Over the years, changes were made that left the territory in roughly the same shape and with roughly the same boundaries as Nebraska has today. But even this final territory was almost torn into two parts as a conflict developed between the settlers living north of the Platte and those living south of the Platte.
The issue that angered the people was the location of the territorial capital and the political power that would go with it. The area south of the Platte River, which had more people, wanted the capital to be located south of the river.
They bitterly complained about the choice of Omaha City north of the Platte as the first capital. A South Platte convention was held at Brownville in , and a formal request was sent to Congress asking them to allow the South Platte area to be annexed by Kansas. Passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act also had a profound political impact. In one of the most heated moments in the debate, proslavery Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina, resorted to beating antislavery Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts with his cane on the Senate floor in It also drew Abraham Lincoln , a former one-term congressman from Illinois, back into the political arena.
In fact, the Kansas-Nebraska Act served to further divide the nation, and served as a crucial step along the path to the Civil War.
Norton, Kansas-Nebraska Act - May 30, Zach Garrison, Kansas-Nebraska Act. Kansas City Public Library. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present.
Bleeding Kansas describes the period of repeated outbreaks of violent guerrilla warfare between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces following the creation of the new territory of Kansas in In all, some 55 people were killed between and The struggle intensified The missouri-kansas conflict You are here Encyclopedia.
By Zach Garrison , University of Cincinnati. Encyclopedia Entry Pierce, Franklin. Lane, James Henry. Dred Scott v. Sandford Andrew H. Reeder becomes Kansas Territorial Governor. With that perspective in mind, he had helped arrange the historic Compromise of , which admitted California to the Union as a free state while placing no restrictions on slavery in the new territories of Utah and New Mexico. Voters there would decide for themselves whether or not to permit slavery, and the principle would be known as popular sovereignty.
But four years later Douglas had a different agenda. Early in , hoping to open the way for a railroad linking California with Illinois and the East, he wanted Congress to approve the establishment of the NebraskaTerritory in the vast wilderness west of Missouri and Iowa. Douglas had sought such approval before, but lacked the Southern votes to get it.
Further bargaining would now be necessary, and the stakes this time would include the Missouri Compromise, for more than 30 years the foundation of federal policy regarding the expansion of slavery. If Nebraska were organized with the compromise in place, it would be slave-free and slave-state Missouri would be bordered on three sides by free states and territories. Douglas was reluctant, but finally agreed. I will incorporate it into my bill, though I know it will raise a hell of a storm.
He was right about that. There was, in fact, a growing antipathy in the North toward slavery. Also, the law seemed to promise the movement of blacks into areas Northern whites had assumed were to be reserved for them.
He was, after all, a practical man, and he saw Kansas-Nebraska as a practical bill. By transferring authority over slavery from Congress to the territories themselves, he believed he was removing a threat to the Union. Nor did he think it likely that slavery would spread from the 15 states where it existed to the areas being opened for settlement. But when it came to judging public feeling on the issue, the senator was, unhappily, tone-deaf.
Many Northerners, and Lincoln is a great example, thought the Missouri Compromise was just a notch below the Constitution as a fundamental part of the American political framework. They saw it as putting slavery on the road to extinction, and that was for them a sacred goal. Kansas-Nebraska betrayed this. Douglas seemed unfazed at first, confident he could undo the damage.
He soon discovered otherwise. Opponents of the Kansas-Nebraska Act carried both houses of the Illinois legislature, which at that time still elected U. Suddenly, the Democrats found themselves a Southern party, one that would be able after to elect only one president in the remainder of the century.
Meanwhile, Abraham Lincoln, a former one-term congressman nearly five years out of office, had joined the fray.
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