Kansas-Nebrask Act During The Civil War

The Kansas-Nebrask Act was an 1854 bill that authorized “popular sovereignty”–letting colonizers of a terrain to decide whether slavery would be allowed within a original state’s boundaries. Planned by Stephen A. Douglas–Abraham Lincoln’s challenger in the powerful Lincoln-Douglas debates–the bill upturned the Missouri Compromise’s use of latitude as the border between slave and free territory. The fights that stand up between pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers in the outcome of the act’s passage led to the retro of violence known as Bleeding Kansas, and helped covered the way for the American Civil War (1861-65).
This 1854 bill to establish western territories became part of the political brief of sectionalism and railroad building, piercing two major political parties and helping to create another, as well as deteriorating North-South relations. …show more content…
Douglas, wanting to guarantee a northern transcontinental railroad route that would advantage his Illinois constituents, introduced a bill to form the territory of Nebraska in order to transport the area under civil control. But southern senators protested; the region lay north of latitude 36°30′ and so under the terms of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 would become a free state. To advance the southerners’ support, Douglas wished-for making two territories in the area–Kansas and Nebraska–and cancelling the Missouri Compromise line. The inquiry of whether the territories would be slave or free would be left to the colonizers under Douglas’s principle of popular control. Apparently, the more northern territory would compete with slavery while the more southern one would document

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