LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Kansas-Nebraska Act: Slavery
built 634 days ago
The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska and opened new lands for settlement, and allowed the settlers to decide whether or not to have slavery. The new Republican Party, formed in reaction against allowing slavery where it had been forbidden, emerged as the dominant force throughout the North. The act was designed by Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. This repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The act established that settlers could decide for themselves whether to allow slavery, in the name of "popular sovereignty" or rule of the people. Opponents denounced the law as a concession to the Slave Power of the South.
Source:
After the Kansas-Nebraska Act, thousands of people moved into the territory. Most of them were simply westward-moving farmers in search of better land, but others swarmed there in an attempt to tip the balance in the impending decision about Kansas’s free/slave status. Thousands of proslavery Missourians crossed the state line into Kansas when they learned that popular sovereignty would determine the fate of slavery. They grabbed as much land as they could and established dozens of small towns. These “border ruffians” ... rigged unfair elections, sometimes recruiting friends and family in Missouri to cross over into Kansas and cast illegal ballots. Others voted multiple times or threatened honest locals to vote for slavery.
Source:
The provisions of the Kansas-Nebraska Act did not lead to the peaceful settlement of the issue as intended. In Kansas, the antislavery and proslavery proponents disagreed violently, undermining the effectiveness of the popular sovereignty doctrine. Two opposing governments were established, and acts of destruction and violence ensued, including an assault on the antislavery town of Lawrence. In retaliation, abolitionist John Brown and his followers killed five settlers who advocated slavery. The phrase Bleeding Kansas was derived from this violence.
Source:
The enactment of the Kansas-Nebraska Act resulted in dissent and dissatisfaction among the Northern Abolitionists. While the Democratic Party was largely pro-slavery, anti-slavery factions did exist, as well as those abolitionists left over from the Whig party. An editorial from the Evening Journal, a New York Whig newspaper, displays the northern outrage immediately following the enactment of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
Source:
The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 shattered whatever peace was gained by the Compromise of 1850. In addition to organizing the U.S. Territories of Kansas and Nebraska, the act attempted to deal with the extension of slavery into this region by allowing the settlers in each territory to decide the question for themselves. U. S. Senator Stephen Douglas, who championed this policy of popular sovereignty and included it in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, unwittingly set off a firestorm of protest among those committed to stopping the spread of slavery. One such person was former Congressman Abraham Lincoln, who strongly opposed any policy that could extend slavery into the territories.
Source:
The Kansas-Nebraska Act, which was signed into law in May 1854, reignited the sectional conflict over slavery extension that many people believed had been settled permanently by the Compromise of 1850. Framed by Illinois' Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas and endorsed as a Democratic party measure by President Franklin Pierce, this legislation organized the entire remaining unorganized area of the Louisiana Territory from the 36° 30' line in the south to the Canadian border into two new territories, Kansas, west of Missouri, and Nebraska, west of Iowa and Minnesota Territory. Douglas introduced the bill primarily to encourage settlement in, and the construction of a railroad line to the Pacific coast across, that area, for no land could be legally sold or land grants given to railroads until it was formally organized. But what made the measure so controversial was its implications regarding slavery expansion.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Slavery