It was called the Kansas-Nebraska Act. It authorized the creation of Kansas and Nebraska, west of Missouri and Iowa and divided by the 40th parallel. ... This act was sponsored by the Democratic senator Stephen A. ... This act split the Democratic party and destroyed the Whig party also. ... This was what known as "Bleeding Kansas." ...
From 1837, when Lincoln first attacked slavery as bad politics, his thoughts evolved from thinking that slavery would eventually die out by compromising that southern states could have its slaves without expanding, to 1854, when the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed, as it stated Congress had no right to prohibit the expansion of slavery to federal territories, and this would radicalize Lincoln's idea of a southern conspiracy that threatened the ideas of the Founding Fathers, which gave him a distinct moral conviction and tone to his political argument. ... Lincoln was a member of the cons...
"Representatives of the northern states claimed that if the southern slaves were mere property, then they should not be counted towards voting representation in Congress (Harrison 1)". ... The northern delegates were afraid that any attempt they made to abolish slavery would have caused the five southern states to refuse to ratify the constitution (Welch 33). ... Most slavery had declined by the late seventeen hundreds, but in the new constitution it was still legal because all of the Northern and Southern delegates had signed the new constitution. ... The invention of the cotton gin made ...
