Repealing an 1820 law banning slavery in territories north of Missouri's southern border, the Kansas-Nebraska Act left both territories (as mapped out in 1855) up for grabs. Library of Congress ...

One northerner wrote in response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, "We went to bed one night, old-fashioned, conservative, compromise, Union Whigs, and waked up stark mad Abolitionists." The Kansas ...

Challenges: Franklin Pierce had to deal with the violent consequences—“Bleeding Kansas”—of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which some historians categorize as a low-intensity civil war. Pierce ...