Kansas-Nebraska Act

Context

The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 paved the way for the rapid expansion of the institution of slavery into the American Southwest (it was precluded by law, and many assumed climate, from the Northwest Territory) in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Nationally, little was said about this trend until 1819, when Missouri, the first territory to be created within the confines of the Louisiana Purchase, applied for admission as a slave state. The ensuing debate thrust the issue of slavery into the national consciousness and exposed a growing sectional rift over the question of slavery's expansion. The following year Henry Clay's Missouri Compromise eased tensions: admitting Missouri into the Union as a slave state paired with the admission of Maine as a free state and establishing a boundary line between slave and free territory at parallel 36°30′ north through the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase, including the area that would later be designated as Kansas and Nebraska.

Debate over the issue flared once again with the annexation of Texas and its proslavery state constitution into the United States in December 1845 and the subsequent war with Mexico that resulted in the appropriation of nearly half of Mexico's territory between 1846 and 1848. Viewing the conflict as a war to promote slavery and intent upon preserving the newly acquired Mexican Cession for “free” white settlers, a number of northern politicians supported a proviso attached to a wartime appropriations bill by Pennsylvania congressman David Wilmot calling for a prohibition of slavery from all territories obtained from Mexico. Wilmot's controversial proviso, pitting northern and southern interests against one another, brought Congress to a standstill. Hoping to end the impasse, Senator Lewis Cass, a Democrat from Michigan and a presidential hopeful in 1848, proposed allowing the people residing within the territories to decide the fate of slavery's expansion themselves, a policy that became known as “popular sovereignty.” Although Cass was defeated in his quest for the presidency by the Whig candidate Zachary Taylor, his policy emerged as the Democratic Party's position on slavery's expansion from that point through the commencement of hostilities between North and South in April 1861.

The gold rush of 1849 triggered explosive and chaotic growth in the newly obtained California region and, once again, propelled the controversy over slavery's extension into the political forefront. Eager to establish order in California and to avoid the touchy issue of the extent of congressional authority over slavery in the federal territories, President Taylor proposed that California be admitted directly into the Union as a free state, forgoing the usual territorial stage. The resulting opposition threatened a state of perpetual gridlock in Congress. Once again Senator Clay stepped forward to craft a far-reaching compromise (which included a controversial new fugitive slave law) bill to prevent the issue from doing further damage. After the omnibus bill's defeat, Senator Douglas of Illinois assumed responsibility for the measure, breaking the bill into its component parts and successfully guiding the so-called Compromise of 1850 through Congress by forging a series of sectional and cross-party alliances in support of the now separate measures. Taylor's untimely death removed the final obstacle to the compromise, and it became law in September 1850.

Although they were punctuated by moments of heightened sectional tension such as the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852, the years immediately following the Compromise of 1850 were relatively free of strife over slavery. Weakened by the previous sectional conflict and by a growing consensus on other critical political issues, the nation's two main parties, the Democrats and Whigs, looked to take advantage of the relative calm to promote new programs and to rebuild party strength. Among the political issues garnering attention was the proposal to construct a transcontinental railroad to link the new state of California to the rest of the federal Union. Faced with a well-organized, determined lobbying effort by southern congressmen wedded to a southern route to California, Senator Douglas, hoping to promote the interests of his home state of Illinois, moved quickly to organize the territory immediately to the west of Illinois and Iowa to facilitate the construction of a northerly route to California. Douglas's initial proposal left the Missouri Compromise's prohibition of slavery in the region intact, but southern opposition (as well as Douglas's own belief that the area in question was inhospitable to slave-based plantation agriculture) quickly prompted Douglas to revise his bill and to organize the new territory according to the principle of popular sovereignty.