Though both parties tried to avoid the question of slavery in the election of 1852, Franklin Pierce could not avoid the issue during his presidency. The prospect of admitting more territory to the Union once again threw the country into a crisis. In this case, Congressmen began to prepare Kansas and Nebraska, territory Thomas Jefferson acquired as part of the Louisiana Purchase, for official settlement. With the country now stretching from coast to coast, this region in the middle seemed ripe for organization and development.
Democrats, led by Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas, initiated the process of statehood with the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Whigs believed that the Missouri Compromise meant that this district would be free territory because it was north of the 36th parallel. Douglas and others surprised the Whigs in the Kansas-Nebraska Act by making a bold new claim about the future of slavery in unorganized territories. They argued that the Compromise of 1850 superseded the Missouri Compromise and that all new territories, regardless of location, would draft their own constitutions, and address the question of slavery for themselves, through the principle of popular sovereignty.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act reopened a debate many â?? including President Franklin Pierce â?? had hoped would lie dormant. Though Pierce opposed the proposal at first, party pressure led him to endorse it by 1854. Some Democrats saw popular sovereignty as an opportunity to expand slavery, while others viewed it as a moderate solution to the slavery question because it transferred responsibility for the contentious issue from the federal government to local governments. A beleaguered Pierce seemed to find comfort in the latter rationale. The foundering Whig Party protested, but it proved incapable of mustering a successful opposition. Eyes then shifted to Kansas to watch the implementation of the law.
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