Many historians believe that the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act on May 30, 1854, was the single most important event pushing the United States on the road to the Civil War. This act superseded the Missouri Compromise and undid much of the Compromise of 1850. The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act also had a major effect on the reconfiguration of America’s political parties. It divided the Democratic Party, played an instrumental role in the demise of the Whig Party, and contributed to the rise of a new, exclusively Northern and antislavery party, the Republican Party. The passage of the act also triggered guerrilla fighting in Kansas.
Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois played the single most important role in the formation of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Douglas, serving as chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, used his position to promote the development of the western part of the United States. Douglas hoped that Western development would have a chastening influence upon the growing sectional enmities between the North and the South. Instead, it had the opposite effect.
Douglas knew that entrepreneurs could not complete a transcontinental railroad without the prior political organization of the West. In February 1853, a bill calling for the admission of Nebraska as a state passed the House. However, when Douglas brought the bill before the Senate, it failed. Douglas could not obtain Southern support for the development of Nebraska so long as the Missouri Compromise prohibited slavery in the area. Douglas knew that if he incorporated the idea of popular sovereignty—of territories deciding for themselves whether to be free or slave—into the bill, he had a better chance of gaining the support of Southern Democrats.
For his first step, Douglas had to persuade four key Democrats: Andrew Butler of South Carolina, David Atchison of Missouri, and James Mason and Robert Hunter of Virginia, known collectively as the “F Street Mess” (for the house on F Street in which they boarded while in Washington, D. C.). These four senators, like Southern Democrats in general, viewed the organization of the Kansas territory under the Missouri Compromise restrictions as a grave threat to slavery. But, in negotiation with Douglas, the F Street Mess saw an opportunity, in a modified bill of territorial organization, to strengthen slavery’s position in the United States by repealing the Missouri Compromise line and instituting popular sovereignty instead.
In January 1854, Douglas inserted the language of popular sovereignty into the bill for Nebraska statehood and added the Kansas Territory to the Nebraska Territory already under consideration. Unfortunately, the idea of popular sovereignty for this region violated the Missouri Compromise, which forbade slavery north of the 36°30' line. Southern Whigs called for explicit repudiation of the Missouri Compromise. In the South, the Whigs and the Democrats were in a contest to show their dedication to slavery. Neither party could allow the other to appear to be more favorable to it, so Southern Democrats also called for the repeal of the Missouri Compromise.
Congressional debate on the Kansas-Nebraska Act revealed great concern from Northerners and many Southerners. Debates raged over the legislation. Northerners argued that the act was too vague on when a vote on slavery ought to take place. Their claim was that the longer a vote waited, the more likely it was that slavery would exist ipso facto. Slaveholders would bring their property with them, so as soon as Southern settlers moved in, Kansas would become a slave territory. Southerners in turn viewed the Northern reaction as yet more proof that they were under siege by Yankee abolitionists, and Northern rhetoric gave them no cause to doubt this. For instance, in October 1854 Abraham Lincoln, then an up-and-coming young Illinois lawyer, stated about popular sovereignty that “[w]hen the white man governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self-government—that is despotism.”
Political parties were just as angry and just as divided as individuals and interest groups over the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Several members of the Ohio congressional delegation, including Senators Benjamin Wade and Salmon P Chase, believed that the act was “a gross violation of a sacred pledge.” They implored their fellow members of Congress to vote against the act on the grounds that “[w]hatever apologies may be offered for the toleration of Slavery in the states, none can be urged for its extension into Territories where it does not exist.” Northern Whigs were upset with the act as well. They were afraid that the Kansas-Nebraska Act might resurrect the Northern Free-Soil Party that had previously caused many problems for them. Northern Whigs also believed that Southerners would take advantage of this opportunity to expand plantation slavery into the Northern United States. This was unlikely, since Southerners believed that the climate of the more northern latitudes prohibited the rise of further slave states in these parts of the West. Correspondingly, Southerners were unenthusiastic about any measure that could, under the tenets of popular sovereignty, lead to the existence of more free states.
On March 3, 1854, the Senate voted 37 to 14 in favor of the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, with Southern Democrats and Whigs voting nearly in lockstep. However, in the House the story was quite different. Alexander H. Stephens, the future vice president of the Confederacy, brought 13 Southern Whig representatives across party lines and assured the passage of the act on May 22, when the House voted 113-100 in favor of the bill.
Northern Whigs of both houses had generally opposed the bill. In fact, a large portion of the Northern Whig Party had hoped to convince Southern Whigs to oppose the bill as well. The Whigs hoped to generate a Whig “renaissance” in 1856 and perhaps even to recapture the White House. These hopes were extremely unrealistic, for they failed to take into account that for a Southern Whig to oppose the Kansas-Nebraska Act would be to commit political suicide, since voting against slavery’s interests doomed any Southern political career. Still, the Kansas-Nebraska Act energized Northern Whigs such as Abraham Lincoln to redouble their political efforts against slavery’s spread.
The response to the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act was violent. Proslavery and antislavery forces flooded into Kansas. Once there, they established themselves in mutually hostile communities. In 1855, amidst pitched battles that earned the period the name Bleeding Kansas, the doctrine of popular sovereignty failed its initial test when the Kansas territory held its first election. The proslavery forces were victorious, but antislavery forces refused to accept the results of the election. They claimed that proslave forces from Missouri had illegally stuffed the ballot boxes. President Franklin Pierce accepted the proslave victory as legitimate and sent government troops into the area to restore order. Congress, however, refused to accept Kansas as a slave state. A crisis over slavery once again shook the entire nation. It was not until 1861, with the South gone from the Union, that Kansas was finally admitted to the Union as a free state.
See also abolition.
Further reading: Thomas Goodrich, War to the Knife: Bleeding Kansas, 1854-1861 (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stack-pole Books, 1998); Kenneth Stampp, America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
—Chad Vanderford
Kelley, William D. (1814-1890) politician Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1814, William Darrah Kelley was a congressman who advocated racial equality in the postwar years.
When Kelley was 13, he was apprenticed to a jeweler, moving to Boston to become an enameler in 1834. His gregarious and open personality soon manifested itself as he spent his time off writing and debating the issues of his day. In 1838 he moved back to his hometown of Philadelphia and learned the law, passing the bar exam in 1841. After becoming a prosecuting attorney, he quickly rose up the ranks of Philadelphia’s legal system and was elected as a judge in 1851.
Politically, Kelley started out as a member of the Democratic Party, but after the Missouri Compromise was repealed in 1854 (allowing slavery to extend further than had previously been agreed), he became an influential founding member of the antislavery Republican Party of Pennsylvania. His first famous speech was delivered that same year, an antislavery oration entitled “Slavery in the Territories.”
Kelley was an excellent speaker whose loud voice carried audiences along with him. He decided to capitalize on his asset, running for Congress in 1856. Although he lost, he ran again four years later and won, holding his seat for the next 20 years.
When the Civil War broke out, Kelley enlisted in the artillery, although he never saw combat. When he returned to Congress he voted for every emancipation or war-related bill that he could. He supported arming African Americans to fight for the Union, and after the war he voted for the establishment of the Freedmen’s Bureau and endorsed military Reconstruction. He became well known as an advocate of black suffrage and an avowed enemy of segregation.
Kelley died in 1890, after spending many years in Congress fighting for those issues he believed in. His daughter
Florence Kelley later become well known as a reformer in her own right.
Further reading: Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women's Political Culture, 1830-1900. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995).
—Troy Rondinone
World History
