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Updated: June 1, 2025
The administration favored the admission of Kansas with the Lecompton Constitution, which was decidedly favorable to the proslavery men. Senator Douglas opposed this plan. He had become committed to the policy of squatter sovereignty during the debate on the Kansas-Nebraska bill in 1854.
General Houston voted against the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, and as a consequence lost his seat in the Senate. It was thought, and freely said, that for good and all he was down and out. He went home and announced himself a candidate for governor of Texas. The campaign that followed was of unexampled bitterness. The secession wave was already mounting high. Houston was an uncompromising Unionist.
But would this be true to that principle of "popular sovereignty" which was the very essence of the Kansas-Nebraska Act? Would it be true to the principle that each locality should decide for itself between slavery and freedom? On this issue the Southerners were fairly generally agreed and maintained that there was no obligation to go behind the work of the convention.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act prejudiced the minds of many against the doctrine, however sound in theory it may have seemed, by unsettling what the North regarded as its vested right in the free territory north of the line of the Missouri Compromise. The Act made the political atmosphere electric.
There were thrilling stories of the opening of the West and the building of transcontinental railways; but most often and most earnestly the discussion turned to the progress of the antislavery movement, to the infamous Kansas-Nebraska bill, to the New England Emigrant Aid Company, which was sending free-state settlers to Kansas, to the weakness of the government in playing again and again into the hands of the proslavery faction.
Local Indian tribes were then at war, but a sense of common danger caused the antagonistic red men to unite, and the white immigrants were massacred in a body. After the famous Missouri Compromise of 1820, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of thirty years later, the slave issue became a very live one in Kansas, and for some time the State was in a condition bordering upon civil war.
The Kansas-Nebraska Bill, which provided for the organizing of those two territories and opened them for settlement, was passed in May. 1854. This bill directly opposed the Missouri Compromise, which restricted slavery to all territory south of 36'0 30" north latitude.
Senator Everett disturbed the momentary quiet of Congress by presenting a memorial signed by over three thousand New England clergymen, who, "in the name of Almighty God," protested against the Kansas-Nebraska Act as a great moral wrong and as a breach of faith. This brought Douglas to his feet.
"But if the people of a Territory took away property in slaves, were they not also defying the Federal authorities?" persisted Green. Unquestionably Congress might revoke the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Douglas admitted; but it should be remembered that the act was bottomed upon an agreement.
One of the proposed changes provided that the chair should entertain no dilatory motions. Such motions, whose purpose was merely to obstruct action, had long been common. The Republicans were said to have alternated motions to adjourn and to fix a day for adjournment no less than one hundred and twenty-eight times in an attempt to defeat the Kansas-Nebraska bill in 1854.
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