page_title: Kansas–Nebraska Act
section_title: Debate in Senate
hierarchical_section_title: Kansas–Nebraska Act / Congressional action / Debate in Senate
caption_attribution_description: The portrait is from the University of Texas at Austing Portrait Gallery, specifically shouston.jpg. The cited source there is
context_page_description: The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 was a territorial organic act that created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. It was drafted by Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas, passed by the 33rd United States Congress, and signed into law by President Franklin Pierce. Douglas introduced the bill with the goal of opening up new lands to development and facilitating construction of a transcontinental railroad, but the Kansas–Nebraska Act is most notable for effectively repealing the Missouri Compromise, stoking national tensions over slavery, and contributing to a series of armed conflicts known as "Bleeding Kansas".
  The United States had acquired vast amounts of sparsely settled land in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, and since the 1840s Douglas had sought to establish a territorial government in a portion of the Louisiana Purchase that was still unorganized. Douglas's efforts were stymied by Senator David Rice Atchison and other Southern leaders who refused to allow the creation of territories that banned slavery; slavery would have been banned because the Missouri Compromise outlawed slavery in territory north of latitude 36°30' north.
context_section_description: On January 23, a revised bill was introduced in the Senate that repealed the Missouri Compromise and divided the territory into two territories: Kansas and Nebraska. The division was the result of concerns expressed by settlers already in Nebraska as well as the senators from Iowa, who were concerned with the location of the territory's seat of government if such a large territory were created. Existing language to affirm the application of all other laws of the United States in the new territory was supplemented by the language agreed on with Pierce: "except the eighth section of the act preparatory to the admission of Missouri into the Union, approved March 6, 1820, which was superseded by the legislation of 1850, commonly called the compromise measures, and is declared inoperative." Identical legislation was soon introduced in the House.
  Historian Allan Nevins wrote that "two interconnected battles began to rage, one in Congress and one in the country at large: each fought with a pertinacity, bitterness, and rancor unknown even in Wilmot Proviso days." In Congress, the freesoilers were at a distinct disadvantage. The Democrats held large majorities in each house, and Douglas, "a ferocious fighter, the fiercest, most ruthless, and most unscrupulous that Congress had perhaps ever known" led a tightly disciplined party. It was in the nation at large that the opponents of Nebraska hoped to achieve a moral victory. The New York Times, which had earlier supported Pierce, predicted that this would be the final straw for Northern supporters of the slavery forces and would "create a deep-seated, intense, and ineradicable hatred of the institution which will crush its political power, at all hazards, and at any cost."
  
  The day after the bill was reintroduced, two Ohioans, Representative Joshua Giddings and Senator Salmon P. Chase, published a free-soil response, "Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress to the People of the United States:  
  We arraign this 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.
  
  Douglas took the appeal personally and responded in Congress, when the debate was opened on January 30 before a full House and packed gallery. Douglas biographer Robert W. Johanssen described part of the speech:  
  Douglas charged the authors of the "Appeal", whom he referred to throughout as the "Abolitionist confederates", with having perpetrated a "base falsehood" in their protest. He expressed his own sense of betrayal, recalling that Chase, "with a smiling face and the appearance of friendship", had appealed for a postponement of debate on the ground that he had not yet familiarized himself with the bill. "Little did I suppose at the time that I granted that act of courtesy," Douglas remarked, that Chase and his compatriots had published a document "in which they arraigned me as having been guilty of a criminal betrayal of my trust," of bad faith, and of plotting against the cause of free government. While other Senators were attending divine worship, they had been "assembled in a secret conclave", devoting the Sabbath to their own conspiratorial and deceitful purposes.
  
  The debate would continue for four months, as many Anti-Nebraska political rallies were held across the north. Douglas remained the main advocate for the bill while Chase, William Seward, of New York, and Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts, led the opposition. The New-York Tribune wrote on March 2:  
  The unanimous sentiment of the North is indignant resistance. ... The whole population are full of it. The feeling in 1848 was far inferior to this in strength and universality.
  The debate in the Senate concluded on March 4, 1854, when Douglas, beginning near midnight on March 3, made a five-and-a-half-hour speech. The final vote in favor of passage was 37 to 14. Free-state senators vote
caption: Sam Houston from Texas was one of the few southern opponents of the Kansas–Nebraska Act. In the debate he urged, "Maintain the Missouri Compromise! Stir not up agitation! Give us peace!"[27]
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