The Kansas Nebraska Act

As the landscape of post-Revolutionary War America continued to evolve, new territories and states continued to be added. With these new territories and states, issues and disputes also developed between both the North and the South, as well as America and other countries such as France, Britain and Mexico. Among these disputes, and arguably the most important leading up to the civil war, was the issue of the Kansas and Nebraska territories. The areas of Kansas and Nebraska were territories that both wanted to become states. The rest of the country was fine with this, but the main issue that arose was whether or not they would be declared slave or Free states. In response to this issue, U.S. Congress would pass the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which was based off of Stephen Douglass’ idea that the status of the new states would be determined by popular sovereignty. The Act served to repeal the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which prohibited slavery north of latitude 36°30, in turn infuriating many in the North who considered the Missouri Compromise to be a long-standing binding agreement. In the pro-slavery South it was strongly supported. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was an important historical event because though it maintained the “aim of expansionism” idea, it sparked intense violence, heated debate, and drastically deepened the relatively subtle political social rifts that already existed between the North and South, ultimately resulting in the Civil War.

The initial purpose of the Kansas–Nebraska Act was to open up many thousands of new farms and make feasible a Midwestern Transcontinental Railroad. It became problematic when popular sovereignty was written into the proposal so that the voters of the moment would decide whether slavery would be allowed. After the act was passed, pro-slavery and anti-slavery supporters rushed in to settle Kansas to affect the outcome of the first election held there after the law went into effect. Pro-slavery settlers carried the...