Kansas-Nebraska Act

[kan-zuhs-nuh-bras-kuh]

noun

U.S. History.

1. the act of Congress in 1854 annulling the Missouri Compromise, providing for the organization of the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, and permitting these territories self-determination on the question of slavery.

Kansas-Nebraska Act

1. A law passed by Congress in 1854 that divided the territory west of the states of Missouri and Iowa and the territory of Minnesota into two new territories, Kansas and Nebraska. The law was extremely controversial because it did not exclude slavery from either territory, despite the fact that the Missouri Compromise prohibited slavery in these territories. By effectively repealing the Missouri Compromise, the law outraged many northerners, led to the collapse of the Whig party and the rise of the Republican party, and moved the nation closer to civil war.

Example Sentences

Franklin Pierce, although a Northerner, fiercely defended slavery while signing the Kansas-Nebraska Act and enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act; he was a drunkard to boot.

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But “the sectional bargain collapsed with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854,” Radan writes, nullifying the Missouri Compromise for the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, leaving states that emerged there “free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way.”

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In May 1854, just as the Kansas-Nebraska Act exploded in American politics, a man named Anthony Burns, who had escaped slavery in Virginia, was arrested and detained in Boston.

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Or did it come in 1854, when the Kansas-Nebraska Act proposed to settle the question of whether those territories would permit slavery on the basis of “popular sovereignty,” meaning the voters would decide by referendum?

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David W. Blight, a Yale historian and expert on the breakdown of American governance before the Civil War, spoke of the hollowing of the political center in the mid-19th century and, after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, congressional paralysis.

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