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University Daily Kansan
Monday. April 17, 1961
Kansas-Nebraska Act Opened Bloody Struggle
By Tom Turner
It's a somewhat yellowed document now, resting in the United States Library of Congress. It's dated February 1854. But the years of controversy and the results of the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill are not told in its faded words.
THE BILL established an immense territory, stretching from the Missouri border on the south to the border of New Mexico, north to the continental divide, in what is now Colorado, up to the 40th parallel, and east along this northern boundary to the Missouri border again.
At least two issues were involved in the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. First, the dispute over the terminus of the proposed Pacific transcontinental railroad. Should it pass through the north, making Chicago and Iowa the main route, or further south, giving terminals to Wyandot Indian settlement (now Kansas City) and St. Louis? The second issue involved organization of the new territory (it was originally proposed as one territory . . . to be known as the Nebraska Territory). Should it be slave or free? By terms of the Missouri Compromise it was to be free because it was located north of the Mason-Dixon line.
The South wished to block the bill in order to bar the possibility of admitting other free states to surround slave Missouri. The north was appalled at the thought of inviting open warfare over the issue, but she was equally appalled at the thought of free choice in the territory.
Both camps agreed on one point, however. There was a desperate need in the young nation for a transcontinental railroad. So, while the Senate battled over the route the railroad would take, the, House heard the merits and demerits of making Nebraska slave or free. They
heard William Richardson, chairman of the Committee on Territories, reply to the ethnocentric, bickering Congressmen, his face flushed with anger:
"Everybody is talking about a railroad to the Pacific. In the name of God, how is a railroad to be made, if you will never let people live on the lands through which it passes?"
The bill passed the House Feb. 10, 1852, but Senate passage was not quite so easy. Sponsored by Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, the bill was tabled at the last session of 1853.
IN 1854, the bill was referred to the Senate Committee on Territories (headed by Sen. Douglas) in its House-passed form. In order to resolve the sectional disagreement over the slavery issue, a clause was inserted, leaving the loaded decision to the voters of the territory:
"When admitted as a state or states, the said territory . . . shall be received into the Union with or without slavery, as their constitutions prescribe at the time of their admission."
This clause was later clarified by the Senate to mean "by popular sovereignty," or by popular vote.
THE COMMITTEE solution did not pass unopposed. Senators argued for a stricter government provision. Senators Chase and Sumner of the north answered:
"We arraign the bill as a gross violation of a sacred pledge; as a criminal betrayal of precious rights; as part and parcel of an atrocious plot to exclude from a vast unoccupied region immigrants from the Old World, and free laborers from our own States, and convert it into a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves."
The South answered with border war and later a man named Quantrill.
THE FORMATION of two territories rather than one came out of Senate debate. The railroad route question still rested in the backs of legislators' minds.
Senators Dodge of Iowa and Johnson of Missouri argued for the division of territory. One territory meant aid to the central route; two
territories meant an equal chance for both northern and central routes.
for both northern and central routes. There was also the possibility that Kansas would go slave while Nebraska went free. This would appease not only pro-slave Missouri but anti-slavery Iowa.
So it was that the bill was passed in 1854 — two new territories endowed with the right, upon statehood, to decide whether to be slave or free.
Friction over this bill became so heavy in 1854 that a specific railroad route was never Congressionally selected. The route was left to the contractors.
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