When douglas divided nebraska territory into two territories, he expected popular sovereignty to

Though Douglas believed the settlers of a territory should decide the slavery question without input from the rest of the nation, his Illinois rival Abraham Lincoln begged to differ. He thought it only logical that the federal territories be regulated by the federal government, meaning Congress. A third view, proposed by Southern senators, argued that precisely because federal territory was owned by the nation as a whole, American citizens possessed the right to take their property—including slaves—into the territory. Lincoln disagreed. If the American people thought "the extension of slavery endangers them," he concluded that they would be irresponsible to "submit the question, and with it, the fate of their country, to a mere handful of men, bent only on temporary self-interest."

Stephen Douglas argued that popular sovereignty was neither a new nor controversial approach to organizing federal territories, but one rooted in American self-government and recently endorsed by northerners and southerners alike in the Compromise Measures of 1850. These measures began as a way to organize the vast western territory—more than half a million square miles comprising present-day Arizona, California, western Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah—acquired by the United States at the close of the Mexican War in early 1848.

The Mexican War began as a border dispute between Texas, recently annexed by the United States, and Mexico, who ended up ceding land that stretched west to the Pacific Ocean and north as far as Wyoming. The war's results not only pleased northern Democrats, bent on fulfilling America's "manifest destiny" to span the North American continent, but also southern Whigs and Democrats, who saw Texas and the western territories as ripe for the rule of "King Cotton" and the spread of slavery. The acquisition of this new land only intensified the national debate over slavery, a debate that would require a complex compromise to avoid a secession of the southern slaveholding states. (For additional information on the Mexican War, see Section VIII, "Extending the Lesson," below.)

The 1850 Compromise Measures were first introduced by Kentucky Senator Henry Clay, who became famous through his work on the 1820 Missouri Compromise. But when he was unable to get the measures passed as a single law, Stephen Douglas worked to pass them as separate statutes. The 1850 Compromise:

1. admitted California as a free state,
2. organized the Utah and New Mexico territories "with or without slavery" when eventually admitted as states,
3. drew in the western boundary of Texas in exchange for $10 million (to pay Texas' debt to Mexico),
4. abolished the slave trade, but not slavery itself, in Washington, D.C., and
5. strengthened the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act through several notorious provisions (e.g., alleged fugitive slaves were not permitted to testify in their own defense and the trial commissioner was paid $10 for a conviction and only $5 for an acquittal).

By providing territorial governments for Utah and New Mexico without banning or legalizing slavery, the seeds of popular sovereignty had been planted by a Congress seeking to lessen the sectional agitation over the future of slavery in an expanding America.

The organization of the Kansas and Nebraska territories would eventually lead to congressional support of a transcontinental railroad that would unite the frontier West with the established East. But in the short run, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 provoked a race between freeholders and slaveholders to settle the territory. The southernmost territory, which bordered the slave state of Missouri, became known as "Bleeding Kansas" for the violence that ensued in the battle to control the territory's political and economic future.

Abraham Lincoln: From the Repeal of the Missouri Compromise to the Birth of the Republican Party

A congressman during the Mexican War, Abraham Lincoln joined his Whig Party in calling the war "unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced" by Democratic President James Polk. When Lincoln completed his term in March 1849, he devoted himself to his neglected Illinois law practice. Not even the controversial Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which compelled northern citizens to help capture fugitive slaves and stirred Harriet Beecher Stowe to write Uncle Tom's Cabin, pulled him back into the political limelight. But when the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed four years later, Lincoln commented that its repeal of the Missouri Compromise "aroused him as he had never been before." From that point on, Lincoln directed his public life towards reversing the growing acceptance of black slavery as a morally indifferent matter at best, and a "positive good" at worst.

"On the question of liberty, as a principle," Lincoln wrote in August 1855, "we are not what we have been." The Whig Party, to which Lincoln devoted himself as a longtime follower of Henry Clay, ceased to be a national power after losing the 1852 presidential election. The nail in its coffin was the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, but this reinvigorated "free soil/free labor" movements in the North. They were anti-slavery in sentiment but not necessarily abolitionist, because the latter disdained the federal Constitution for protecting slavery in states where it already existed. A nascent Republican Party took shape in a few states, but Lincoln would wait until 1856 to join what became a national party committed to the restriction of slavery from federal territory.

In Lincoln's mind, the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 marked a crossroads in American politics: the nation must decide if the federal constitution committed them to the spread of freedom or slavery. A year later, reflecting on the nation's growing sectionalism over slavery and the inability of slave states to wean themselves off of their "peculiar institution," Lincoln would write, "I think that there is no peaceful extinction of slavery in prospect for us." Douglas's prediction that popular sovereignty would "impart peace to the country & stability to the Union" would prove tragically off the mark.

By 1854 the United States had fulfilled its "manifest destiny" of occupying all of the geographical expanse from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans. The rapid settlement of the West raised to a new level of intensity the persistent question of whether or not to permit slavery to extend into the new territories.

This activity requires students to contrast the maps of 1820 and 1854 so that they can see how much the nation had grown in the thirty-four year period, and to analyze new developments in the map of 1854 in order for students to appreciate the urgency of the arguments advanced in the national debate over slavery.

Students will work with an interactive map of the United States in 1854, observing how the country had changed from 1820 to 1854.

As with the map of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (see Lesson One of this unit, An Early Threat of Secession), two sets of questions have been provided for this map: one to be used for a comparative study of states and territories, and the other for an analytical study of changes brought about (a) since the 1820 Compromise and (b) as a result of the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854. Two map analysis worksheets that have direct links to the map, provided on page 2–3 of the PDF, can be downloaded, printed, and distributed to students for recording their answers to the questions.

Activity 2. The Kansas–Nebraska Act: A Debate between Two Illinoisans

The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 shattered whatever peace was gained by the Compromise of 1850. In addition to organizing the U.S. Territories of Kansas and Nebraska, the act attempted to deal with the extension of slavery into this region by allowing the settlers in each territory to decide the question for themselves. U. S. Senator Stephen Douglas, who championed this policy of popular sovereignty and included it in the Kansas–Nebraska Act, unwittingly set off a firestorm of protest among those committed to stopping the spread of slavery. One such person was former Congressman Abraham Lincoln, who strongly opposed any policy that could extend slavery into the territories.

After viewing the short video above produced by the History Channel on the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, begin this four part activity by having students:

1. read excerpts of two speeches, one by Douglas and the other by Lincoln;
2. answer questions about the speeches, provided in chart form available in the PDF;
3. debate the issues raised in the speeches;
4. participate in a follow-up discussion.

Part 1: Read the Lincoln and Douglas speeches

This activity will engage students with arguments used by Douglas to promote popular sovereignty and those used by Lincoln to counter it.

The speeches are also located in the PDF, along with the question and answer worksheets, and can be downloaded and printed for student use.

Part 2: Note salient points in both speeches

Depending on the amount of class time available for this lesson, Parts 1 and 2 can be accomplished in one of three ways:

(a) On-line assignment—Instruct students to go on-line to the websites for the speeches by Douglas and Lincoln. In the worksheets they will answer the questions for each speech. (b) In-class assignment—Make copies of the two excerpted speeches and the worksheets, and hand them out to students to work on in class. They may work on them individually or in groups.

(c) Homework assignment—To save time, make copies of the speeches and the worksheet one class period ahead of time, and hand them out to the students for homework. Instruct the students to have the speeches read and the charts completed by the next class period.