Origins
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The issue of slavery, deeply embedded in the culture of the Southern United States, had been divisive since the country's formation.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 created the Kansas and Nebraska territories and opened the lands to settlement by American pioneers. The Act also established that the question of whether slavery would be allowed in the new states of Kansas and Nebraska would be decided by the inhabitants of the states – essentially repealing the Missouri Compromise. The concept of letting the settlers decide, now known as "popular sovereignty," was an idea advocated by U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas, chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories. Popular sovereignty was an attempt to offer concessions to the Southern states by making possible the expansion of slavery into both western and northern territories. While this doctrine, also known in Kansas Territory as "squatter sovereignty," was not actually formulated by U.S. Senator Lewis Cass, he nevertheless earned the sobriquet "Father of Popular Sovereignty" by providing its ideological framework in a letter published in the Washington Daily Union, which later also secured for Cass the presidential nomination of the Democratic party.
Initially, it was assumed that few slave owners would attempt to settle in Kansas and make it a slave state, because it was thought to be too far north for profitable exploitation of slaves. However, the eastern portion of Kansas along the Missouri River was as suitable for slave-based agriculture as the nearby "black belt" of Missouri in which most of Missouri's slaves were held.
The settlement and the zone formation of the state government in Kansas became highly politicized beyond the borders of the territory. There were a number of reasons for this. Missouri, a slave state, was uniquely exposed to free states, with Illinois and Iowa bordering it on the east and north. Most parts of Missouri held very few slaves, and slave owners were a very small proportion of the state's population. If Kansas entered the Union as a free state, Missouri would have free soil on three sides. Since manumission, abolition activity, and escape were all more common in the border states, the existence of nearby free soil was a threat to Missouri slaveowners.
Also, in the Senate, each state is apportioned two senate seats. A rough balance had existed between free and slave states, but each addition of a state threatened to tip the balance, disrupting the status quo (see Slave Power).
Read more about this topic: Bleeding Kansas
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