In 1854, Senator Stephen Douglas from Illinois proposed a bill to organize the vast Nebraska territory west of Iowa and Missouri. Hoping to rally the Democratic party and unite the nation by reviving the idea of Manifest Destiny, Douglas proposed what would become known as the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Douglas unknowingly renewed a decades old debate over slavery and caused the nation to fall more deeply into a sectional divide that would split the Union in the years to come.
The origins of the Kansas-Nebraska Act lie in the uncontroversial issue of the advancement of Midwestern settlement. …
