Americans almost always view the Civil War of 1861-65 as a war between North and South, and specifically between the anti-slave states of New England and the mid-Atlantic, and the slave states of the South. During the war itself, some of the fighting occurred in the western areas of the Mississippi River (the Battle of Vickburg, for example), but for the most part the history taught in our schools has focused on the secession of the Southern States from the Union based on notions of “states’ rights,” and the Union’s campaign to end slavery in the South. As this article suggests, the Civil War was also the product of decades of political wrangling over Western expansion. This author argues that the “North-South” theme of the Civil War tends to ignore the massive social and political conflicts over slavery that took place in the West in the decades preceding the War– what I will call the “East-West” war between the States—and how the infamous Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 inexorably led the nation into war. It was 170 years ago, on May 30 1854, that this legislation was signed into law, triggering massive unrest in the country, and ultimately led to Civil War.
To appreciate the importance of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, we first need to understand the history of Western expansion in the first half of the 19th century. Almost from the moment the Louisiana Purchase was signed in 1803, the history of Western expansion was part-and-parcel with the history of slavery, due in large part to the antipathy of the Southern slave states to the addition of any new western states to the Union if they were “free” states in which slavery was outlawed. A major fear of southern slave holders was that as more states were added to the Union with voting power in the U.S. Congress, the greater the risk that a majority vote could emerge to completely outlaw slavery in the United States. Those fears led to a conscious and deliberate effort to block the admission of free states unless matched with new states that either openly endorsed slavery, or were “ripe for the pickings.” You see this in the series of states admitted to the Union after the the War of 1812, in which a number of anti-slave and slave states were admitted in pairs: Indiana and Mississippi (1816-17), Illinois and Alabama (1818-19), and Arkansas and Michigan (1836-37) are examples.
In the midst of this rapid addition of new states—17 new states were admitted between 1803 and 1859– Congress enacted the “Missouri Compromise” of 1820, which banned slavery in territories north of the 36 30 ‘parallel. But the Compromise did not last, as pressure mounted to allow slavery in the vast areas of the West that had not yet been admitted to the Union, including the Nebraska, Kansas, Utah and New Mexico Territories. Something had to give, and so Congress enacted the “Compromise of 1850,” which allowed slavery in the Utah and New Mexico Territories, while keeping the North-South dividing line of the Missouri Compromise in place (or at least it did not repeal the Missouri Compromise).
The Compromise of 1850 didn’t settle things, either. Just a few years later, Congress was petitioned to create another territory, the Nebraska Territory. The political maneuvering began on January 4, 1854, when Stephen A. Douglas (of the “Lincoln-Douglas Debates” fame) introduced a bill to create the Nebraska Territory, with the proviso that any later petition by Nebraska for statehood could be “with or without slavery, as [the state’s] constitution may prescribe at the time of their admission.” In other words, the bill provided that the citizens of the Territory had the authority—not the federal government– to become a slave state if they so chose. The bill thus embodied the concept of “popular sovereignty” that Douglas had long advocated, and which became a major bone of contention between him and Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates in 1858, in which the issue of slavery took center stage.
Although Nebraska was located north of the line established by the Missouri Compromise that otherwise would have barred slavery, Douglas’ bill was silent on whether the Missouri Compromise therefore barred slavery in the Nebraska Territory, notwithstanding the language quoted above. As a result, the bill met with vigorous opposition from various Southern senators who demanded that the bill explicitly repeal the Missouri Compromise. Over the course of the next three weeks, political leaders on both sides of the aisle tried to resolve the issue of slavery in the Nebraska Territory, but the Southern block in the Senate held strong. On January 23, a revised bill was introduced, endorsed by President Franklin Pierce, which affirmatively repealed the Missouri Compromise, and created two new Territories, Kansas and Nebraska, out of the original Territory of Nebraska—hence the later name of the legislation, the “Kansas-Nebraska Act.”
The introduction of Douglas’ revised bill on January 23 created a firestorm of criticism from anti-slavery advocates. One pamphlet labeled the bill “a gross violation of a sacred privilege,” and “a criminal betrayal of precious rights.” Protests took place throughout the North, and newspapers published countless diatribes against the bill. In the meantime, the Senate began debate on the bill on January 30, and spent the next five weeks in intense—and sometimes personal—attacks for and against the bill. Debate was ended on March 4. The final vote was 37 to 14 in favor of the bill, with virtually all slave state senators voting to approve the bill. More interesting is the fact that the vote among free state senators was very close—14 senators voted yes, while 12 voted no. Following the Senate vote, the House of Representatives spent most of the next two months debating the bill, finally approving it in a very close vote of 113 to 100. Once again, the slave states were staunch supporters, and Southern Democrats voted overwhelmingly in favor of the bill, 57 to 2. The bill was signed into law by President Pierce on May 30, 1854.
What followed in the period 1854-1861 was a series of bloody confrontations in Kansas, which came to be known as “Bleeding Kansas.” There, pro-slavery supporters streamed into the state from Missouri and other states in order to claim citizenship and vote in favor of Kansas entering the Union as a slave state, as the Kansas-Nebraska Act would have allowed. The confrontations in the state of Kansas became so pronounced that free-state advocates established their own state capitol in Topeka, to counter-act the political agitators in the existing capitol of Lecompton. It was in Kansas that abolitionist John Brown first gained notoriety for his instigation of the Pottawatomie Massacre in May 1856, in which five pro-slavery settlers were killed.
Out of this chaos, the Republican Party was born, Franklin Pierce was voted out of office in 1856, and Republican John C Fremont won the popular vote in a majority of the free states in the election—but lost to Democrat James Buchanan. Most alarmingly, on March 6, 1857, just days after President Buchanan was inaugurated, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, in which the Court ruled that the federal government did not have the power to exclude slavery in the territories. Buchanan endorsed the decision, and instructed his fellow Democrats to abide by the Court’s decision.
It’s clear in retrospect that Western expansion had put the Eastern anti-slavery states on a collision course with Southern slave states, as Eastern business interests sought to bring more western states into the Union as part of an overall plan to expand commerce, build railroads and other infrastructure, and convey public lands in the West into private hands. By the same token, Southern slave states had their own expansion plans, which involved the acquisition of more and more land in the West to fuel the production of cotton, enabled by slave labor. By the time the Kansas-Nebraska Act became law, there was no longer much hope of compromise, as the violent conflicts taking place in Kansas underscored. In just a few short years, the United States would experience death and destruction on an unprecedented scale when the Civil War broke out in the Spring of 1861. Looking back, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was the handwriting on the wall.