compromise, the law allowed the people of these territories to decide if slavery would or wouldn’t exist. This concept, known as popular sovereignty, allows people to decide an issue. This provision basically ended the Missouri Compromise. However, instead of keeping things calm, there was fierce fighting in Kansas over the spread of slavery in that territory. There were various reasons for passing this law.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act was caused by the need for a transcontinental railroad and the desire of Northerners to have that railroad run through the North.

After the US acquired the West Coast, it became clear that a railroad was needed to cross the country and provide decent transportation to and from that area.  Northerners and Southerners both wanted the railroad to go through their territory.  One of the problems for the North was that a Northern railroad would have to go through Kansas or Nebraska and neither of these areas had yet been organized as an official territory with a government and such.  In order to defeat that criticism of the Northern line, Stephen Douglas proposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act was a law that was passed by Congress in 1854.  It created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska and it specified that the issue of slavery in those territories would be subject to popular sovereignty. That is, the people in the territories would be able to vote on whether to allow slavery.  The Kansas-Nebraska Act led to violence in Kansas and helped to bring about the Civil War.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act was proposed by Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois.  Douglas wanted to get the area that is now Nebraska organized into a formal territory because it was necessary to do so in order to put a transcontinental railroad across that land.  Douglas wanted the transcontinental railroad to begin in Chicago and go across the Midwest rather than allowing it to take a more southern route that would not include his state. 

The problem with the Kansas-Nebraska Act was that it called for popular sovereignty on the issue of slavery. This was an issue because the Missouri Compromise had banned slavery in both Kansas and Nebraska. The Kansas-Nebraska Act upset Northerners by doing away with the Missouri Compromise and reopening the issue of slavery.  Northerners felt that the new law showed that the South had the power to rewrite laws to its own advantage.

After the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed, conflict erupted in Kansas between pro- and anti-slavery settlers. This time of conflict has come to be known as “Bleeding Kansas.”  A major figure to come out of this was John Brown, who was involved in massacres of pro-slavery settlers.

Because the Kansas-Nebraska Act brought about “Bleeding Kansas,” it also helped bring about the Civil War. It helped to make the North and the South trust one another less and feel more hatred and anger towards one another. In this way, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was a very important step in the movement toward the Civil War.

In the Pre- Civil War days of believing that compromise can solve all problems in the young nation, the Kansas- Nebraska Act was another political maneuver that sought to avoid confronting the challenging slavery question.  Essentially, the act divided the Nebraska territory into territories that could decide the "free state" vs. "slave state" issue by popular sovereignty.  Senator Stephen Douglas from Illinois proposed the legislation, believing that it would be better for settlers to decide the issue through their own vote as opposed to making government intervene in the issue.  The result of "Bleeding Kansas," where pro- slavery and anti- slavery settlers rushed to decide the issue through armed confrontation proved the legislation to be a disastrous miscalculation on his part.  In the end, the Act was another telling sign that the nation could not resolve the issue of slavery without armed conflict and that it could not be negotiated away.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act was a law passed in 1854 that did a lot to help make the Civil War more likely.  It caused there to be more anger between the North and the South.

The Act said that Kansas and Nebraska would get to decide whether they wanted to have slaves or not.  This went against the Missouri Compromise, which had already decided that both territories could not have slaves.

This, in itself, made the North mad.  But what made things worse was the fighting in Kansas that came out of this.  Pro- and anti-slavery settlers competed in Kansas to get the largest population and so win the vote over slavery.  This competition included lots of violence.

Starting with the Compromise of 1850, tensions between North and South over the legality of slavery within the territories would continually intensify across the decade, eventually culminating in the Civil War. The Kansas-Nebraska Act would represent a critical moment in this history.

One of the key features of US history up to this point in the nineteenth century was the growth of abolitionism in the North and with it the desire to eventually outlaw slavery by constitutional amendment. Naturally, so long as there was a balance between slave states and free states, such hopes would prove impossible to achieve. Thus, both Southerners and Northerners viewed the territories as the key political battleground over which slavery's future status would ultimately be determined (as it was from the territories that new states would eventually be formed).

With the Compromise of 1850, the principle of popular sovereignty was first applied to the New Mexico and Utah territories, allowing the residents within those territories to determine for themselves whether or not slavery should be legal or illegal. One of the key points of the Kansas-Nebraska Act was that it applied this principle of popular sovereignty to the territories of Kansas and Nebraska (thus reversing a precedent by which slavery had been outlawed within these territories since the Missouri Compromise). As a result, both abolitionists and defenders of slavery moved into Kansas, seeking to influence these votes in their favor. This resulted in a great deal of sectarian violence.

Throughout this decade of the 1850s, one can observe growing discord between the South and the North over the issue of slavery, eventually resulting in the Civil War. The Kansas-Nebraska Act (and the turmoil that would result from it) played a critical role within that history.