140 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS
On January 4, 1854, the Democratic Party’s most
powerful senator introduced a bill that prompted
a national crisis and disrupted the entire political
landscape. The Illinois senator, Stephen Douglas,
designed the bill to unify the Democrats and bring
him one step closer to the White House. Instead
it tore his party apart and contributed to a violent
reckoning over slavery in the West.
Douglas proposed the bill to organize the
two large territories of Kansas and Nebraska for
settlement, as shown on this map. They had been
considered Indian territory until westward expansion
led many to press for more land opportunities in
the 1850s. This reconsideration of the territory was
also driven by plans for a transcontinental railroad.
Douglas preferred a northern route through his native
Chicago, but knew that this would require support
from the Southern wing of his party. For themselves,
Southern Democrats insisted on the party’s explicit
commitment to defending and expanding slavery.
To curry favor with Southern Democrats, Douglas
included a provision in the Kansas–Nebraska bill
that granted future settlers of these two territories
the right to determine the legality of slavery for
themselves. He believed that this eminently
“democratic” solution would appeal to everyone
in his party, but he was utterly wrong. Thirty-four
years earlier, Congress had made slavery illegal in
the Louisiana Territory north of the 36° 30' line, just
south of Kansas. With his new bill, Douglas cavalierly
overturned the Missouri Compromise, which
had endured for over three decades. Slavery had
historically been limited to the American South;
now it had license to spread throughout the West.
This supreme political miscalculation
inadvertently galvanized opposition to slavery across
the political spectrum. Most Northerners cared little
about the fate of African Americans, but the prospect
of slavery expanding into the West both terrified
and enraged them. The backlash was far worse
than Douglas could have imagined, and it drove
disaffected Whigs and Democrats together to form
the new Republican Party. What united this diverse
group was the conviction that Congress had not just
the right but also the obligation to bar slavery from the
western territories. Republicans believed that slavery
was wrong, but even more pressing was their vision of
the territorial west as protected for free whites.
THE GEOPOLITICS OF SLAVERY
John Jay, “Freedom and Slavery, and
the Coveted Territories,” 1856