Essay # 10 Examine political crisis of 1850 The Kansa Nebraska act created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, opening new lands for settlement, and had the effect of repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820 by allowing settlers in those territories to decide through Popular Sovereignty whether they would allow slavery within each territory. The act was designed by Democratic Senator Stephen Douglas. Douglas hoped popular sovereignty would enable democracy to triumph, so he would not have to take a side on the issue of slavery. A wave of indignation erupted across the North as anti-slavery elements howled betrayal, for Kansas had been officially closed to slavery since the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and that Compromise was now repealed because of popular sovereignty. Opponents denounced the law as a triumph of the hated slave power -- that is the political power of the rich slave owners, who would buy up the best lands in Kansas. The Compromise of 1850 was crafted by retired Senator Henry Clay, in an effort to assuage growing discord between the north and south. No one was particularly happy with the bill, and while it did delay civil war for another 10 years, it added fuel to a simmering pot that was on the edge of burning out of control. a piece of legislation, called the Wilmot Proviso which would have set that all territories acquired through the Mexican War would be free states. This controversial bill passed the House, because the north had the majority vote. However, it never passed through the Senate. Northern democrats, who opposed slavery, became increasingly angry with southern democrats, whom they believed controlled the party. All but one northern state approved of the Proviso; however, none of the southern states approved. Their "fear" was that slavery would slowly be eradicated if slaveholding states were surrounded by "free" abolitionist territories. About this time, California was ready to be admitted as a free state into the Union, which made southerners unhappy. So, as part of the Compromise, Clay overrode the Missouri Compromise which determined that all states north of Missouri's southern border would be free which determined that all states north of Missouri's southern border would be free. The issues of runaway slaves was also a hot spot, so another feature of the 1850 Compromise was to allow southern slave owners to hunt down and retrieve fugitive slaves who had escaped into the northern states. To balance out this provision, he suggested a ban on slavery in Washington D.C.While the Compromise put a temporary lid on simmering discord, it only put off the inevitable succession of the southern states by ten years. By that time, there was no quenching the inferno that led headlong into the Civil War. The Know Nothing Party was made up of Nativists who believed that Catholics, Native Americans, Black people and Immigrants were bad for America. And in order for a person to be a member of the Know Nothing Party. They had to be White Anglo Saxon Protestant who was born and raised in America and who shared the same views as the people in the group. They also had to be willing to do anything the group asked of them. The reason why the got the name the Know Nothings was when they terrorized a person who wasn't in their group and the cops asked about it they would reply: I know nothing. Hence the Know Nothing Party. The Republican Party was found in northern states in 1854 by anti-slavery activists. The main cause was disagreement to the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise by which slavery was kept out of Kansas. The Republicans saw the expansion of slavery as a great evil. The Republican Party first came to power in 1860 with the election of Lincoln to the Presidency and Republicans in control of Congress and the northern states. It oversaw the saving of the union, the destruction of slavery, and the provision of equal rights to all men in the American Civil War and