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Apr 16, 2024 · Its enemies, especially in New England, called it “squatter sovereignty.” It was first applied in organizing the Utah and New Mexico territories in 1850. Its most crucial application came with the passage of U.S. Sen. Stephen A. Douglas ’s Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which repealed the prohibition of slavery north of latitude 36°30 ...
- Overview
- The Kansas-Nebraska Act and popular sovereignty
- Party realignment
- What do you think?
The Kansas-Nebraska Act, passed in 1854, reopened the debate over the expansion of slavery in the United States.
In 1854, an uproar regarding the question of slavery in the territories challenged the relative calm after the Compromise of 1850. The pressure on this question came primarily from northern farmers, who wanted the federal government to survey the land west of Iowa and Missouri and put it up for sale. Promoters of a transcontinental railroad also pushed for this westward expansion.
Furthermore, many in the South were growing resentful of the Missouri Compromise, which established the 36° 30' parallel as the geographical boundary of slavery. Slaveholders entrenched themselves in defense of their “way of life,” which depended on the ownership of slaves, while also claiming that prohibiting slavery’s expansion ran counter to basic American property rights. They now contended that the question should be decided by popular sovereignty, or allowing the white residents of a territory to decide whether it should permit slavery when it applied for statehood.
Meanwhile, some antislavery northerners wanted the West reserved for poor whites to seek opportunity. Abolitionists, too, were becoming more vocal in their support for the complete end of slavery.
Democratic leaders sought to bind these disparate ideologies together. Illinois Democratic senator Stephen Douglas believed he had found a solution—the Kansas-Nebraska bill—that would promote party unity and also appease Southerners who detested the Missouri Compromise line. The act created two territories: Kansas, directly west of Missouri; and Nebraska, west of Iowa. The act applied the principle of popular sovereignty. Since both territories fell above the 36° 30' line, the proposed bill would repeal the Missouri Compromise of 1820.
The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed residents of Kansas to determine whether the state would be slave or free, sparked a violent struggle between proslavery and antislavery factions, both of whom flooded into the territory hoping to gain enough votes for their side to triumph. It also spurred a major party realignment.
Since the 1830s, the two main political parties in the United States had been the Democratic Party and the Whig Party. The parties disagreed mainly about economic policy. Whigs advocated for accelerated economic growth, often endorsing federal government projects to achieve that goal. Democrats wanted the federal government to play a smaller role in regulating the economy. Whigs tended to be wealthier; they were prominent planters in the South and wealthy urban northerners--in other words, the beneficiaries of the market revolution. Democrats presented themselves as defenders of the common people against the elite.
The issue of slavery began to crack the foundations of the Second Party System in the 1840s. The Kansas-Nebraska Act divided the Democratic Party along sectional lines, as half of the northern Democrats in the House voted against it. In 1848, the newly-formed Free Soil Party nominated former president Martin Van Buren and ran on an antislavery platform of “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men.”
The Democrats divided along sectional lines as a result of the bill, and the Whig party, in decline in the early 1850s, found its political power slipping further. Most important, the Kansas-Nebraska Act gave rise to the Republican Party, a new political party that attracted northern Whigs, Democrats who shunned the Kansas-Nebraska Act, members of the Free-Soil Party, and assorted abolitionists.
Imagine you were a Northern abolitionist when the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed. How would you respond?
Explain how the two-party system shifted at the end of the 1850s.
How did the new party system differ geographically from the Second Party System?
[Notes and attributions]
The Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the Missouri Compromise, created two new territories, and allowed for popular sovereignty. It also produced a violent uprising known as “Bleeding Kansas,” as proslavery and antislavery activists flooded into the territories to sway the vote.
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As the 1840s melted into the 1850s, Stephen Douglas became the loudest proponent of popular sovereignty. As long as the issue was discussed theoretically, he had many supporters. In fact, to many, popular sovereignty was the perfect means to avoid the problem.
By Zach Garrison, University of Cincinnati. Popular sovereignty in 19 th century America emerged as a compromise strategy for determining whether a Western territory would permit or prohibit slavery. First promoted in the 1840s in response to debates over western expansion, popular sovereignty argued that in a democracy, residents of a ...
United States - Popular Sovereignty, Democracy, Federalism: The Compromise of 1850 was an uneasy patchwork of concessions to all sides that began to fall apart as soon as it was enacted. In the long run the principle of popular sovereignty proved to be most unsatisfactory of all, making each territory a battleground where the supporters of the South contended with the defenders of the North ...
This lesson plan will examine how the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 affected the political balance between free and slave states and explore how its author, Stephen Douglas, promoted its policy of popular sovereignty in an effort to avoid a national crisis over slavery in the federal territories.
