Twice-Divided Nation by Graber Samuel;

Author:Graber, Samuel; [Graber, Samuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT000000 Literary Criticism / General, LIT004020 Literary Criticism / American / General
Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Kansas-Nebraska: Unpopular Sovereignty

Buchanan and other American leaders sought to annex Cuba as part of a larger movement to expand the American slave system. One thrust of the proslavery plan sought the acquisition of new territory in the Caribbean and as far away as Central America. But another involved organizing new slave states within established US territory. The push to bring slavery to Kansas, a sparsely settled western region where it had been tacitly banned since 1820, would radically alter the American political landscape and create a new focal point for nationalist anxieties that were also fermenting throughout the transatlantic news.

The crisis began with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, legislation that laid out the terms under which the new territory would achieve statehood. Like Britain’s original war strategy, the act emerged from expansionist agendas pursued in the name of national interest. Yet, like the Crimean adventure, it inaugurated a period of national division and threw national politics into turmoil. Thus an expression of America’s continental ambitions ensured that its territorial destiny would be anything but manifest.

Introduced by Senator Stephen A. Douglas, one of the Compromise of 1850’s architects, the new act extended the southwestern territories’ right to decide the slavery question to the as-yet unorganized territories ceded to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase. In essence Kansas-Nebraska revoked the already weakened Missouri Compromise by rescinding the Free Soil status of the land immediately west of Missouri. This dubious alteration of a long-standing agreement arrived cloaked in the democratic-sounding mantle of “popular sovereignty” but was neither democratic nor popular. Interpreted in different ways by different factions, it inspired little support and much anxiety among the northern public, and its application caused one of the more bizarre parodies of self-government in US history.22

By allowing recent settlers to decide Kansas’s slavery question, the law divided the territory into two distinct camps, each with its own version of Kansas’s place in national history and each with contradictory visions of its future. Pro- and antislavery groups raced to Kansas, many of them less interested in settling than in settling the slavery issue, and they brought weapons to complement their respective arguments. Some Missouri border jumpers only stayed long enough to vote proslavery candidates into office and roust their opponents from their land if not their convictions. Northerners following the news from afar, and harkening to the many sermons, speeches, and editorials delivered by powerful antislavery advocates, funded Free Soil settlements and sent guns to defend them. While the transcendentalist minister Theodore Parker insisted that Kansas had finalized a deep national division and that “no moral union makes the two one,” the Tribune called for more guns, bodies, and blood to ensure Kansas entered the Union as a free state.23 Pro- and antislavery governments sent dueling constitutions to Washington for approval, forcing their consideration not just by politicians but also by all who followed the news. As it played out in the papers, Kansas’s divided history exacerbated conflicts between and within national political parties, breaking the two-party system and splitting the branches of government.

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