Compromises Leading to the Civil War

an agreement or a settlement of a dispute that is reached by each side making concessions.

Missouri Compromise

• When Missouri wanted to become a state in 1819 the balance of states would be thrown off.

• To solve this issue of balanced states, Maine was admitted to the Union as a Free State at the same time as Missouri (a slave state)

• Congress agreed to put down these new statehood requirements in a law.

Missouri Compromise

• All new states admitted to the Union, except Missouri, that are North of the Arkansas/Missouri border (36” 30” Line) would be Free States. All new states below this line would be Slave States.

• The Compromise required that the balance of power remain equal.

• This meant that one Free Territory and one Slave Territory would have to apply for statehood together to keep the country balanced.

Compromise of 1850

Compromise of 1850

Compromise of 1850

Compromise of 1850

Compromise of 1850

Compromise of 1850

Kansas-Nebraska

Kansas Nebraska Act

• On January 4, 1854, Stephen A. Douglas, wanting to ensure a northern transcontinental railroad route that would benefit his Illinois constituents, introduced a bill to organize the territory of Nebraska in order to bring the area under civil control.

• But southern senators objected; the region lay north of latitude 36°30′ and so under the terms of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 would become a free state.

• To gain the southerners’ support, Douglas proposed creating two territories in the area–Kansas and Nebraska–and repealing the Missouri Compromise line.

• The question of whether the territories would be slave or free would be left to the settlers under Douglas’s principle of popular sovereignty.

• Presumably, the more northern territory would oppose slavery while the more southern one would permit it.

Kansas Nebraska Act

• The Kansas-Nebraska Act was an 1854 bill that mandated “popular sovereignty”–allowing settlers of a territory to decide whether slavery would be allowed within a new state’s borders.

• The bill overturned the Missouri Compromise’s use of latitude as the boundary between slave and free territory.

Popular sovereignty is the principle that

the authority of a state and its government

is created and sustained by the consent of

its people, through their elected

representatives (Rule by the People), who are the source of all political power.

Kansas Nebraska Act

• The act passed Congress, but it failed in its purposes.

• By the time Kansas was admitted to statehood in 1861 after an internal civil war, southern states had begun to secede from the Union.

• The railroad was eventually built but not along the route Douglas wanted and with funds voted by a Republican Congress during a Republican Civil War administration.

Bleeding Kansas

• The conflicts that arose between pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers in the aftermath of the act’s passage led to the period of violence known as Bleeding Kansas, and helped paved the way for the American Civil War (1861-65)

• Bleeding Kansas is the term used to described the period of violence during the settling of the Kansas territory.

• Proslavery and free-state settlers flooded into Kansas to try to influence the decision.

• Violence soon erupted as both factions fought for control.

• Abolitionist John Brown led anti-slavery fighters in Kansas before his famed raid on Harpers Ferry.