the bill.

This severe political division fractured the structure of the political party system. The Whig Party was essentially destroyed in the South. The Democrats were so seriously divided that their tenuous congressional majority became highly vulnerable. A coalition of anti-Nebraska Democrats, northern Whigs, Know-Nothings, and nativist groups joined the newly organized Republican Party, making it a viable political force. By 1856 the Whigs had all but disappeared, and the Republican Party was able to confront the weakened Democrats with strong opposition.

In addition to these basic political changes, the Kansas-Nebraska Act had direct ramifications. Kansas and Nebraska were promptly opened for settlement in 1854. Although Nebraska remained relatively quiet, Kansas, the destination of most of the new settlers, became a political hotbed. Settlers came to Kansas not only to develop the frontier but also—and perhaps more importantly—to lend their weight in the determination of whether Kansas would be free or slave.

Almost from the outset, political stability was lacking in Kansas. From the South, proslavery Missourians traveled into Kansas to vote in favor of slavery, often arriving in armed bands. Groups in the North and East, such as the Emigrant Aid Company, helped so large a number of antislavery settlers move into the territory that it was generally thought that an honest referendum of actual settlers would not permit slavery in Kansas. But Missouri raiders entering the territory in great numbers made an honest count impossible. In 1855 a proslavery territorial legislature was established in the town of Lecompton, Kansas, while at the same time an antislavery legislature was established in Topeka. Almost inevitably, civil war erupted in Kansas as proslavery and antislavery forces clashed for control of the territory. Although bloody, the conflict remained inconclusive until the 1860s, when Kansas was finally admitted to the Union as a free soil state.

The violence and political chaos in Kansas not only presaged the Civil War but also helped to trigger it. In 1857 the proslavery territorial government in Lecompton presented to Congress a constitution that would have incorporated Kansas into the Union as a slave state. Chastened by the disastrous failure of his Kansas-Nebraska Act, Stephen Douglas led congressional opposition to the Lecompton constitution. Douglas and a diverse coalition of northern political factions in Congress narrowly managed to defeat Kansas's proposed admission to the Union as a slave state. The divisive battle over Lecompton, however, shattered the unity of the national Democratic Party, which in 1860 would divide into northern and southern wings. The collapse of the Democratic Party, the one remaining national party, set the stage for southern secession in 1860.

Bibliography

Gienapp, William E. The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Holt, Michael F. The Political Crisis of the 1850s. New York: Wiley, 1978.

———. The Rise and Fall of the Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Malin, James C. The Nebraska Question, 1852–1854. Lawrence, Kans.: The author, 1953.

Potter, David M. The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861. New York: Harper and Row, 1976.

Rawley, James A. Race and Politics: "Bleeding Kansas" and the Coming of the Civil War. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1969.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Kansas-Nebraska Act
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Kansas-Nebraska Act, bill that became law on May 30, 1854, by which the U.S. Congress established the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. By 1854 the organization of the vast Platte and Kansas river countries W of Iowa and Missouri was overdue. As an isolated issue territorial organization of this area was no problem. It was, however, irrevocably bound to the bitter sectional controversy over the extension of slavery into the territories and was further complicated by conflict over the location of the projected transcontinental railroad. Under no circumstances did proslavery Congressmen want a free territory (Kansas) W of Missouri. Because the West was expanding rapidly, territorial organization, despite these difficulties, could no longer be postponed. Four attempts to organize a single territory for this area had already been defeated in Congress, largely because of Southern opposition to the Missouri Compromise. Although the last of these attempts to organize the area had nearly been successful, Stephen A. Douglas, chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, decided to offer territorial legislation making concessions to the South. Douglas's motives have remained largely a matter of speculation. Various historians have emphasized Douglas's desire for the Presidency, his wish to cement the bonds of the Democratic party, his interest in expansion and railroad building, or his desire to activate the unimpressive Pierce administration. The bill he reported in Jan., 1854, contained the provision that the question of slavery should be left to the decision of the territorial settlers themselves. This was the famous principle that Douglas now called popular sovereignty, though actually it had been enunciated four years earlier in the Compromise of 1850. In its final form Douglas's bill provided for the creation of two new territories—Kansas and Nebraska—instead of one. The obvious inference—at least to Missourians—was that the first would be slave, the second free. The Kansas-Nebraska Act flatly contradicted the provisions of the Missouri Compromise (under which slavery would have been barred from both territories); indeed, an amendment was added specifically repealing that compromise. This aspect of the bill in particular enraged the antislavery forces, but after three months of bitter debate in Congress, Douglas, backed by President Pierce and the Southerners, saw it adopted. Its effects were anything but reassuring to those who had hoped for a peaceful solution. The popular sovereignty provision caused both proslavery and antislavery forces to marshal strength and exert full pressure to determine the “popular” decision in Kansas in their own favor, using groups such as the Emigrant Aid Company. The result was the tragedy of “bleeding” Kansas. Northerners and Southerners were aroused to such passions that sectional division reached a point that precluded reconciliation. A new political organization, the Republican party, was founded by opponents of the bill, and the United States was propelled toward the Civil War.

Bibliography

See P. O. Ray, The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise (1909, repr. 1965).

 
Law Encyclopedia: Kansas-Nebraska Act
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This entry contains information applicable to United States law only.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 (10 Stat. 277) was a significant piece of legislation because it dealt with several controversial issues, including slavery, western expansion, and the construction of a transcontinental railroad.

Slavery was a widely debated divisive issue for many years preceding the Civil War and there were several attempts at conciliation. The first of these was the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (3 Stat. 545), which decided the slavery question in regard to the creation of two new states, Missouri and Maine. The compromise declared that Maine was to be admitted as a free state, while Missouri was allowed to enter the Union with no restrictions regarding slavery. Subsequently, however, Missouri entered as a slave state. The compromise also prohibited the extension of slavery north of the 36°30` latitude which established the southern border of Missouri.

The Compromise of 1850 (9 Stat. 452) settled another controversy concerning slavery and instituted the doctrine of popular sovereignty, which permitted the residents of the area to decide the question. When Texas and other new territories were acquired as a result of the Mexican War in 1848, and California sought admission to the Union in 1849, the question again arose concerning the slave status of the new areas. The Compromise of 1850 provided that California be admitted as a free state and that the citizens of the new territories of New Mexico and Utah decide whether their states favored or opposed slavery, pursuant to the doctrine of popular sovereignty.

In 1854, the Kansas and Nebraska territories were the next areas subjected to a dispute over slavery. Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois drafted a bill calling for the creation of two states, Kansas and Nebraska, areas he felt were vital to the construction of a railroad to the Pacific coast. The question of slavery in these states would be decided by popular sovereignty. The reasons for Douglas's excessive concern are speculative but include his support of western expansion and his belief that the popular sovereignty doctrine would cause the least dispute; his hope that his business interests would profit by the construction of a transcontinental railroad with a Chicago terminus and a route through the new territories; and his desire to gain favor in the South to garner support for his future presidential aspirations.

In order for the Kansas-Nebraska Act to be effective, it was necessary to repeal the Missouri Compromise and its boundary restrictions on the territorial extension of slavery. The new act was opposed by antislavery forces and subject to bitter dispute in Congress. President Franklin Pierce and a faction of Southern congressmen supported the bill and influenced its passage.

The provisions of the Kansas-Nebraska Act did not lead to the peaceful settlement of the issue as intended. In Kansas, the antislavery and proslavery proponents disagreed violently, undermining the effectiveness of the popular sovereignty doctrine. Two opposing governments were established, and acts of destruction and violence ensued, including an assault on the antislavery town of Lawrence. In retaliation, abolitionist John Brown and his followers killed five settlers who advocated slavery. The phrase Bleeding Kansas was derived from this violence.

The Lecompton Constitution of 1857 was drafted based upon the results of a Kansas election that offered the voters the choice of limited or unlimited slavery. This angered the abolitionists, who refused to vote. President James Buchanan approved the Lecompton Constitution and encouraged its acceptance by Congress, but Douglas and his supporters vehemently opposed the admission of Kansas as a slave state. Another election was held in 1858, and the people of Kansas voted against the Lecompton document; three years later, Kansas entered the Union as a free state.

See: railroad.

 
Act of Congress:

Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854

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Excerpt from the Kansas Nebraska Act of 1954

That the Constitution, and all Laws of the United States which are not locally inapplica ble, shall have the same force and effect within the said Territory of Nebraska as else where within the United States, except the eighth section of the act preparatory to the admission of Missouri into the Union ... which, being inconsistent with the principle of non-intervention by Congress with slavery in the States and territories, as recognized by the legislation of eighteen hundred and fifty,..., is hereby declared inoperative and void; it being the true intent and meaning of this act not to legislate slavery into any Territory or State, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way....

Each year Congress passes thousands of laws, but only a few truly shape the course of national life. One such law was the Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854 (10 Stat. 282). This act produced terrible consequences and perhaps deserves the title of the most ill-conceived and wretched piece of congressional handiwork in the nation's history. More than any other single action, this law put the United States on the path to Civil War.

The Kansas Nebraska Act was the consequence of three forces: the spirit of Manifest Destiny, the conflict between Northern and Southern states over slavery's expansion into the Western territories acquired after the Mexican War, and the expansionist visions of Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas.

Slavery and the Western Territories

From 1846 to 1850, Congress had wrestled with the question of slavery's expansion into the Western territories and finally devised a somewhat unsatisfactory solution in the Compromise of 1850. The previous Missouri Compromise of 1820 had established a line (at 36 degrees 30 minutes) below which slavery was permitted and above which it was prohibited. The Compromise of 1850 did not extend that line to the Pacific Ocean. Instead, California was to enter as a free state and, in terms the compromise left very vague, settlers in the other territory acquired from Mexico would decide for themselves whether to establish slavery.

Senator Stephen Douglas, one of the strong men of the Democratic Party and the outstanding leader in the Great Lakes region, was an ardent expansionist who desired to turn the territories between Iowa and California into states. He sought statehood for this area partly because he wanted a transcontinental railroad to San Francisco to originate from Chicago rather than from a rival city (such as St. Louis or New Orleans). No railroad could be built unless the lands of the West were on their way toward statehood, because only then would law enforcement be brought to the region.

Douglas immediately ran into Southern opposition concerning the organization of areas beyond Iowa and Missouri into territories. Still smarting from the debates over the Compromise of 1850, Southerners wanted assurance that slave property would be looked upon as any other type of property. In 1853 Douglas tried to organize the territory of Nebraska and was bluntly told by Senator David Atchison of Missouri that the South would never support such an organization as long as the 36 degree 30 minute line of the Missouri Compromise prohibited slavery in the Nebraska region. The Missouri Compromise marked out slave property as different from ordinary property and therefore subject to different rules. For many Southerners, after the political crisis from 1846 to 1850, this discrimination (as they saw it) against slave property was no longer acceptable.

Congressional Controversy

A frustrated Douglas was determined to set the land between Iowa and the Rocky Mountains on the path to eventual statehood. As chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories in the first session of the Thirty-Third Congress, he proposed to organize the Territory of Nebraska and let the question of slavery be settled at its eventual constitutional convention. This proposal did not satisfy Southerners. Kentucky Senator Archibold Dixon of the Whig Party offered an amendment that specifically repealed the Missouri Compromise line of 36 degrees 30 minutes. Douglas took his bill back into committee and consulted with his peers. He then came back to the Senate on January 23, 1854, with a new bill that repealed the Missouri Compromise line and divided the land into the new territory of Kansas and Nebraska.

The critical question of slavery was to be settled by the settlers themselves, by the doctrine of popular sovereignty. This concept was devised by Michigan Senator Lewis Cass in December 1847 and then picked up by the Democrats in the presidential election of 1848. The act stated that its intent was "to leave the people [of Kansas and Nebraska] perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way." Popular sovereignty became the grand touchstone of truth for Douglas thereafter, and the rest of his life (he died in April 1861) was devoted to championing its righteousness.

Douglas's new bill tore Congress into battling halves and eventually destroyed the Whig-Democrat two-party system that had ruled the nation since the 1830s. Douglas and many of the Northern Democrats adopted popular sovereignty and insisted on its validity in overcoming arguments about slavery.

In effect they agreed that the Missouri Compromise line demeaned Southerners. Southerners agreed about the injustice done to them by the Missouri Compromise but hesitated to accept popular sovereignty, for they believed that settlers could not determine the existence of slavery at any time other than when they framed their state constitutions.

Northern Whigs and many Northern Democrats exploded in wrath at the repeal of the venerable Compromise of 1820. For them, the Missouri Compromise had virtually become a part of the Constitution. What possible reason could there be to repeal the compromise line—especially at a moment when there was no public agitation about slavery—except to allow Southerners to expand slavery into places where it had been prohibited? The aristrocratic slaveholders of the South were called the "Slave Power." Northern congressional leaders feared that the Slave Power had become aggressive, intending to gain more slave states, would overwhelm Congress with slave-state representatives and senators, destroy civil liberties, convert free states into slave states, enslave all workingmen regardless of color, and transform the United States from a republic into a slaveholding despotism.

The debate over the bill raged for three months. President Franklin Pierce applied pressure on Northern Democrats to accept it, and on May 22, 1854, the House passed the Kansas Nebraska Act (the Senate had passed it on March 3). Pierce signed the bill into law on May 30.

A Disastrous Miscalculation

No congressional member had so badly miscalculated the consequences of his actions as had Douglas. He believed that, besides getting a transcontinental railroad terminating in Chicago, he had removed the slavery issue from national life. By putting discussion of slavery in the hands of settlers and taking it away from members of Congress, Douglas believed, as did many others, that the national agitation over slavery's expansion would cease. This prediction was proven miserably wrong. Many Northerners fiercely resisted any possibility of slavery's extension into the Louisiana Purchase area or in the states of Wisconsin and Michigan, and out of the ashes of the Whig Party soon rose the Republican Party. In the congressional elections of 1854, the Democratic Party suffered the greatest defeat in its history. At the beginning of Congress in December 1853, Northern Democrats had ninety-one members; after the elections of 1854, they had twenty-five. Only seven out of forty-four Northern Democrats who had voted for the Kansas Nebraska Act were reelected. It took the Northern Democrats twenty years to recover from this disaster.

Bleeding Kansas

Kansas territory became a running sore on the national political body that only inflamed hostility between North and South. Northerners who advocated a free state, known as "free soilers," streamed into Kansas Territory, only to be met by proslavery Southerners and Missourians. These Missourians were called "Border Ruffians" because they lived in Missouri but then traveled to Kansas to vote illegally in Kansas elections. By 1856 the controversy between these two factions was so intense as to be called "Bleeding Kansas." Two rival legislatures existed, one in Topeka (the free soil capital) and one in Lecompton (the proslavery capital). By fraudulent election tactics, the proslavery faction took over the territorial legislature and wrote a constitution making Kansas a slave state. This constitution was then ratified under fraudulent conditions by a vote of the settlers, with most free soilers abstaining.

Douglas considered the actions of the proslavery faction in Kansas a perversion of the doctrine of popular sovereignty, so he refused to vote for it and joined the Republicans in opposition. The Lecompton Constitution was rejected by Congress in 1858, making Southern leaders furious at Douglas. Meanwhile, all this deceitful activity designed to make Kansas a slave state convinced a majority of Northerners that a Slave Power did in fact intend to convert the United States into a slaveholding despotism. In response, the power of the Republican Party swelled. In the election of 1860, the Democratic Party, polarized by the Kansas Nebraska Act, broke into Northern and Southern fragments, enabling the Republicans to stride to victory.

Civil War

With the Republicans controlling the federal government and because of their evident dislike of slavery, Southerners in the plantation states (Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas) decided to leave the Union. The stage was set for the Civil War. Other events probably would have triggered the reactions which led to secession and civil war, for the antagonism of Northern society to slavery was not simply going to vanish. But in the actual chain of events, the Kansas Nebraska Act stands out as the one that precipitated armed conflict between North and South.

Bibliography

Gara, Larry. The Presidency of Franklin Pierce. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991.

Gates, Paul Wallace. Fifty Million Acres: Conflicts over Kansas Land Policy, 1854–1890. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1954.

Holt, Michael F. The Political Crisis of the 1850s. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978.

Johannsen, Robert W. Stephen A. Douglas. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

McPherson, James M. Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction, 2d ed. New York: Knopf, 1992.

Potter, David M. The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861. Completed and edited by Don. E. Fehrenbacher. New York: Harper and Row, 1976.

 
History Dictionary: Kansas-Nebraska Act
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A law passed by Congress in 1854 that divided the territory west of the states of Missouri and Iowa and the territory of Minnesota into two new territories, Kansas and Nebraska. The law was extremely controversial because it did not exclude slavery from either territory, despite the fact that the Missouri Compromise prohibited slavery in these territories. By effectively repealing the Missouri Compromise, the law outraged many northerners, led to the collapse of the Whig party and the rise of the Republican party, and moved the nation closer to civil war.

 
Wikipedia: Kansas-Nebraska Act
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This 1856 map shows slave states (gray), free states (pink), and US territories (green) with Kansas in center (white).

In United States history, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, opened new lands, repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and allowed settlers in those territories to determine if they would allow slavery within their boundaries. The initial purpose of the Kansas-Nebraska Act was to create opportunities for a Mideastern Transcontinental Railroad. It was not problematic until popular sovereignty was written into the proposal. The act was designed by Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois.

The act established that settlers could vote to decide whether to allow slavery, in the name of popular sovereignty or rule of the people. Douglas hoped it would ease relations between the North and the South, because the South could expand slavery to new territories but the North still had the right to abolish slavery in their states. Instead, opponents denounced the law as a concession to the slave power of the South. The new Republican Party, which was created in opposition to the act, aimed to stop the expansion of slavery, and soon emerged as the dominant force throughout the North.

Contents

Background

Since early in the 1840s the topic of a transcontinental railroad had been discussed. While there were debates over the specifics, especially the route to be taken, there was a public consensus that such a railroad should be built by private interests financed by public land grants. In 1845 Stephen Douglas, serving in his first term in the United States House of Representatives, submitted an unsuccessful plan to formally organize the Nebraska Territory as the first step in building a railroad with its eastern terminal in Chicago. Railroad proposals would be submitted and debated in all subsequent sessions of Congress with cities such as Chicago, St. Louis, Quincy, Memphis, and New Orleans competing to be the jumping off point for the construction.[1]

Events leading to
the US Civil War
Northwest Ordinance
Missouri Compromise
Tariff of 1828
Nullification Crisis
Nat Turner's slave rebellion
The Amistad
Mexican American War
Wilmot Proviso
Manifest Destiny
Compromise of 1850
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Kansas-Nebraska Act
Bleeding Kansas
Dred Scott v. Sandford
Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry
Election of 1860
Secession of Southern States
Battle of Fort Sumter
Underground railroad
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Several proposals in late 1852 and early 1853 had strong support, but in the end they failed because of disputes over whether the railroad would follow a northern or a southern route. In early 1853 the House of Representatives passed a bill by an 107 to 49 vote that organized the Nebraska Territory in land west of Iowa and Missouri. In March the bill moved to the Senate Committee on Territories which was now headed by Senator Douglas. Missouri Senator David Atchison announced that he would support the Nebraska proposal only if slaveholders were not banned from the new territory. While the bill was silent on this issue, slavery would have been prohibited under the terms of the Missouri Compromise. Other southern senators were not as flexible as Atchison. By a vote of 23 to 17 the Senate voted to table the motion with every senator from states south of Missouri voting for the tabling.[2]

During the Senate adjournment, the issues of the railroad and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise became entangled in Missouri politics as Atchison campaigned for reelection against the forces of Thomas Hart Benton. Atchison was maneuvered into choosing between antagonizing the state railroad interests or the state slaveholders. Finally Atchison took the position that he would rather see Nebraska “sink in hell” before he would allow it to be overrun by free-soilers[3].

In this era, congressmen generally found lodging in boarding houses when they were in the nation’s capital performing their legislative duties. Atchison shared lodgings on an F Street house shared by the leading southerners in Congress. Atchison himself was the Senate’s president pro tempore, and his housemates included Robert T. Hunter (chairman of the Finance Committee from Virginia), James Mason (chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee from Virginia), and Andrew P. Butler (chairman of the Judiciary Committee from South Carolina). When Congress reconvened on December 5, 1853, this group, termed the “F Street Mess”, along with Virginian William O. Goode, formed the nucleus that would insist on slaveholder equality in Nebraska. Douglas was aware of their opinions and their power and knew that he needed to address their concerns.[4]

Iowa’s Senator Augustus C. Dodge immediately reintroduced the same legislation to organize Nebraska that had stalled in the previous session, and it was referred to Douglas’ committee on December 14. Douglas, hoping to achieve the support of the southerners, publicly announced that the same principle that had been established in the Compromise of 1850 should apply in Nebraska. In the Compromise of 1850, Utah and New Mexico Territory had been organized without any restrictions on slavery, and many supporters of Douglas argued that this compromise had already superseded the Missouri Compromise. [5] These territories, however, unlike Nebraska, had never been part of the Louisiana Purchase and had never been subject to the Missouri Compromise.

Congressional action

Introduction of the Nebraska bill

Stephen A. Douglas -- "The great principle of self government is at stake, and surely the people of this country are never going to decide that the principle upon which our whole republican system rests is vicious and wrong."[6]

The bill was reported to the main body of the Senate on January 4, 1854. The bill had been significantly modified by Douglas, who had also authored the New Mexico and Utah territorial acts, to mirror the language from the Compromise of 1850. In the new bill the territory of Nebraska was extended north all the way to the forty-ninth parallel, and any decisions on slavery were to be made "when admitted as a state or states, the said territory, or any portion of the same, shall be received into the Union, with or without slavery, as their constitution may prescribe at the time of their admission."[7] In a report accompanying the bill, Douglas’s committee wrote that the intent of the Utah and New Mexico acts:

...were intended to have a far more comprehensive and enduring effect than the mere adjustment of the difficulties arising out of the recent acquisition of Mexican territory. They were designed to establish certain great principles, which would not only furnish adequate remedies for existing evils, but, in all time to come, avoid the perils of a similar agitation, by withdrawing the question of slavery from the halls of Congress and the political arena, and committing it to the arbitrament of those who were immediately interested in, and alone responsible for its consequences.[8]

The report compared the situation in New Mexico and Utah with the situation in Nebraska. In the first instance, many had argued that slavery had previously been prohibited under Mexican law just as it was prohibited in Nebraska under the Missouri Compromise. Just as the creation of New Mexico and Utah territories had not ruled on the validity of Mexican law on the acquired territory, the Nebraska bill was neither "affirming or repealing ... the Missouri act." In other words, popular sovereignty was being established by ignoring, rather than addressing, the problem presented by the Missouri Compromise.[8]

Douglas’ attempt to finesse his way around the Missouri Compromise did not work. Archibald Dixon, a Kentucky Whig, believed that unless the Missouri Compromise was explicitly repealed, slaveholders would be reluctant to move to the new territory until slavery was actually approved by the settlers -- settlers who would most likely hold free-soil views. On January 16 Dixon surprised Douglas by introducing an amendment that would repeal the section of the Missouri Compromise prohibiting slavery above the 36°30' parallel. Douglas met privately with Dixon and in the end, despite his misgivings on northern reaction, agreed to accept Dixon’s arguments.[9] From a political standpoint, the Whig Party had been in decline in the South because of the effectiveness with which the Democrats had hammered southern Whigs over slavery issues. The Whigs hoped that by seizing the initiative on this issue that they would be identified as the strongest defender of slavery.[10]

Charles Sumner on Douglas -- "Alas! too often those principles which give consistency, individuality, and form to the Northern character, which render it staunch, strong, and seaworthy, which bind it together as with iron, are drawn out, one by one, like the bolts of the ill-fitted vessel, and from the miserable, loosened fragments is formed that human anomaly -- a Northern man with Southern principles. Sir, no such man can speak for the North."[11]

A similar amendment was offered in the House by Philip Phillips of Alabama. With the encouragement of the "F Street Mess", Douglas met with them and Phillips to ensure that the momentum for passing the bill remained with the Democratic Party. Towards this end, they arranged to meet with President Franklin Pierce to ensure that the issue would be declared a test of party loyalty within the Democratic Party.[12]

Meeting with President Pierce

Pierce had barely mentioned Nebraska in his State of the Union message the previous month and was not enthusiastic about the implications of repealing the Missouri Compromise. Close advisors Senator Lewis Cass, a proponent of popular sovereignty as far back as 1848 as an alternative to the Wilmot Proviso, and Secretary of State William L. Marcy both told Pierce that repeal would create serious political problems. On Saturday January 22 the full cabinet met, and only Secretary of War Jefferson Davis and Secretary of Navy James C. Dobbin supported repeal. Instead the president and cabinet submitted to Douglas an alternative plan that would have sought out a judicial ruling on the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise. Both Pierce and Attorney General Caleb Cushing believed that the Supreme Court would find it unconstitutional.[13]

Douglas’ committee met later that night. Douglas was agreeable to the proposal, but the Atchison group was not. Determined to offer the repeal to Congress that Monday but reluctant to act without Pierce’s commitment, Douglas arranged through Secretary Davis to meet with President Pierce on Sunday even though Pierce generally refrained from conducting any business on a Sunday. Douglas was accompanied at the meeting by Atchison, Hunter, Phillips, and John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky.[14]

Douglas and Atchison first met alone with Pierce before the whole group convened. Pierce was persuaded to support repeal, and, at Douglas’ insistence, Pierce provided a written draft asserting that the Missouri Compromise had been made inoperative by the principles of the Compromise of 1850. Later, Pierce informed his cabinet which concurred in the change of direction.[15] The Washington Union, the communications organ for the administration, wrote on January 24 that support for the bill would be "a test of Democratic orthodoxy."[16]

Debate in the Senate

On January 23, a revised bill was introduced in the Senate. In addition to the changes regarding repeal of the Missouri Compromise, Nebraska was now divided into two territories, Kansas and Nebraska, with the division coming at the thirty-seventh parallel. The division was the result of concerns expressed by settlers already in Nebraska as well as the Senators from Iowa who were concerned with the location of the territory's seat of government if such a large territory was created. Existing language which affirmed the application of all other laws of the United States in the new territory was supplemented by the language agreed on with President Pierce that read, “except the eighth section of the act preparatory to the admission of Missouri into the Union, approved March 6, 1820, which was superseded by the legislation of 1850, commonly called the compromise measures, and is declared inoperative.” Identical legislation was soon introduced in the House.[17]

Forcing Slavery Down the Throat of a Freesoiler
An 1854 cartoon depicts a giant free soiler being held down by James Buchanan and Lewis Cass standing on the Democratic platform marked "Kansas", "Cuba" and "Central America". Franklin Pierce also holds down the giant's beard as Stephen A. Douglas shoves a black man down his throat.

Historian Allan Nevins wrote that "two interconnected battles began to rage, one in Congress and one in the country at large: each fought with a pertinacity, bitterness, and rancor unknown even in Wilmot Proviso days." In Congress, the freesoilers were at a distinct disadvantage. The Democrats held large majorities in each house, and Stephen Douglas, "a ferocious fighter, the fiercest, most ruthless, and most unscrupulous that Congress had perhaps ever known" led a tightly disciplined party. It was in the nation at large that the opponents of Nebraska hoped to achieve a moral victory. The New York Times, which had earlier supported President Pierce, predicted that this would be the final straw for northern supporters of the slavery forces and would "create a deep-seated, intense, and ineradicable hatred of the institution which will crush its political power, at all hazards, and at any cost."[18]

The day after the bill was reintroduced, two Ohioans, Representative Joshua Giddings and Senator Salmon P. Chase, published a free soil response titled, “Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress to the People of the United States.” The Appeal stated:

We arraign this bill as a gross violation of a sacred pledge; as a criminal betrayal of precious rights; as part and parcel of an atrocious plot to exclude from a vast unoccupied region immigrants from the Old World and free laborers from our own States, and convert it into a dreary region of despotism,inhabited by masters and slaves.[19]

Douglas took the Appeal personally and responded in Congress when the debate was opened on January 30 before a full house and packed gallery. Douglas biographer Robert W. Johanssen described part of the speech:

Douglas charged the authors of the "Appeal", whom he referred to throughout as the "Abolitionist confederates," with having perpetrated a "base falsehood" in their protest. He expressed his own sense of betrayal, recalling that Chase, "with a smiling face and the appearance of friendship," had appealed for a postponement of debate on the ground that he had not yet familiarized himself with the bill. "Little did I suppose at the time that I granted that act of courtesy," Douglas remarked, that Chase and his compatriots had published a document "in which they arraigned me as having been guilty of a criminal betrayal of my trust," of bad faith, and of plotting against the cause of free government. While other Senators were attending divine worship, they had been "assembled in a secret conclave," devoting the Sabbath to their own conspiratorial and deceitful purposes.[20]

The debate would continue for four months. Douglas remained the main advocate for the bill while Chase, William Seward of New York, and Charles Sumner of Massachusetts led the opposition. The New York Tribune wrote on March 2 that, "The unanimous sentiment of the North is indignant resistance. ... The whole population are full of it. The feeling in 1848 was far inferior to this in strength and universality."[21]

Sam Houston from Texas was one of the few southern opponents of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In the debate he urged, “Maintain the Missouri Compromise! Stir not up agitation! Give us peace!”[22]
Alexander Stephens from Georgia -- “Nebraska is through the House. I took the reins in my hand, applied the whip and spur, and brought the 'wagon' out at eleven o'clock P.M. Glory enough for one day.”[23]

The debate in the Senate concluded on March 4, 1854 when Stephen Douglas, beginning near midnight on March 3, made a five and a half hour speech. The final vote in favor of passage was 37 to 14. Free state senators voted 14 to 12 in favor while slave state senators overwhelmingly supported the bill, 23 to 2.[24]

Debate in the House of Representatives

The bill next moved to the House of Representatives. On March 21, 1854, as a delaying tactic, the legislation was referred by a vote of 110 to 95 to the committee of the whole where it would be the last item on the calendar. Realizing from the vote to stall that the act faced an uphill struggle, the Pierce Administration made it clear to all Democrats that passage of the bill was essential to the party and would dictate how federal patronage would be handled. Jefferson Davis and Attorney General Caleb Cushing from Massachusetts, along with Douglas, spearheaded the partisan efforts.[25] By the end of April Douglas believed that there were enough votes to pass the bill. The House leadership then began a series of roll call votes in which legislation ahead of the Kansas-Nebraska Act was called to the floor and tabled without debate.[26]

Thomas Hart Benton was among those speaking forcibly against the measure. On April 25, in a House speech that biographer William Nisbet Chambers called “long, passionate, historical, [and] polemical,” Benton attacked the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which he “had stood upon ... above thirty years, and intended to stand upon it to the end -- solitary and alone, if need be; but preferring company.” The speech was distributed afterwards as a pamphlet when opposition to the act moved outside the walls of Congress.[27]

It was not until May 8 that the debate began in the House. The debate was even more intense than in the Senate. While it seemed to be a forgone conclusion that the bill would pass, the opponents went all out to fight it.[28] Historian Michael Morrison wrote:

Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri -- "What is the excuse for all this turmoil and mischief? We are told it is to keep the question of slavery out of Congress! Great God! It was out of Congress, completely, entirely, and forever out of Congress, unless Congress dragged it in by breaking down the sacred laws which settled it!"[29]

A filibuster led by Lewis D. Campbell, an Ohio free-soiler, nearly provoked the House into a war of more than words. Campbell, joined by other antislavery northerners, exchanged insults and invectives with southerners, neither side giving quarter. Weapons were brandished on the floor of the House. Finally, bumptiousness gave way to violence. Henry A. Edmundson, a Virginia Democrat, well oiled and well armed, had to be restrained from making a violent attack on Campbell. Only after the sergeant at arms arrested him, debate was cut off, and the House adjourned did the melee subside.[30]

The floor debate was handled by Alexander Stephens of Georgia. Stephens insisted that the Missouri Compromise had never been a true compromise but had been imposed on the South. He argued that the issue was whether republican principles -- "that the citizens of every distinct community or State should have the right to govern themselves in their domestic matters as they please" -- would be honored.[31]

The final vote in favor of the bill was 113 to 100. Northern Democrats split in favor of the bill by a narrow 44 to 42 vote while all 45 northern Whigs opposed it. In the South, Democrats voted in favor by 57 to 2 and Whigs by a closer 12 to 7.[32] President Pierce signed the measure into law on May 30.

Lincoln-Douglas Debates

Act orchestrator Senator Stephen A. Douglas and former Illinois congressman Abraham Lincoln aired their disagreement over the Kansas-Nebraska Act in three public speeches during September and October 1854.[33] Lincoln gave his most comprehensive argument against slavery and the provisions of the Act in Peoria, Illinois, on October 16, the Peoria Speech.[34] He and Douglas both spoke to the large audience, Douglas first and Lincoln in response two hours later. Lincoln's three-hour speech, presented thorough moral, legal and economic arguments against slavery, set the stage for Lincoln’s political future.[35]

Hostilities

Pro-slavery settlers came to Kansas mainly from neighboring Missouri. Their influence in territorial elections was often bolstered by resident Missourians who crossed into Kansas solely for the purpose of voting in such ballots. They formed groups like the Blue Lodges and were dubbed border ruffians a term coined by opponent and abolitionist Horace Greeley. Abolitionist settlers moved from the East with express purpose of making Kansas a free state. A clash between the opposing sides was inevitable.

Successive territorial governors, usually sympathetic to slavery, attempted unsuccessfully to maintain the peace. The territorial capital of Lecompton, Kansas, the target of much agitation, became such a hostile environment for Free-Staters that they set up their own unofficial legislature at Topeka.

John Brown and his sons gained notoriety in the fight against slavery by brutally murdering five pro-slavery farmers in the Pottawatomie Massacre with a broadsword. Brown also helped defend a few dozen Free-State supporters from several hundred angry pro-slavery supporters at the town of Osawatomie.

Hostilities between the factions reached a state of low-intensity civil war, which was damaging to President Pierce. The nascent Republican Party sought to capitalize on the scandal of "Bleeding Kansas". Routine ballot-rigging and intimidation practiced by both pro and anti-slavery settlers failed to deter the immigration of anti-slavery settlers, who won a demographic victory in the race to populate the state.

Constitution Amendment rights

The pro-slavery territorial legislature ultimately proposed a state constitution for approval by referendum. The constitution was offered in two alternative forms, neither of which made slavery illegal. Free Soil settlers boycotted the legislature's referendum and organized their own, which approved a free-state constitution. The results of the competing referendums were sent to Washington by the territorial governor.

President James Buchanan sent the Lecompton Constitution (which allowed slavery, but disallowed import of new slaves) to Congress for approval. The Senate approved the admission of Kansas as a state under the Lecompton Constitution, despite the opposition of Senator Douglas, who believed that the Kansas referendum on the Constitution, by failing to offer the alternative of prohibiting slavery, was unfair. The measure was subsequently blocked in the United States House of Representatives, where northern congressmen refused to admit Kansas as a slave state. Senator James Hammond of South Carolina (famous for his "King Cotton" speech) characterized this resolution as the expulsion of the state, asking, "If Kansas is driven out of the Union for being a slave state, can any Southern state remain within it with honor?"

Results

The Kansas-Nebraska Act divided the nation and pointed it toward civil war. The act itself virtually nullified the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise of 1850. The turmoil over the act split both the Democratic and Know Nothing parties and gave rise to the Republican Party, which split the United States into two major political parties- North (Republican) and South (Democratic).

Eventually a new anti-slavery state constitution was drawn up. On January 29, 1861, Kansas was admitted to the Union as a free state. Nebraska was not admitted to the Union as a state until after the Civil War in 1867.

Notes

  1. ^ Potter p. 146-149
  2. ^ Potter p. 150-152
  3. ^ Potter p. 154-155
  4. ^ Freehling pp. 550-551. Johanssen p. 407
  5. ^ Johannsen p. 402-403
  6. ^ Holt p. 145
  7. ^ Johanssen pp. 405
  8. ^ a b Johanssen p. 406
  9. ^ Nevins p. 95-96
  10. ^ Cooper p. 350
  11. ^ Nevins p. 139
  12. ^ Johanssen p. 412-413. Cooper pp. 350-351
  13. ^ Potter p. 161. Johanssen pp. 413-414
  14. ^ Potter p. 161. Johanssen p. 414
  15. ^ Johanssen p. 414-415
  16. ^ Foner p. 156
  17. ^ Johanssen pp. 415-417
  18. ^ Nevins p. 111
  19. ^ Nevins pp. 111-112. Johanssen p. 418
  20. ^ Johanssen p. 420
  21. ^ Nevins p. 121
  22. ^ Nevins p. 144
  23. ^ Nevins p. 156
  24. ^ Potter p. 165. The vote occurred at 3:30 a.m. and many senators, including Houston, had retired for the night. Estimates on what the vote might have been with all still in attendance vary from 40-20 to 42-18. Nevins p. 145
  25. ^ Nevins p. 154
  26. ^ Potter p. 166
  27. ^ Chalmers p. 401
  28. ^ Nevins p. 154-155
  29. ^ Nevins p. 156
  30. ^ Morrison p. 154
  31. ^ Nevins p. 155
  32. ^ Nevins p. 156-157
  33. ^ The Lincoln Institute (2002-2008). "1854 - Abraham Lincoln and Freedom". http://www.mrlincolnandfreedom.org/inside.asp?ID=10&subjectID=2. Retrieved on 2008-08-25. 
  34. ^ Lehrman, Lewis E.. "Abraham Lincoln at Peoria: The Turning Point". http://www.lincolnatpeoria.com/. Retrieved on 2008-08-25. 
  35. ^ The Lincoln Institute; Lewis E. Lehrman (2002-2008). "Preface by Lewis Lehrman, Abraham Lincoln and Freedom". http://www.mrlincolnandfreedom.org/inside.asp?ID=1&subjectID=1. Retrieved on 2008-08-25. 

References

External links

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Pre-War Kansas State Flag
September 1861
August 1863
October 1863
October 1864

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