Kansas–Nebraska Act - Background

Background

The availability of tens of millions of acres of excellent farmland in the area made it necessary to create a territorial infrastructure to allow settlement. Railroad interests were especially eager to start operations since they needed farmers as customers. Four previous attempts to pass legislation had failed. The solution was a bill proposed in January 1854 by Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. He was the Democratic party leader in the United States Senate, the chairman of the Committee on Territories, an avid promoter of railroads, an aspirant to the presidency, and, above all, a fervent believer in popular sovereignty: the policy of letting the residents of a territory decide whether or not they would permit slavery to exist.

Since early in the 1840s the topic of a transcontinental railroad had been discussed. While there were debates over the specifics, especially the route to be taken, there was a public consensus that such a railroad should be built by private interests financed by public land grants. In 1845 Douglas, serving in his first term in the United States House of Representatives, had submitted an unsuccessful plan to formally organize the Nebraska Territory as the first step in building a railroad with its eastern terminus in Chicago. Railroad proposals were debated in all subsequent sessions of Congress with cities such as Chicago, St. Louis, Quincy, Memphis and New Orleans competing to be the jumping-off point for the construction.

Several proposals in late 1852 and early 1853 had strong support, but in the end they failed because of disputes over whether the railroad would follow a northern or a southern route. In early 1853 the House of Representatives passed a bill by a 107-to-49 vote that organized the Nebraska Territory in land west of Iowa and Missouri. In March the bill moved to the Senate Committee on Territories, which was then headed by Sen. Douglas. Missouri Sen. David Atchison announced that he would support the Nebraska proposal only if slaveholders were not banned from the new territory. While the bill was silent on this issue, slavery would have been prohibited under the terms of the Missouri Compromise. Other Southern senators were not as flexible as Atchison. By a vote of 23 to 17, the senate voted to kill the motion by laying it on the table with every senator from states south of Missouri voting for the tabling.

During the senate adjournment, the issues of the railroad and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise became entangled in Missouri politics as Atchison campaigned for re-election against the forces of Thomas Hart Benton. Atchison was maneuvered into choosing between antagonizing the state railroad interests and antagonizing the state slaveholders. Finally Atchison took the position that he would rather see Nebraska "sink in hell" before he would allow it to be overrun by free soilers.

In this era, congressmen generally found lodging in boarding houses when they were in the nation’s capital performing their legislative duties. Atchison shared lodgings in an F Street house shared by the leading Southerners in Congress. Atchison himself was the senate’s president pro tempore. His housemates included Robert T. Hunter (from Virginia, chairman of the Finance Committee), James Mason (from Virginia, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee) and Andrew P. Butler (from South Carolina, chairman of the Judiciary Committee). When Congress reconvened on December 5, 1853, this group, termed the "F Street Mess", along with Virginian William O. Goode, formed the nucleus that would insist on slaveholder equality in Nebraska. Douglas was aware of their opinions and power, and knew that he needed to address their concerns.

Iowa Sen. Augustus C. Dodge immediately reintroduced the same legislation to organize Nebraska that had stalled in the previous session; it was referred to Douglas’s committee on December 14. Douglas, hoping to achieve the support of the Southerners, publicly announced that the same principle that had been established in the Compromise of 1850 should apply in Nebraska. In the Compromise of 1850, Utah and New Mexico Territory had been organized without any restrictions on slavery, and many supporters of Douglas argued that this compromise had already superseded the Missouri Compromise. These territories, however, unlike Nebraska, had not been part of the Louisiana Purchase and had never been subject to the Missouri Compromise.