A History of the American People

land strategy of the South. Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, who had helped Clay to draft the
1850 Compromise, was now chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, and in that
capacity he brought forward a Bill to create a new territory called Nebraska in the lands west of
the Missouri and Iowa, the object being to get rails across it with an eastern terminus in the
rapidly growing beef-and-wheat capital of Chicago. To appease the Southerners, he proposed to
include in the Bill a popular sovereignty clause, allowing the Nebraskans themselves to decide if
they wanted slavery or not. The South was not satisfied with this and Douglas sought to reassure
them still further by not only providing for another territory and future state, Kansas, but
repealing the old 1820 Missouri Compromise insofar as it banned slavery north of latitude 36.30.
This outraged the North, brought up to regard the 1820 Compromise as a sacred pledge,' almost part of the Constitution. It outraged some Southerners too, such as Sam Houston of Texas, who saw that these new territories would mean the expulsion of the Indians, who had been told they could occupy these landsas long as grass shall grow and water run.' But Douglas, who wanted
to balance himself carefully between North and South and so become president, pushed on; and
President Pierce backed him; and so the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed by 113 to 100 in the House
and 37 to 14 in the Senate, in May 1854.
Backing this contentious Bill proved, for Pierce, a mistake and ruled out any chance of his
being reelected. It also led to what might be called the first bloodshed of the Civil War. Nebraska
was so far north that no one seriously believed it could be turned into a series of free states.
Kansas was a different matter, and both sides tried to build up militant colonies there, and take
advantage of the new law which stated its people were perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution.' The first foray was conducted by the New England Emigrant Aid Society, which in 1855-6 sent in 1,250 anti-slavery enthusiasts. The Southerners organized just across the border in Missouri. In October 1854 the territory's first governor, Andrew H. Reeder, arrived and quickly organized a census, as prelude to an election in March 1855. But when the election came, the Missourians crossed the border in thousands and swamped the polls. The governor said the polls were a fraud but did nothing to invalidate the results, probably because he was afraid of being lynched. Territorial governors were provided by Washington with virtually no resources or money, as readers of Chapter 25 of Mark Twain's Roughing It-which describes the system from bitter experience-will know. At all events the slavers swept the polls, expelled from the legislature the few antislavers who were elected, adopted a drastic slave-code, and made it a capital offense to help a slave escape or aid a fugitive. They even made orally questioning the legality of slavery a felony. The anti-slavers, and genuine settlers who wanted to remain neutral, responded by holding a constitutional convention-elected unlawfully-drafted a constitution in Topeka which banned both slaves and freed blacks from Kansas, applied for admission to the US as a state, and elected another governor and legislature. Then the fighting began, a miniature civil war of Kansas' own. The Bible-thumping clergymen from the North proved expert gun-runners, especially of what were known as 'Beecher's Bibles,' rifles supplied by the bloodthirsty congregation of the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. The South moved in guns too. In May 1856 a mob of slavers sacked Lawrence, a free-soil town, blew up the Free State Hotel with five cannon, burned the governor's house and tossed the presses of the local newspaper into the river. This in turn provoked a fanatical free-soiler called John Brown, a glaring-eyes fellow later described by one who was with him in Kansas asa man impressed with the idea that God has raised him up on purpose to
break the jaws of the wicked.' Two days after the `Sack of Lawrence,' Brown, his four sons, and