The Kansas-Nebraska Act was a law passed by the US government under President Franklin Pierce in 1854 that allowed for the states of Nebraska and Kansas to decide if they wanted to allow slavery through popular sovereignty. The act led to outside influences attempting to influence the slavery debate, leading to clashes between Free Staters and Border Ruffians in the "Bleeding Kansas" upheaval. The Kansas-Nebraska Act effectively overturned the Missouri Compromise, and the two states would both agree to outlaw slavery.
Background[]
In August 1846, Congressman David Wilmot introduced an amendment, or proviso, to an army appropriations bill that would have banned slavery forever in territories acquired from Mexico. Although the Wilmot Proviso passed the US House of Representatives, it failed in the US Senate. As a result, the future of slavery was still not settled in the West.
The political parties offered different solutions during the 1848 presidential election campaign. John C. Calhoun argued that the Constitution protected property, and so slave-owners had the right to take slaves into the territories. Democratic nominee Lewis Cass argued that settlers should vote on the issue, while the Whig Party tried to avoid it and nominated Zachary Taylor, a Virginia slaveholder and hero of the war with Mexico.
The Liberty Party joined with anti-slavery Whigs and the Free Soil Party to nominate former president Martin Van Buren for president. The Free Soil Party pledged itself to no new slave states and called slavery a "barbarism."
History[]
The first steps to decide if the new territory should be slave or free were legislative. Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas worked to balance the demands of the militant pro-slavery faction, led by Missouri senator David Rice Atchison, with those Northern Democrats who were fearful of conceding too much to Southern interests. Douglas suggested that it be left to a vote in the territory. Atchison thought Douglas' plan of "popular sovereignty" was not enough and demanded the repeal of 1820's Missouri Compromise. Douglas agreed to argue for the repeal, thus opening up the West for the potential expansion of slavery.
The proposed Kansas-Nebraska Act triggered a passionate response. Since the Compromise of 1850 and the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Northern aversion to appeasing Southern "Slave Power" had grown. Abraham Lincoln strongly believed slavery to be "an unqualified evil" and that no man had the right to hold another as property. He denounced both the act and Douglas in public. A former Whig, Lincoln now joined with others in the North who opposed slavery's expansion but as yet had no formal political party. This so-called "anti-Nebraska" group included Free Soilers, abolitionists, and Northern Whigs. Yet, despite an outcry across the North, Douglas was able to convince and coerce enough Senate Democrats to approve the Kansas-Nebraska Act - 15 of the 20 Northern Democrats supported it. In the House, wehre Southern influence was weaker, it just barely passed. In the elections that followed, half of the incumbent Northern Democrats lost their seats.
The way was now open to let the settlers vote. Neighboring Missouri, a slave state, encouraged a first wave of pro-slavery migrants, but as 1854 went on, anti-slavery settlers from across the North and Midwest entered the territory. Missouri politicians helped organized militia and citizens' groups prepared to ride into the state's border regions to scare Northern or free-state advocates. The Missourians also voted illegally, hoping to elect delegates who would support slavery.
Atchison personally led a large group of "Border Ruffians" - as the Missouri citizens were called by abolitionists - across the Kansas state line to vote. He boasted that 1,100 people were on the way and he could gather another 5,000 if needed. The count for the first territorial legislature included those 5,000 fraudulent tallies and resulted in a pro-slavery body. The territorial governor begged President Franklin Pierce to invalidate the election, but Pierce, a political ally of Atchison, fired the governor instead.
Rival state governments[]
The new pro-slavery legislature legalized slavery and banned anti-slavery speeches and texts. Those who aided runaway slaves were to be punished with death. This intimidation enraged the larger free-state faction of Kansas residents. Rejecting the official territorial government as invalid, in the fall of 1855 they gathered in Topeka where they formed their own legislature, elected a governor, and wrote the Topeka Constitution. By January 1856, two rival governments competed for control of Kansas and dominated national politics. Pierce recognized the pro-slavery government in the city of Lecompton, while the new Republican Party, founded in 1854, backed the free-state legislature and attacked Democrats as tools of Southern Slave Power. The Massachusetts abolitionist, Charles Sumner, was incensed. In May, he delivered a two-day speech entitled "The Crime Against Kansas," in which he accused pro-slavery men of carrying on with the "harlot, Slavery." Popular sovereignty had failed.
On 21 May 1856, pro-slavery men rode into Lawrence, a free-state town, and destroyed its newspaper's press and burned its Free State Hotel. Republican newspapers and campaign speeches described it as the sack of Lawrence, regarding the event as further proof of Southern intent to create a society dominated by powerful slaveholders.
In January 1857, the US Supreme Court reached the notorious Dred Scott decision. The court's ruling said that prohibiting slavery in a federal territory was unconstitutional, and that African-Americans, free or slave, were not citizens of the United States. This emboldened pro-slavery leaders in Kansas, who met in Lecompton and proposed a new state constitution.
The Lecompton Constitution[]
Their idea was to give voters in Kansas a referendum between their own Lecompton Constitution "with slavery" or a "future" free state "without slavery." In the latter case, the 200 slaves in Kansas would remain in bondage as would any children they bore, but there would be no extension of slavery beyond that.
While Republicans and free-state supporters denounced the plan, it put severe strains on the Democratic Party. Across the North, Democrats faced a dilemma. They knew that backing the Lecompton Constitution would be seen as a betrayal of the ideal of popular sovereignty and too sympathetic to Southern interests. On the other hand, opposing the constitution would alienate the Southern Democrats, who made up the party's largest and most powerful group in Congress.
Four years earlier, Stephen Douglas had promised the voters of Kansas the right to decide about slavery in a free and fair election. In 1858, he rose in the Senate to denounce the Lecompton Constitution, even as a new president, Democrat James Buchanan, urged its acceptance. Southern senators ostracized Douglas and made it clear he would never have their support for a future presidential run. In Kansas, meanwhile, federal troops monitored the vote as citizens overwhelmingly rejected slavery. In Congressional elections, Northern voters swept most pro-Southern Democrats from office.
Aftermath[]
During the era of turmoil in Kansas, politics in the North was chaotic as new parties rose to replace the fading Whigs. IN 1854, a new party would pose a challenge to the increasingly divided Democratic Party.
From the mid-1840s, many Americans fixated on the threats Catholics and large numbers of immigrants presented to their image of a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant nation. Secret societies emerged and pledged to oppose the influence of Catholics and new arrivals. When questioned, they answered, "I know nothing." Opponents used the phrase to label the movement. Know Nothings shocked party leaders by sending their members, as many as 500,000, to the polls. By 1855, they dominated much of the East, replacing the Whigs as the opponents of the Democrats in the mid-Atlantic states, California, and large areas of the South. The party split in 1856 following a convention vote on slavery, and most Northern Know Nothings would eventually support the Republican Party.
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