Kansas-Nebraska Act
In January, 1854, Senator Stephen Douglas proposed a bill to organize the territory west of Missouri. The price of
southern support, Douglas soon discovered, was the addition of an amendment explicity repealing the Missouri
Compromise. He reluctantly agreed, and in this more controversial form, the bill made its way through Congress. It
passed in the Senate by a large margin and passed narrowly in the House. Douglas’s bill split his party rather than
uniting it. A group of independent Democrats denounced the bill as a “gross violation of a sacred pledge.” For
many northerners, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was an abomination, striking them like a slap in the face because it
permitted the possibility of slavery where it had previously been prohibited.
Douglas’s bill had a catastrophic effect on sectional harmony. It repudiated a compromise that many in the north
regarded as binding. In defiance of the whole compromise tradition, it made a concession to the South on the issue
of slavery extension without providing an equivalent concession to the North. It also shattered the fragile sectional
accommodation of 1850 and made future compromises less likely.
The act also destroyed what was left of the two parties, the Whigs and the Democrats. The Whig party disintegrated
when its congressional representation split cleanly along sectional lines. The Democratic Party survived, but its
ability to act as a unifying national force was seriously impaired. They lost influence in the North and became the
regional proslavery party of the South.