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Slavery Emerges as a Major Political Issues in Partisan Politics:

In 1866 Stephen Douglass, the Democratic senator from Illinois proposed the

Kansas-Nebraska Act, intended to recapture part of what the Southern slave-owning

states had lost by virtue of the Missouri Compromise of 1850. Specifically, the Act was

intended to allow Kansas the right to decide the issue of slavery for herself upon the

inclusion of the new western territories into the American Union (Nevins & Commager

1992)

Even before the Kansas-Nebraska Act actually passed into law, the concern it

generated in connection with the slaveholding status of the new territories inspired the

formation of a new political party, the Republicans, first organized in 1854 in a

convention in Michigan. Upon its formal establishment, elements of the Republican

party dedicated itself to preventing any further spread of slavery into any free state or into

any of the new territories in general. In conjunction with those efforts, the Republicans

demanded the immediate repeal of both the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 (Furlong, et al

1966)......

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