The Kansas-Nebraska Act Is Passed: May 25, 1854

This text comes from our book, Lands of Hope and Promise.

It was a year of troubles, was 1854. It was a year of economic depression. It was a year of unrest. Besides the upheaval over slavery, in the cities a smoldering resentment of the poor against the rich was growing more evident. And now the Kansas-Nebraska Act had shredded a 30-year compromise that had held the union together. What future was in store for the nation?

Anti-slavery Democrats in Congress—Joshua Giddings, Salmon Chase, Charles Sumner, and Gerrit Smith—denounced the Kansas-Nebraska Act in an “Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress to the People of the United States.” They called the act a “gross violation of a sacred pledge.” Citizens, they declared, might resist the act, “for the cause of freedom is the cause of God.” Other Democrats showed their disgust for the Democrats’ support for the Kansas-Nebraska Act by leaving the party.

Lafayette Hall, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where the newly established Republican Party held its first convention in February 1856

Throughout the North—in New England, the Midwest, and the states along the northern Mississippi—voices began to call for state conventions to stem the spread of slavery. Conventions of anti-slavery men met in Maine, Vermont, Michigan, and Massachusetts. A convention in Massachusetts, featuring Charles Francis Adams (John Quincy’s son), drew up a platform for what they called the Republican Party. The platform proclaimed “that no man can own another man . . . That slavery must be prohibited in the territories . . . That all new States must be Free States . . . That the rights of our colored citizens going to other States must be protected.”

Fearing that popular sovereignty might claim Kansas and Nebraska for slavery, northerners organized emigrant aid societies to settle anti-slavery men in those territories. The societies raised $100,000 to finance settlements of thousands of ardent, and not-so-ardent, anti-slavery families in Kansas and Nebraska.

The upheavals of the time revived old anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic nativism. Since the 1840s, harassment of immigrants, and Catholics in particular, had abated. Now, once again, many Americans saw both groups as threats—the Catholics to the Protestant ideas of freedom (as “papists,” it was said, they served a foreign prince), and the immigrants to the availability of jobs to poorer, Protestant whites. Some German immigrants had introduced revolutionary communism into America and were publishing journals (in German) calling for an uprising of the working class.

Charles B. Allen of New York had in 1849 founded a secret patriotic society called the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, that developed into the American “Know-Nothing” Party. Its goal was to support the election of anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic politicians to public office. Members of the order took oaths of secrecy; and, when asked anything about the order, were to reply “I know nothing” (for which they earned the dubious nickname, the “Know-Nothings.”) In 1852, the order showed some influence at the polls. By 1854, it had become a serious force in politics.

That year the “Know-Nothing” Order organized itself into a political party, called the American Party. The Whigs had disappeared, and the only major party, the Democratic, was the party of the immigrants and Catholics. (To nativist disgust, Democratic President Pierce had even appointed a Catholic to be his postmaster general.) The only recourse for nativists, then, was to form their own party. In the off-year elections of 1854, the American “Know-Nothing” Party almost took control of the state of New York. In Massachusetts, Know-Nothings secured the governorship, the entire Senate, and all but two seats in the House of Representatives. In 1855, they won victories in Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Connecticut. The same year, Know-Nothing officials were elected in Maryland and Kentucky, as well as Tennessee, New York, California, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. It seemed that the American Party could become a real rival to the Democratic Party. With the elections of 1856 just around the corner, Know-Nothings were sure they could capture even the presidency.

Bloody Kansas

Even before the Kansas-Nebraska Act had been signed into law, Missourians had been crossing the border onto the plains of Kansas. The territory was still Indian land, but such a technical legal detail had rarely influenced the settlement patterns of American emigrants. The government would eventually open any Indian territory to white settlement, if enough white Americans wanted it that way.

The Missourians in Kansas were pro-slavery. But with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, settlers from the Northeast, funded by emigrant aid societies, poured into Kansas to make sure the territory would be free-soil, not slave. Soon, the majority of settlers were free-soilers, and desperate pro-slavery southerners saw Kansas slipping from their grasp.

President Pierce appointed Andrew Reeder of Pennsylvania as the first territorial governor of Kansas and Samuel Dexter Lecompte as the territory’s first chief justice. As chief justice, Lecompte organized the first election for a territorial representative to Congress. Over 1,500 armed Missourians crossed the border to vote for pro-slavery candidates, overwhelming the votes of the free-soilers. During the election for the territorial legislature in March 1855, the same thing happened—Missourians assured a pro-slavery majority in the legislature. The new legislature, which then met at Leavenworth, adopted the laws of Missouri for Kansas, made it a crime to speak or write against slavery, and decreed that anyone helping a slave to escape from his master would be executed.

John Brown, about 1856

Hoping, however, to maintain peace in the territory, Governor Reeder dissolved the territorial legislature. But President Pierce, who favored the pro-slavery forces, removed Reeder and replaced him with a pro-slavery governor, William Shannon. The free-soilers, meanwhile, had set up their own legislature in Topeka that, in December 1855, drew up a free-state constitution that excluded all blacks, free or slave, from Kansas. The Topeka legislature chose state officials and sent a delegation to Congress.

In the midst of all this political wrangling, armed bands of pro-slavery men had been stopping wagons of emigrants from the Northeast, arresting free-soilers, and threatening anybody opposed to a pro-slavery future for Kansas. Hearing rumors of a large pro-slavery military force assembling in Missouri, free-soilers appealed to President Pierce for help, but he ignored them. Pierce blamed the emigrant aid societies for all the trouble in Kansas and gave his full support to the pro-slavery Leavenworth assembly. To counter pro-slavery violence, emigrant aid societies began sending supplies of Sharps repeating-rifles to Kansas free-soilers.

The stage was now set for a full-scale conflict. Major Jefferson Buford of Alabama, with 300 volunteers, marched into the territory to aid the pro-slavery forces. Governor Shannon welcomed Buford and designated his force the Kansas Militia. Strengthened by 500 more men, in May 1856, Buford’s militia descended on Lawrence, a free-soil town, confiscated the arms of the citizens, and destroyed printing presses, the public library, and the Free State Hotel. Emigrant aid societies responded to such violence by sending more money and settlers into Kansas. In Kansas itself, the reaction was far more bloody. An ardent abolitionist, John Brown, who lived at Osawatomie with his four sons and 60 other settlers, had come to Kansas to stop any westward tide of slavery. Now, in retaliation for the sacking of Lawrence and the murder of free-soilers, Brown led a party to the pro-slavery settlement at Dutch Henry’s Crossing on Pottawatomie Creek, seized five men, and gunned them down in a mass execution.

Cartoon of Preston Brooks’ attack on Sumner

For the next several months, bloody warfare, like a prairie fire, ignited the Kansas-Missouri border. Free-soil violence now equaled pro-­slavery violence. Northern “Jayhawkers” pitted themselves against Missouri “border ruffians” with such names as Kickapoo Rangers, Doniphan Tigers, and Lecompton Guards. Terrible were the stories that reached the East of murders, highway robberies, pillage, and arson. “Bloody Kansas” demonstrated how deep the chasm between the North and South was growing.

Nor was violence confined to the frontier. In Washington, D.C., on May 19, 1856, Charles Sumner, the talented, handsome anti-slavery senator from Massachusetts, eloquently condemned the “crime against Kansas” before the assembled Senate. Sumner scurrilously attacked Senator Andrew James Butler of South Carolina, saying he courted “the harlot slavery,” and called Stephen Douglas “the squire of slavery, ready to do its humiliating offices.” Two days later, Butler’s cousin, Preston Brooks, a congressman from South Carolina, stood up and denounced Sumner on the Senate floor for insulting not only Butler but South Carolina as well. Then with a stout stick, Brooks proceeded to beat the Massachusetts senator senseless.

Butler’s choice of weapon was pregnant with meaning. According to the southern code of honor, a “gentleman” would have been challenged to a duel, not beaten like a dog—or a slave! Charles Sumner did not recover for another three years, so badly was he wounded. The North, of course, denounced the violence and made Sumner a hero, while many southerners praised the “chivalry” of Preston Brooks for defending the honor of his state and his kinsman.