Another election was called. Once again pro-slavery supporters won and once again they were charged with election fraud. As a result, Congress did not recognize the constitution adopted by the pro-slavery settlers and Kansas was not allowed to become a state.
Eventually, however, anti-slavery settlers outnumbered pro-slavery settlers and a new constitution was drawn up. On January 29, , just before the start of the Civil War, Kansas was admitted to the Union as a free state. Douglas in a series of seven debates. Thousands of spectators and newspaper reporters from around the country watched as The Fugitive Slave Acts were a pair of federal laws that allowed for the capture and return of runaway enslaved people within the territory of the United States.
Enacted by Congress in , the first Fugitive Slave Act authorized local governments to seize and return escapees The Civil Rights Act of , which ended segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin, is considered one of the crowning legislative achievements of the civil rights movement. First proposed by The Patriot Act is legislation passed in to improve the abilities of U.
Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Recommended for you. Kansas-Nebraska Act. Bleeding Kansas. Tea Act. Townshend Acts. Voters there would decide for themselves whether or not to permit slavery, and the principle would be known as popular sovereignty.
But four years later Douglas had a different agenda. Early in , hoping to open the way for a railroad linking California with Illinois and the East, he wanted Congress to approve the establishment of the NebraskaTerritory in the vast wilderness west of Missouri and Iowa. Douglas had sought such approval before, but lacked the Southern votes to get it.
Further bargaining would now be necessary, and the stakes this time would include the Missouri Compromise, for more than 30 years the foundation of federal policy regarding the expansion of slavery. If Nebraska were organized with the compromise in place, it would be slave-free and slave-state Missouri would be bordered on three sides by free states and territories.
Douglas was reluctant, but finally agreed. I will incorporate it into my bill, though I know it will raise a hell of a storm.
He was right about that. There was, in fact, a growing antipathy in the North toward slavery. Also, the law seemed to promise the movement of blacks into areas Northern whites had assumed were to be reserved for them. He was, after all, a practical man, and he saw Kansas-Nebraska as a practical bill.
By transferring authority over slavery from Congress to the territories themselves, he believed he was removing a threat to the Union. Nor did he think it likely that slavery would spread from the 15 states where it existed to the areas being opened for settlement. But when it came to judging public feeling on the issue, the senator was, unhappily, tone-deaf. Many Northerners, and Lincoln is a great example, thought the Missouri Compromise was just a notch below the Constitution as a fundamental part of the American political framework.
They saw it as putting slavery on the road to extinction, and that was for them a sacred goal. Kansas-Nebraska betrayed this. Douglas seemed unfazed at first, confident he could undo the damage. He soon discovered otherwise. Opponents of the Kansas-Nebraska Act carried both houses of the Illinois legislature, which at that time still elected U. Suddenly, the Democrats found themselves a Southern party, one that would be able after to elect only one president in the remainder of the century.
Meanwhile, Abraham Lincoln, a former one-term congressman nearly five years out of office, had joined the fray. While Douglas viewed popular sovereignty as a bedrock democratic value, Lincoln saw its application to slavery as a callous statement of moral indifference. And he equated revoking the Missouri Compromise with repudiating the Declaration of Independence itself.
He was, like Douglas, a practical man, with whom the Union always came first. He endorsed the spirit of compromise on which it depended, and which he believed Kansas-Nebraska subverted. One side will provoke; the other resent. The one will taunt, the other defy; one aggresses, the other retaliates.
That is precisely what happened. When the North proved equally determined to keep Kansas free, the territory turned into a battlefield. Events quickly took an ominous turn.
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