Read complete books and articles on: Kansas-Nebraska Act

Kansas-Nebraska Act - bill that became law on May 30, 1854, by which the U.S. Congress established the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. By 1854 the organization of the vast Platte and Kansas river countries W of Iowa and Missouri was overdue. As an isolated issue territorial organization of this area was no problem. It was, however, irrevocably bound to the bitter sectional controversy over the extension of slavery into the territories and was further complicated by conflict over the location of the projected transcontinental railroad. Under no circumstances did proslavery Congressmen want a free territory (Kansas) W of Missouri. Because the West was expanding rapidly, territorial organization, despite these difficulties, could no longer be postponed. Four attempts to organize a single territory for this area had already been defeated in Congress, largely because of Southern opposition to the Missouri Compromise. Although the last of these attempts to organize the area had nearly been successful, Stephen A. Douglas, chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, decided to offer territorial legislation making concessions to the South. Douglas's motives have remained largely a matter of speculation. Various historians have emphasized Douglas's desire for the Presidency, his wish to cement the bonds of the Democratic party, his interest in expansion and railroad building, or his desire to activate the unimpressive Pierce administration. The bill he reported in Jan., 1854, contained the provision that the question of slavery should be left to the decision of the territorial settlers themselves. This was the famous principle that Douglas now called popular sovereignty, though actually it had been enunciated four years earlier in the Compromise of 1850. In its final form Douglas's bill provided for the creation of two new territories—Kansas and Nebraska—instead of one. The obvious inference—at least to Missourians—was that the first would be slave, the second free. The Kansas-Nebraska Act flatly contradicted the provisions of the Missouri Compromise (under which slavery would have been barred from both territories); indeed, an amendment was added specifically repealing that compromise. This aspect of the bill in particular enraged the antislavery forces, but after three months of bitter debate in Congress, Douglas, backed by President Pierce and the Southerners, saw it adopted. Its effects were anything but reassuring to those who had hoped for a peaceful solution. The popular sovereignty provision caused both proslavery and antislavery forces to marshal strength and exert full pressure to determine the "popular" decision in Kansas in their own favor, using groups such as the Emigrant Aid Company. The result was the tragedy of "bleeding" Kansas. Northerners and Southerners were aroused to such passions that sectional division reached a point that precluded reconciliation. A new political organization, the Republican party, was founded by opponents of the bill, and the United States was propelled toward the Civil War.

See P. O. Ray, The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise (1909, repr. 1965).

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12 of the Best Books and Articles on: Kansas-Nebraska Act

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854, Vol. I (Chap. 30 "The Kansas-Nebraska Act, I: Confrontation in Missouri" and Chap. 31 "The Kansas-Nebraska Act, II: Decision in Congress") » Read Now
by William W. Freehling. 642 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

Far from a monolithic block of diehard slave states, the South in the eight decades before the Civil War was, in William Freehling's words, "a world so lushly various as to be a storyteller's dream." It was a world where Deep South cotton planters clashed with South Carolina rice growers, where the...
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Far from a monolithic block of diehard slave states, the South in the eight decades before the Civil War was, in William Freehling's words, "a world so lushly various as to be a storyteller's dream." It was a world where Deep South cotton planters clashed with South Carolina rice growers, where the egalitarian spirit sweeping the North seeped down through border states already uncertain about slavery, where even sections of the same state (for instance, coastal and mountain Virginia) divided bitterly on key issues. It was the world of Jefferson Davis, John C. Calhoun, Andrew Jackson, and Thomas Jefferson, and also of Gullah Jack, Nat Turner, and Frederick Douglass. Now, in the first volume of his long awaited, monumental study of the South's road to disunion, historian William Freehling offers a sweeping political and social history of the antebellum South from 1776 to 1854. All the dramatic events leading to secession are here: the Missouri Compromise, the Nullification Controversy, the Gag Rule ("the Pearl Harbor of the slavery controversy"), the Annexation of Texas, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Freehling vividly recounts each crisis, illuminating complex issues and sketching colorful portraits of major figures. Along the way, he reveals the surprising extent to which slavery influenced national politics before 1850, and he provides important reinterpretations of American republicanism, Jeffersonian states' rights, Jacksonian democracy, and the causes of the American Civil War. But for all Freehling's brilliant insight into American antebellum politics, Secessionists at Bay is at bottom the saga of the rich social tapestry of the pre-war South. He takes us to old Charleston, Natchez, and Nashville, to the big house of a typical plantation, and we feel anew the tensions between the slaveowner and his family, the poor whites and the planters, the established South and the newer South, and especially between the slave and his master, "Cuffee" and "Massa." Freehling brings the Old South back to life in all its color, cruelty, and diversity. It is a memorable portrait, certain to be a key analysis of this crucial era in American history.
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2.

History of Nebraska (Chap. 6 "The Kansas-Nebraska Act") » Read Now
by James C. Olson, Ronald C. Naugle. 506 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

History of Nebraska was originally created to mark the territorial centennial of Nebraska, and revised to coincide with the statehood centennial. This one-volume history quickly became the standard text for the college student and reference for the general reader, unmatched for three generations...
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History of Nebraska was originally created to mark the territorial centennial of Nebraska, and revised to coincide with the statehood centennial. This one-volume history quickly became the standard text for the college student and reference for the general reader, unmatched for three generations. This third edition, which has been thoroughly revised and rewritten while preserving the spirit and intelligence of the original, affirms and extends that record. Incorporating the results of thirty years of scholarship and research, the third edition of History of Nebraska gives fuller attention to such topics as the Native American experience in Nebraska and the accomplishments and circumstances of the state's women and minorities. It also provides a historical analysis of the state's dramatic changes in the past thirty years.
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3.

Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (Chap. 5 "Of Pegasus and Bellerophon Popular Sovereignty, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Origins of the Kansas-Nebraska Act") » Read Now
by Michael A. Morrison. 400 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

"A fresh and provocative contribution to our understanding of the process of party disorganization and sectional mobilization that brought the union to its final crisis". Peter S. Onuf, University of Virginia
How the territorial question and the extension of slavery led to the sectionalization of...
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"A fresh and provocative contribution to our understanding of the process of party disorganization and sectional mobilization that brought the union to its final crisis". Peter S. Onuf, University of Virginia
How the territorial question and the extension of slavery led to the sectionalization of American politics
Tracing the sectionalization of American politics in the 1840s and 1850s, Michael Morrison offers a comprehensive study of how slavery and territorial expansion intersected as causes of the Civil War. Specifically, he argues that the common heritage of the American Revolution bound Americans together until disputes over the extension of slavery into the territories led northerners and southerners to increasingly divergent understandings of the Revolution's legacy.
Manifest Destiny promised the literal enlargement of freedom through the extension of American institutions all the way to the Pacific. At each step -- from John Tyler's attempt to annex Texas in 1844, to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, to the opening shots of the Civil War-the issue of slavery had to be confronted. Morrison shows that the Revolution was the common prism through which northerners and southerners viewed these events and that the factor that ultimately made consensus impossible was slavery itself. By 1861, no nationally accepted solution to the dilemma of slavery in the territories had emerged, no political party existed as a national entity, and politicians from both North and South had come to believe that those on the other side had subverted the American political tradition.
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4.

History of Black Americans: From the Compromise of 1850 to the End of the Civil War (Chap. 11 "Kansas-Nebraska, Cuban Annexation, and the Early Republican Party") » Read Now
by Philip S. Foner. 540 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

...Black Resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850: The Last Phase 87...1850-1861 III: Africa 167 11. Kansas-Nebraska, Cuban Annexation, and the Early...
5.

The Origins of America's Civil War ("The Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854" begins on p. 99) » Read Now
by Bruce Collins. 169 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library
6.

Parties and Slavery, 1850-1859 (1906) (Chap. VII "The Kansas-Nebraska Bill (1853-1854)") » Read Now
by Theodore Clarke Smith. 344 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

...Oregon territory was closed by an organizing act of 1848. All that was left open to slave-holders...commissioners judgment. 1 Upon this act was poured out the anger of all...
7.

The Whig Party in the South (1913) (Chap. IX "The Kansas-Nebraska Bill") » Read Now
by Arthur Charles Cole. 398 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

...wing rendered them unfit to act as the champions of the slave...CHAPTER IX. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill 277 CHAPTER...21 hoping that they might act as a check upon "that...
8.

Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (Discussion of the Kansas-Nebraska bill begins on p. 155) » Read Now
by Eric Foner. 353 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

Since its publication twenty-five years ago, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men has been recognized as a classic, an indispensable contribution to our understanding of the causes of the American Civil War. A key work in establishing political ideology as a major concern of modern American historians...
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Since its publication twenty-five years ago, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men has been recognized as a classic, an indispensable contribution to our understanding of the causes of the American Civil War. A key work in establishing political ideology as a major concern of modern American historians, it remains the only full-scale evaluation of the ideas of the early Republican party. Now with a new introduction, Eric Foner puts his argument into the context of contemporary scholarship, reassessing the concept of free labor in the light of the last twenty-five years of writing on such issues as work, gender, economic change, and political thought. A significant reevaluation of the causes of the Civil War, Foner's study looks beyond the North's opposition to slavery and its emphasis upon preserving the Union to determine the broader grounds of its willingness to undertake a war against the South in 1861. Its search is for those social concepts the North accepted as vital to its way of life, finding these concepts most clearly expressed in the ideology of the growing Republican party in the decade before the war's start. Through a careful analysis of the attitudes of leading factions in the party's formation (northern Whigs, former Democrats, and political abolitionists) Foner is able to show what each contributed to Republican ideology. He also shows how northern ideas of human rights--in particular a man's right to work where and how he wanted, and to accumulate property in his own name--and the goals of American society were implicit in that ideology. This was the ideology that permeated the North in the period directly before the Civil War, led to the election of Abraham Lincoln, and led, almost immediately, to the Civil War itself. At the heart of the controversy over the extension of slavery, he argues, is the issue of whether the northern or southern form of society would take root in the West, whose development would determine the nation's destiny. In his new introductory essay, Foner presents a greatly altered view of the subject. Only entrepreneurs and farmers were actually "free men" in the sense used in the ideology of the period. Actually, by the time the Civil War was initiated, half the workers in the North were wage-earners, not independent workers. And this did not account for women and blacks, who had little freedom in choosing what work they did. He goes onto show that even after the Civil War these guarantees for "free soil, free labor, free men" did not really apply for most Americans, and especially not for blacks. Demonstrating the profoundly successful fusion of value and interest within Republican ideology prior to the Civil War, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men remains a classic of modern American historical writing. Eloquent and influential, it shows how this ideology provided the moral consensus which allowed the North, for the first time in history, to mobilize an entire society in modern warfare.
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9.

The Self-Inflicted Wound: Southern Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Discussion of the Kansas-Nebraska Act begins on p. 65) » Read Now
by Robert F. Durden. 150 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

...powers. Through the controversial Embargo Act, the Jefferson administration attempted...Madison, in March 1809 was to sign the act repealing the measure. The war with...
10.

Encyclopedia of American Parties, Campaigns, and Elections ("Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854" begins on p. 243) » Read Now
by William C. Binning, Larry E. Esterly, Paul A. Sracic. 467 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

In this comprehensive guide to the language of contemporary American politics, Binning offers clear descriptions of terms such as "soft money," "gerrymandering," and "blanket primary." Examples are frequently offered to help clarify definitions. Particular attention is given to the ever-changing...
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In this comprehensive guide to the language of contemporary American politics, Binning offers clear descriptions of terms such as "soft money," "gerrymandering," and "blanket primary." Examples are frequently offered to help clarify definitions. Particular attention is given to the ever-changing organizational structure of parties and contemporary electoral systems. This encyclopedia explains campaign finance reform laws and the Voting Rights Act. The more significant Supreme Court decisions in these areas are summarized, with an eye to giving readers a greater understanding of how these laws have been interpreted and applied. Brief biographies of important political figures such as presidents, vicepresidents, and congressional and party leaders are also included, along with a concise summary of every presidential election since 1789.
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11.

Governing the Devil in Hell: "Bleeding Kansas" and the Destruction of the Franklin Pierce Presidency, in White House Studies » Read Now
by Michael J.C. Taylor. 20 pgs.
12.

Liberalism's Hope and Despair: Lincoln's Peoria Speech of 1854, in Social Research » Read Now
by John Burt. 29 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

...The Debate Over the Kansas-Nebraska Act The speech Lincoln gave against the Kansas-Nebraska Act in Peoria on October 16...what would be the area of the Kansas- Nebraska...