Kansas-Nebraska Act

12 Key excerpts on "Kansas-Nebraska Act"

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  Shaped by the West, Volume 1

  A History of North America to 1877

  • William F. Deverell, Anne F. Hyde(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  Douglas introduced legislation that used treaties to extinguish Indian land rights and created two new territories, Kansas and Nebraska. Once enough people had settled these territories, they could hold an election to determine the status of slavery by popular vote. The bill, excerpted here, passed narrowly, but it vaulted slavery in the territories to the center of political debate. How would proslavery and antislavery advocates each respond to the language in Douglas’s bill? What would happen to Indians living in the region? Why didn’t this solution solve the political problem of slavery? The Kansas-Nebraska Act 1854 1 Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That all that part of the territory of the United States included within the following limits, except such portions thereof as are hereinafter expressly exempted from the operations of this act, to wit: begin-ning at a point in the Missouri River where the fortieth parallel of north lati-tude crosses the same; thence west on said parallel to the east boundary of the Territory of Utah, on the summit of the Rocky Mountains; thence on said sum-mit northward to the forty-ninth parallel of north latitude; thence east on said parallel to the western boundary of the territory of Minnesota; thence south-1. An Act to Organize the Territories of Nebraska and Kansas, 1854, Record Group 11, General Records of the United States Government, National Archives. The Compromise of Popular Sovereignty 257 ward on said boundary to the Missouri River; thence down the main channel of said river to the place of beginning, be, and the same is hereby, created into a temporary government by the name of the Territory of Nebraska; and 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.

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  The Laws That Shaped America

  Fifteen Acts of Congress and Their Lasting Impact

  • Dennis W. Johnson(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  There was no mention of slavery, and it was assumed that the Missouri Compromise would continue to be in force. 99 The bill went to Senator Douglas’s committee and immediately was transformed into the chairman’s bill. The Key Individuals in the Kansas–Nebraska Act Stephen A. Douglas (1813–1861), from Illinois, a Democratic two-term member of Congress (1843–1847) and three-term Senator (1847–1861). Three times he ran for the presidency: in 1852 and 1856, he was an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic nomination, and in 1860 was the nominee of the Northern Democrats. His life intersected with that of Abraham Lincoln through the historic Lincoln–Douglas debates of 1858 and the presidential election of 1860. During the 1850s, Douglas was far better known and more powerful than Lincoln and served as chairman of the important Senate Committee on Territories. Early in his career, Douglas developed a reputation for brashness, brilliant oratory often laced with sarcasm and profanity, and aggressive political action. He was a stout defender of Manifest Destiny, a harsh critic of the abolitionists, but was a strong Union man who worked hard to keep the increasingly fractious Democratic Party together. At five feet four inches, dubbed the “Little Giant,” Douglas was a tobacco-chewing, whiskey-drinking Midwest lawyer, who transformed himself, with assistance from his Southern wife, into a cigar-smoking, cognac-sipping socially and politically ambitious fixture in Washington. 100 Douglas’s chief rival was Salmon P. Chase (1808–1873) of Ohio, who was the first Free Soil Party candidate elected to the Senate (1849–1855); he then was elected governor of Ohio (1855–1859) and returned to the Senate as a Republican in 1860. Soon thereafter, he resigned to become Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury (1861–1864), then chief justice of the United States (1864–1873). As chief justice, he presided over the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson

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  Making an Antislavery Nation

  Lincoln, Douglas, and the Battle over Freedom

  • Graham A. Peck(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • University of Illinois Press

    (Publisher)

  That it did so should come as no surprise. After all, it administered two bracing shocks to the northern people: it represented a betrayal of staggering proportions by southern politicians, and it nakedly challenged most Northerners’ understanding of American freedom. In doing so, it forced them to come to grips with slavery. Few Northerners willingly defended slavery's morality, the growth of slaveholders’ political power, or the opening of new territory to slave labor. Yet the Kansas-Nebraska Act implicitly did all these things, on principle. Douglas informed Georgia's Howell Cobb in April 1854 that the North would never “decide that the principle upon which our whole republican system rests is vicious & wrong.” 47 But Douglas failed to comprehend that many Northerners considered slavery vicious and wrong, and countless others considered it, at the very least, injurious and regrettable. Certainly, a majority of them considered it an absolute contradiction of freedom. While some Northerners had accepted popular sovereignty in 1850 as an expedient freesoil policy to save the Union, very few had elevated it to a national ideal. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854 created a radically different context for popular sovereignty. Most Northerners deemed the repeal an execrable proslavery sin, damned it for reopening the slavery controversy, and trembled for the fate of Kansas and the nation. Shocked by popular sovereignty's new creedal claims—and its alarming new application in Kansas Territory—Northerners vowed to defend freedom. The Kansas-Nebraska Act thus backfired catastrophically. It destroyed the freesoil reputation of popular sovereignty and precipitated a remorseless national struggle to determine slavery's relationship to freedom. 48

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  Kansas's War

  The Civil War in Documents

  • Pearl T. Ponce(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Ohio University Press

    (Publisher)

  Yet the violence that broke out in the 1850s was an unintended consequence of the territory’s organization. Kansas had been carved from that part of the original Louisiana Purchase lands north of latitude 36°30', which marked the southern border of Missouri. By the terms of that state’s admission, in 1820, future states located north of this Missouri Compromise line would be free while states to its south would be open to slavery. However, when President Franklin Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, in May 1854, Kansas was opened to settlement under the doctrine of popular sovereignty, allowing residents to determine their state institutions (notably slavery) for themselves. Although two previous territories, Utah and New Mexico, had been organized through popular sovereignty in 1850, that decision was an outgrowth of the Mexican-American War and a nod to the antislavery tradition in those lands. Pierce’s signature jettisoned a congressional compromise in effect for more than three decades. While its geography should have meant a free Kansas, residents now had the option to implant slavery. Within months of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, the territory became notorious for partisan strife that ranged from voter intimidation to electoral fraud to outright warfare, all in the effort to determine the future state’s eventual relationship to slavery.

  Although sectional tensions might have led to territorial conflict anyhow, from the start Kansas’s condition rendered it unfit for settlement. The territory had not been surveyed, not one acre of land was legally available for sale, and the area bordering Missouri, where most settlers would enter, was closed to settlement.1 When Kansas Territory was organized, in 1854, there were approximately fourteen hundred Americans living in the area: half were missionaries or traders while the other half were employed by the federal government, many in a military capacity. However these numbers do not capture the full reality, for while there may have been few white settlers in Kansas, thousands of American Indians lived within its borders. Approximately seventeen thousand Indians made Kansas their home, with the Osages (4,951), Pottawatomies (4,300), and Delawares (1,132) among the most numerous.2 The Kaws (also known as the Kansa Indians, after whom the state takes it name), the Osages, and the Pawnees had settled in the area by the eighteenth century. Over the next century and a half, many more tribes had been pushed out of the Old Northwest (what is now Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and northeastern Minnesota) and into the region by an Indian removal as effective in the North as it more famously had been in the South. By 1850 a number of tribes had exchanged their old lands for new ones in Kansas.3

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  Civil War America

  Making a Nation, 1848-1877

  • Robert Cook(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Kansas-Nebraska bill was condemned as ‘part and parcel of an atrocious plot’ to spread slavery into a vast area reserved for settlement by free men under the terms of the venerated Missouri Compromise. ‘Whatever apologies may be offered for the toleration of slavery in the States,’ contended the ‘Appeal’, ‘none can be urged for its extension into Territories where it does not exist… Let all protest earnestly and emphatically… against this enormous crime.’ 3 The ‘Appeal’ was an astute piece of political propaganda artfully designed to play on the inchoate fears and prejudices of the electorate. Americans knew the lessons of history. Republics were fragile entities constantly under threat from evil men and institutions conspiring to concentrate power and wealth in their own hands. The Revolution itself had taught the people that eternal vigilance was the only sure safeguard against encroaching tyranny. Chase and his allies in Congress were longstanding opponents of slavery – on humanitarian as well as political grounds – but they knew their audience well. The aim of the ‘Appeal’ was simple: to broaden the coalition against slavery, hitherto marginalized by the Compromise of 1850, by promoting a fundamental realignment of politics along sectional lines. What better way to do this than shake northern voters out of their lethargy by providing clear evidence that their own rights were under threat from a malign coterie of southern slaveholders who allegedly exercised a dominant influence over the Republic with the assistance of dupes like Stephen Douglas? The latter, then, had unwittingly presented his radical antislavery opponents with an opportunity to break the stranglehold of a party system that traditionally had operated to protect slavery. ‘My soul sickens at the names Whig & Democrat’, wrote the Massachusetts Free Soiler Charles Sumner privately

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  America's Road to Empire

  Foreign Policy from Independence to World War One

  • Piero Gleijeses(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  One word, Kansas, epitomizes their two administrations. Pierce pushed through Congress a bill that created two territories, Kansas and Nebraska, that would be open to slavery, reversing a solemn pledge made by the US Congress in 1820; Buchanan aggressively supported the entry of Kansas as a slave state against the will of its inhabitants. With their foolhardy actions Pierce and Buchanan inflamed the sectional conflict, derailed their ambitious programs of territorial expansion, and spurred the extraordinary growth of the Republican Party. Republicans were not abolitionists, but they fiercely opposed the expansion of slavery beyond the states where it existed. In the 1856 presidential election, the Republican candidate gained 30 percent of the popular vote. In 1858, the Republicans displaced the Democrats as the largest party in the House. In the 1860 presidential election, the overriding issue was slavery, and the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, won. His victory precipitated the secession of the South. 171 America’s Road to Empire 172 The Compromise of 1850 While southern and northern members of Congress brawled over slavery in the territories seized from Mexico, the 1848 discovery of gold in California meant that by late 1849 100,000 newcomers had settled there—a potpourri that included people from as far afield as China and Chile, but was mostly composed of US citizens. California needed law and order; it needed a government. The white settlers took matters into their own hands; with the encouragement of President Taylor, they drafted a constitution that barred slavery and petitioned for admission as a state. In Congress, southerners opposed the request, but slowly an agreement was forged: the Compromise of 1850 stipulated that in New Mexico (which included Arizona) and Utah (which included Nevada) the territorial legislatures would be free to decide whether slavery would be legal [Map 12].

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  U. S. History

  • P. Scott Corbett, Volker Janssen, John M. Lund, Todd Pfannestiel, Paul Vickery, Sylvie Waskiewicz(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Openstax

    (Publisher)

  After several months of rancorous debate, Congress passed five laws—known collectively as the Compromise of 1850—that people on both sides of the divide hoped had solved the nation’s problems. However, many northerners feared the impact of the Fugitive Slave Act, which made it a crime not only to help slaves escape, but also to fail to help capture them. Many Americans, both black and white, flouted the Fugitive Slave Act by participating in the Underground Railroad, providing safe houses for slaves on the run from the South. Eight northern states passed personal liberty laws to counteract the effects of the Fugitive Slave Act. Chapter 14 | Troubled Times: the Tumultuous 1850s 415 14.2 The Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Republican Party The application of popular sovereignty to the organization of the Kansas and Nebraska territories ended the sectional truce that had prevailed since the Compromise of 1850. Senator Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act opened the door to chaos in Kansas as proslavery and Free-Soil forces waged war against each other, and radical abolitionists, notably John Brown, committed themselves to violence to end slavery. The act also upended the second party system of Whigs and Democrats by inspiring the formation of the new Republican Party, committed to arresting the further spread of slavery. Many voters approved its platform in the 1856 presidential election, though the Democrats won the race because they remained a national, rather than a sectional, political force. 14.3 The Dred Scott Decision and Sectional Strife The Dred Scott decision of 1857 went well beyond the question of whether or not Dred Scott gained his freedom. Instead, the Supreme Court delivered a far-reaching pronouncement about African Americans in the United States, finding they could never be citizens and that Congress could not interfere with the expansion of slavery into the territories.

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  Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections)

  • Abraham Lincoln, Daniel Kilham Dodge, (Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  The new year of 1854 found slavery excluded from more than half the States by State constitutions, and from most of the national territory by Congressional prohibition. Four days later commenced the struggle which ended in repealing that Congressional prohibition. This opened all the national territory to slavery, and was the first point gained.

  But, so far, Congress only had acted, and an indorsement by the people, real or apparent, was indispensable, to save the point already gained, and give chance for more.

  This necessity had not been overlooked, but had been provided for, as well as might be, in the notable argument of "squatter sovereignty," otherwise called "sacred right of self-government," which latter phrase, though expressive of the only rightful basis of any government, was so perverted in this attempted use of it as to amount to just this: That if any one man choose to enslave another, no third man shall be allowed to object. That argument was incorporated into the Nebraska bill itself, in the language which follows: "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, subject only to the Constitution of the United States." Then opened the roar of loose declamation in favor of "Squatter Sovereignty" and "sacred right of self-government." "But," said opposition members, "let us amend the bill so as to expressly declare that the people of the Territory may exclude slavery." "Not we," said the friends of the measure; and down they voted the amendment.

  While the Nebraska bill was passing through Congress, a law case involving the question of a negro's freedom, by reason of his owner having voluntarily taken him first into a free State and then into a Territory covered by the Congressional prohibition, and held him as a slave for a long time in each, was passing through the United States Circuit Court for the District of Missouri; and both Nebraska bill and lawsuit were brought to a decision in the same month of May, 1854. The negro's name was "Dred Scott," which name now designates the decision finally made in the case. Before the then next presidential election, the law case came to and was argued in the Supreme Court of the United States; but the decision of it was deferred until after the election. Still, before the election, Senator Trumbull, on the floor of the Senate, requested the leading advocate of the Nebraska bill to state his opinion

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  LINCOLN – Complete 7 Volume Edition: Biographies, Speeches and Debates, Civil War Telegrams, Letters, Presidential Orders & Proclamations

  Leader & Reformer

  • Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Carl Schurz, Joseph Choate, Francis F. Browne(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Madison & Adams Press

    (Publisher)

  The new year of 1854 found slavery excluded from more than half the States by State Constitutions, and from most of the National territory by Congressional prohibition. Four days later, commenced the struggle which ended in repealing that Congressional prohibition. This opened all the National territory to slavery, and was the first point gained.

  But, so far, Congress only had acted, and an indorsement by the people, real or apparent, was indispensable to save the point already gained, and give chance for more.

  This necessity had not been overlooked, but had been provided for, as well as might be, in the notable argument of "squatter sovereignty," otherwise called "sacred right of self-government," which latter phrase, though expressive of the only rightful basis of any government, was so perverted in this attempted use of it as to amount to just this: That if any one man choose to enslave another, no third man shall be allowed to object. That argument was incorporated into the Nebraska Bill itself, in the language which follows:

  "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, subject only to the Constitution of the United States."

  Then opened the roar of loose declamation in favor of "squatter sovereignty," and "sacred right of self-government." "But," said opposition members, "let us amend the bill so as to expressly declare that the people of the Territory may exclude slavery." "Not we," said the friends of the measure, and down they voted the amendment.

  While the Nebraska Bill was passing through Congress, a law case, involving the question of a negro's freedom, by reason of his owner having voluntarily taken him first into a free State, and then into a territory covered by the Congressional Prohibition, and held him as a slave for a long time in each, was passing through the United States Circuit Court for the District of Missouri; and both Nebraska Bill and lawsuit were brought to a decision in the same month of May, 1854. The negro's name was "Dred Scott," which name now designates the decision finally made in the case. Before the then next Presidential election, the law case came to, and was argued in, the Supreme Court of the United States; but the decision of it was deferred until after the election. Still, before the election, Senator Trumbull, on the floor of the Senate, requested the leading advocate of the Nebraska Bill to state his opinion whether the people of a territory can constitutionally exclude slavery from their limits; and the latter answers: "That is a question for the Supreme Court."

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  Lincoln's Tragic Pragmatism

  Lincoln, Douglas, and Moral Conflict

  • John Burt(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Belknap Press

    (Publisher)

  52 This argument, too, Lincoln rightly saw as fishy, comparing it to the claim that if one does not build onto a house then one has somehow forfeited that house. But Douglas was right to argue that when the slave states balked at organizing Kansas as a free territory under the Missouri Compromise restriction they were not behaving terribly differently from the way the free states had behaved in 1821.

  The pragmatic claim that repealing the 36° 30′ line provision of the Missouri Compromise, combined with the proviso that slavery could not prosper in Kansas anyway, was the only way to organize territorial governments in the face of southern opposition was probably Douglas’s strongest argument, and, for that matter, probably also renders his actual motivations. But Douglas also argued that his position was not only consistent and principled but in the spirit of the Compromise of 1850. Why did he make this claim?

  For one thing, Douglas could claim that the politicians who most opposed him about the Kansas-Nebraska Act were opponents of the Compromise of 1850 to begin with, and thus were in no position to speak of its meaning or treat it as a sacred compact that Douglas, who was after all both the principal author of the compromise and the manager of its adoption, had shattered. As Douglas had said at the time:

  They talk about the bill being a violation of the compromise measures of 1850. Who can show me a man in either house of Congress who was in favor of those compromise measures in 1850, and who is not now in favor of leaving the people of Nebraska and Kansas to do as they please upon the subject of slavery, according to the principle of my bill? Is there one? If so I have not heard of him. The tornado has been raised by abolitionists, and by abolitionists alone.53

  Douglas was probably right about who his opponents were (remembering how the compromise was reached), although he was wrong in Lincoln’s case. Certainly Chase, Sumner, and Giddings, the most vociferous opponents of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, were no sympathizers with the Compromise of 1850. And Douglas knew how people behave when they have made a deal they begrudge: his speeches during the spring of 1854 were full of examples of how northern politicians who signed onto the Missouri Compromise spent years trying to evade it, and only discovered that it was something to revere when Douglas sought to repeal it.54 Indeed, as Douglas pointed out in a letter responding to a protest from thirty-five Chicago clergymen about the Kansas-Nebraska Act, many of those who gave speeches about the sacredness of the compact enshrined in the Missouri Compromise had been doing their best to subvert the Fugitive Slave Act, which was the product of exactly the same kind of deal.55

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  Lincoln's Tragic Pragmatism

  Lincoln, Douglas, and Moral Conflict

  • John Burt(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Belknap Press

    (Publisher)

  But Douglas was right to argue that when the slave states balked at organizing Kansas as a free territory under the Missouri Compromise restriction they were not behaving terribly differently from the way the free states had behaved in 1821. The pragmatic claim that repealing the 36° 30 ′ line provision of the Missouri Compromise, combined with the proviso that slavery could not prosper in Kansas anyway, was the only way to organize territorial 56 Lincoln’s Tr a g i c Pragmatism governments in the face of southern opposition was probably Doug-las’s strongest argument, and, for that matter, probably also renders his actual motivations. But Douglas also argued that his position was not only consistent and principled but in the spirit of the Compromise of 1850. Why did he make this claim? For one thing, Douglas could claim that the politicians who most op-posed him about the Kansas-Nebraska Act were opponents of the Com-promise of 1850 to begin with, and thus were in no position to speak of its meaning or treat it as a sacred compact that Douglas, who was after all both the principal author of the compromise and the manager of its adoption, had shattered. As Douglas had said at the time: They talk about the bill being a violation of the compromise mea-sures of 1850. Who can show me a man in either house of Congress who was in favor of those compromise measures in 1850, and who is not now in favor of leaving the people of Nebraska and Kansas to do as they please upon the subject of slavery, according to the principle of my bill? Is there one? If so I have not heard of him. The tornado has been raised by abolitionists, and by abolitionists alone. 53 Douglas was probably right about who his opponents were (remem-bering how the compromise was reached), although he was wrong in Lincoln’s case. Certainly Chase, Sumner, and Giddings, the most vociferous opponents of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, were no sympa-thizers with the Compromise of 1850.

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  John White Geary

  Soldier-Statesman, 1819-1873

  • Harry Marlin Tinkcom(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection

    (Publisher)

  ν GOVERNOR OF KANSAS G E A R Y , now reëstablished in western Pennsylvania, gave him-self over to the quiet pursuit of agriculture and the raising of stock. This was an occupation which he had long anticipated, and now he was firmly resolved to spend the remainder of his life in work so congenial to his present frame of mind. His reso-lution could not even be shaken by an offer of the governship of Utah by Pierce in 1855. He was definitely out of public life —so he thought. While thus pursuing the even tenor of his way, he was once again called upon to be of service to his country. For in 1856 Pierce asked him to become governor of bleeding Kansas, that turbulent land of factional dispute and sanguinary conflict. It is fairly reasonable to assume that the Territory of Kansas would never have become a theatre of guerrilla warfare had the Missouri Compromise remained in force. By that act the land which constituted Kansas was to remain free territory. Yet in 1854 the trouble-making Kansas-Nebraska Act divided the land in question into two territories, Kansas and Nebraska. The energetic Douglas had been responsible for the division. This was a compromise measure, for if two territories were created, the South would have an opportunity to secure one for slavery. Since Nebraska had nearer access to northern immigration, it was conceded to the North. The South would then claim Kan-sas for slavery. Then, too, this arrangement would tend to keep the wavering balance of free and slave states fairly equal. The northern abolitionists, however, refused to concede this point. As a result, northern immigration poured into the territory, greatly encouraged by the ever active emigrant aid societies. Hundreds of antislavery men entered the territory with the express purpose of settling there. With these came bands of mÜitantly violent abolitionists to insure the state against slavery. Of this latter group, and most famous of them all, was John 58

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