The Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Unraveling

The act of Congress that created Nebraska Territory also nearly tore the country apart. On May thirtieth, eighteen fifty-four, President Franklin Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act into law, and within months, settlers from both sides of the slavery debate were crossing into Kansas with rifles and intentions. The crisis it unleashed had been building for thirty years.

The Missouri Compromise of eighteen twenty had drawn a line across the country at latitude thirty-six degrees thirty minutes north, at Missouri's southern border extended west. Everything north of that line, except Missouri itself, was to be free from slavery. The line had held for three decades as a fragile peace.

Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois was the architect of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. His stated goal was to organize the territories so that a transcontinental railroad, one he expected to run through Chicago, could be routed across the plains. To get southern senators to vote for it, he included a provision that repealed the Missouri Compromise and replaced it with the doctrine of popular sovereignty. Each new territory would decide the slavery question by a vote of its own settlers.

The result in Kansas was immediate and violent. Pro-slavery settlers from Missouri poured across the border. Anti-slavery settlers funded by northern abolitionists did the same. Both sides established rival governments. Armed clashes killed dozens of people. The territory earned the name Bleeding Kansas. A former congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln, who had been largely retired from politics, returned to the campaign trail in explicit opposition to Douglas and the act.

Nebraska, further north and cooler in both climate and politics, organized more quietly. But the act that gave it existence was the act that broke apart the last national compromise on slavery. The Civil War was seven years away.