Gambar halaman
PDF
ePub

SECOND. The Constitution of Missouri was found to dis criminate against free colored persons who were citizens in many of the States. The joint resolution of March 2, 1821, therefore admitted the State on condition of the abrogation of this discrimination.

[ocr errors]

CHAPTER X.

THE KANSAS-NEBRASKA BILL.

"Is this, O countrymen of mine! a day for us to sow
The soil of new-gained empire with slavery s seeds of woe?
To feed with our fresh life-blood the old world's cast-off crime,
Dropped, like some monstrosity, from the tired lap of time?
To run anew the evil race the old lost Nations ran,

And die like them of unbelief of God, and wrong of man?"

THE Kansas-Nebraska bill, is, in United States History,

an Act of Congress by which the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska were organized in 1854. Its political importance consisted wholly of its repeal of the Missouri Compromise.

for

Before the introduction of the bill, it did not seem possible

any further question to arise as to slavery in the United States. In the several States, slavery was regulated by State law; in the Louisiana purchase both sections had, in 1820, united to abolish slavery in the portion North of 36° 36', ignoring the portion South of it; all the Southern portion, outside the Indian Territory, was covered soon afterward by the slave State of Arkansas; and in the territory afterward acquired from Mexico, both sections had united in 1850 in an agreement to ignore the existence of slavery, until it could be regulated by the laws of the States which should be formed therefrom in future. Every inch of the United States seemed to be covered by some compromise or other.

The slavery question was in this condition of equilibrium, when a bill was passed by the House, February 10, 1853, to organize the Territory of Nebraska, covering, also, the modern State of Kansas. It lay wholly within that portion of the Louisiana purchase, whose freedom had been guaranteed by the Missouri Compromise, and the bill, therefore, said nothing about slavery, its supporters taking it for granted that the territory was already full. In the Senate it was laid on the table, March 3, the affirmative including every Southern Sen

ator except those from Missouri; but their opposition to the bill came entirely from an undefined repugnance to the practical operations of the Missouri Compromise-not from any idea that the Compromise was no longer in force. If it had been repealed by the compromise of 1850, those most interested in the repeal do not seem to have yet discovered it in 1853.

During the summer of 1853, following the adjournment of Congress, the discussion of the new phase which the proposed organization of Nebraska at once brought about in the slavery question, became general among Southern politicians. The Southern people do no seem to have taken any great interest in the matter, for it was very improbable that slave labor could be profitably employed in Nebraska, even if it were allowed. The question was wholly political. The territory in question had been worthless ever since it was bargained away to secure the admission of Missouri as a Southern and slave-holding State; but now emigration was beginning to mark out the boundaries of present Territories and potential States, which would, in the near future, make the South a minority in the Senate, as it had always been in the House, and, perhaps place it at the mercy of the united North. To prevent this, result was of importance to Southern politicians, 1st, that, if the Missouri Compromise was to endure, Nebraska should remain unorganized, in order to check immigration and prevent the rapid formation of another Northern State; 2d, that, if the Missouri Compromise could be avoided, Nebraska should at least be open to slavery, for the same purpose as above, since it was agreed on all hands that free immigration instinctively avoided any contact with slave labor; and, 3d, that, if slave labor could possibly be made profitable in Nebraska, the Territory should become a slave State. The last contingency was generally recognized as highly improbable; one of the first two was the direct objective point.

On January 16, 1854, Dixon, of Kentucky, gave notice of an amendment abolishing the Missouri Compromise in the case of Nebraska. This was the first open signal of danger to the Missouri Compromise; and, on the following day, Sumner, of

[ocr errors]

Massachusetts, gave notice of an amendment to the bill, providing that nothing contained in it should abrogate or contravene that settlement of the slavery question. Douglas at once had the bill recommitted, and, January 23, he reported, in its final shape, the Kansas-Nebraska bill, which, in its ultimate and unexpected consequences, was one of the most far-reaching legislative acts in American History.

The bill divided the Territory from latitude 37° to latitude 43° 30' into two Territories, the Southern to be called Kansas and the Northern Nebraska; the territory between latitude 36° 30′ and 37° was now left to the Indians. In the organization of both these Territories it was declared to be the purpose of the act to carry out the following three propositions and principles established by the compromise measures of 1850: First. That all questions of slavery in the Territories, or States to be formed from them, were to be left to the representatives of the people residing therein. Second. That cases involving title to slaves, or personal freedom, might be appealed from the local tribunals to the Supreme Court; and third. That the fugitive slave law should apply to the Territories. The section which extended the Constitution and laws of the United States over the Territories, had the following proviso: "Except the eighth section of the act preparatory to the admission of Missouri into the Union, approved March 6, 1820, which, being inconsistent with the principles of non-intervention of Congress with slavery in the States and Territories, as recognized by the legislation of 1850, commonly called the Compromise Measure, is hereby declared inoperative and void; it being the true intent and meaning of this act not to legislate slavery into any Territory or State, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States."

The effects of the bill upon the parties of the time may be summarized as follows: First, It destroyed the Whig party, the great mass of whose voters in the South went over to the Democratic party, and in the North to the new Republican

party; Second, It made the Democratic party almost entirely sectional, for the loss of its strong anti-slavery element in the North left it, in the course of the next few years, to a hopeless minority there; it crystallized all the Northern element opposed to slavery into another sectional party soon to take the name of Republican; and, Fourth, It compelled all other elements, after a hopeless effort to form a new party on a new issue, to join one or the other sectional party. Its effects on the people of the two sections were still more unfortunate: in the North it laid the foundation for the belief, which the Dred Scott decision was soon to confirm, that the whole policy of the South was a greedy, grasping, selfish desire for the extension of slavery. In the South, by the grant of what none but the politicians had hitherto asked or expected, the abolition of the Missouri Compromise, it prepared the people for the belief that the subsequent forced settlement of Kansas by means of emigrant aid societies was a treacherous evasion by the North of the terms of the Kansas-Nebraska bill, and still more the Dred Scott decision which followed it, placed each section in 1860, to its own thinking, impregnably upon its own peculiar ground of aggrievement: the North remembered only the violation of the Compromise of 1820 by the Kansas-Nebraska bill, taking the Dred Scott decision as only an aggravation of the original offense: the South, ignoring the Compromise of 1820 as obsolete by mutual agreement, complained of the North's refusal to carry out fairly the Kansas-Nebraska bill and the Dred Scott decision.

« SebelumnyaLanjutkan »