PW - The 1850s Lesson

The 1850s

Kansas Nebraska Act

A Closer Look: Kansas-Nebraska Act

A Closer Look: Kansas-Nebraska Act

Image Credit: Map Courtesy of PBS.

In 1854, Congress again took up the issue of slavery in new U.S. states and territories. This time, the territories were Kansas and Nebraska, and Congress approved the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and gave the settlers in all new territories the right to decide for themselves whether theirs would be a free or a slave state. This made a proslavery doctrine, popular sovereignty (rule by the people), the law of the United States.

Pro and antislavery groups hurried into Kansas in attempts to create voting majorities there. Antislavery abolitionists came from Eastern states; proslavery settlers came mainly from neighboring Missouri. Some of these Missourians settled in Kansas, but many more stayed there only long enough to vote for slavery and then return to Missouri.

Proslavery voters elected a legislature ready to make Kansas a slave state. Abolitionists then elected a rival Kansas government with an antislavery constitution, established a different capital city, and raised an army. Proslavery Kansans reacted by raising their own army.

The U.S. House of Representatives supported the abolitionist Kansans; the U.S. Senate and President Franklin Pierce supported the proslavery Kansans. Violence between the two sides created warlike conditions. Popular sovereignty had failed.

Dred Scott

21 DRED SCOTT v. SANDFORD (1857). A slave, Dred Scott sued for his freedom on the ground that his master, an Army surgeon, had taken him into Illinois and then the Wisconsin Territory, where slavery had been barred by Congress in the Missouri Compromise. The Court, whose majority decision was read by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, ruled that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional because it violated the property rights protected by the Fifth Amendment, since it denied slave owners the right to take their property wherever they wanted to. In effect, this decision opened all the West to slavery, infuriated the North, and pushed the nation more precipitously toward civil war.In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court issued the Dred Scott decision, settling a lawsuit in which an African American slave named Dred Scott claimed he should be a free man because he had lived with his master in slave states and in free states. The Court rejected Scott's claim, ruling that no African American - even if free - could ever be a U.S. citizen. Further, the Court said Congress could not prohibit slavery in federal territories. Thus, the Court found that popular sovereignty and the Missouri Compromise of 1820 were unconstitutional.

Portrait of Dred Scott

The Dred Scott decision gave slavery the protection of the U.S. Constitution. Proslavery Americans welcomed the Court's ruling as proof they had been right during the previous few decades struggles against abolitionists. In contrast, abolitionists convinced many state legislatures to declare the Dred Scott decision not binding within their state borders. The new Republican Party said that if their candidate were elected president in 1860 he would appoint a new Supreme Court that would reverse Dred Scott.

 

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