Читать книгу American Civil War For Dummies - Keith D. Dickson - Страница 32

Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. Essentially, Douglas wanted to bypass the issue of slavery altogether in favor of westward expansion. Never believing slavery would expand into the Great Plains anyway, he proposed legislation that would allow the people who entered the territory to decide whether their future state would allow slavery or not. This idea, called popular sovereignty, would take Congress off the hook and give the power to individual citizens to decide the issue for themselves. While it seemed the perfect solution for a democracy, the act threw everything out of balance. Under the logic of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, all territory could legally be opened to slavery, and the compromise boundary line of 1820 no longer held.

This outraged Northerners who were willing to take action to ensure that slavery would be restricted in new territories at all costs. With the rest of the unorganized territory legally open to slavery as a result of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the South believed the time was now or never to assert its rights and ensure that its future power base in the West would be secure. By doing so, it would stave off what appeared to be the increasingly real threat of the North eventually overwhelming the South. Without a balance between free and slave states, the North would gain a permanent majority in both houses of Congress, leaving the South to the mercy of hostile Northern politicians and abolitionists, who would dictate the future direction of the nation. The stage was set for conflict in Kansas. Whichever section won political control of Kansas — by fair means or foul — had a good chance of controlling other territories and the political power in Congress when those territories became states. The political stakes for each section now became very high.