Kansas-Nebraska Act

Impact

The Kansas-Nebraska Act had a profound and immediate impact upon the American people and the nation's subsequent history. Southerners generally embraced the act, viewing it as validation of their way of life and their interpretation of the intentions of the Founding Fathers to establish a slave-based republic. Many northerners, however, increasingly predisposed to suspicion of their southern peers as a result of years of heightened sectional tensions, were mortified by the act, lamenting the potential loss to slavery of territory long reserved for free settlers. Accordingly, scores of protest meetings condemning Douglas and his controversial legislation and calling for coordinated political opposition to the act were staged throughout the North. The uproar over the Kansas-Nebraska Act upended an already fragile political system and doomed a reeling Whig Party.

Shortly after the Kansas-Nebraska Act became law, political activists in the North, committed to an agenda of preserving the western territories for free settlers, began to pull together elements from the fractured Democratic and Whig Parties into new political coalitions designed to advocate for an end to slavery's expansion and to the seeming control of slavery's supporters over Washington. In short order, these coalitions began to coordinate their activities, banding together under such names as “Anti-Nebraska,” “Fusion,” and, most famously, the “Republican Party.” In spite of the intense hostility to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, throughout late 1854 and into 1855 and 1856, the Republican agenda was merely one of many competing for northern electoral support. Events in Kansas, however, soon gave the Republicans a leg up on their opponents.

In the immediate aftermath of the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, settlers from the contiguous slave state of Missouri rapidly organized to ensure victory for their particular way of life in the new Kansas Territory, migrating to the territory and occupying land along the Missouri River. Antislavery activists quickly followed suit, establishing settlements at Topeka and Lawrence. Rapid settlement in the region spurred territorial governor Andrew Reeder to call for a legislative election in the spring of 1855. Marred by voter fraud and intimidation, the balloting resulted in the election of a stridently proslavery territorial legislature. Free-state settlers responded by rejecting the proslavery laws created by the new legislature and by creating an antislavery shadow government in Topeka. By late 1855 the two sides had begun to take up arms, and stories about “Bleeding Kansas” permeated the nation's newspapers. The violence escalated in 1856, culminating with the sack of Lawrence, Kansas, the beating of Senator Charles Sumner by South Carolina's Preston Brooks in retaliation for a speech decrying the civil war in Kansas, and the murder of proslavery settlers on Pottawatomie Creek by the abolitionist John Brown.

The bloody events of 1856 seemingly lent credence to the Republican Party's condemnation of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and its claim of a slave power conspiracy determined to force slavery into the western territories and to undermine the intentions of the nation's Founders. As a result, the party quickly rose to prominence throughout the North and, by the fall of 1856, stood as the primary opposition to Democratic Party. Although the party was unsuccessful in the presidential election of 1856, its rise to prominence, along with the Democratic Party's increasingly pro-southern stance, sectionalized American politics and thus made compromise and moderation virtually impossible.

For their part, Democrats, despite the obvious problems in Kansas, clung tenaciously to the principle of popular sovereignty. Debate over Kansas's attempt to join the Union as a slave state under the Lecompton Constitution and the Supreme Court's decision in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford, however, dramatically undermined the appeal of their platform and further bolstered their Republican opponents. The subsequent election of Republican Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 presidential race sounded the death knell for popular sovereignty. Thrust into the White House because of northern votes alone, Lincoln embodied a commitment to antislavery extension and thus, from a southern point of view, a commitment to the destruction of their liberty. Convinced that secession was their only viable option, the states of the Deep South withdrew from the Union beginning in December 1860, and the United States rapidly slid into civil war.