Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Wood engraving illustrating the Charleston convention. The front-runner for the nomination was Douglas, who was considered a moderate on the slavery issue. With the 1854 Kansas–Nebraska Act, he advanced the doctrine of popular sovereignty: allowing settlers in each Territory to decide for themselves whether slavery would be allowed—a change from the flat prohibition of slavery in most ...
The act was proposed by Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois as a way to appease Southern representatives in Congress, who had resisted earlier proposals to admit states from the Nebraska Territory because of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had explicitly forbidden the practice of slavery in all U.S. territory north of 36°30' latitude ...
Stephen Arnold Douglas (né Douglass; April 23, 1813 – June 3, 1861) was an American politician and lawyer from Illinois.A U.S. Senator, he was one of two nominees of the badly split Democratic Party to run for president in the 1860 presidential election, which was won by Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln.
The only slave he personally owned, Tom, escaped in 1814. When Tom was found in Massachusetts, Van Buren tentatively agreed to sell him to the finder, but terms were not agreed and Tom remained free. Later in life, Van Buren belonged to the Free Soil Party , which opposed the expansion of slavery into the Western territories without advocating ...
In 1854, Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois—a key Democratic leader in the Senate—pushed the Kansas–Nebraska Act through Congress. President Franklin Pierce signed the bill into law in 1854. [3] [4] [5] The Act opened Kansas Territory and Nebraska Territory to a decision by the residences on whether slavery would be legal or not. Previously ...
In the North, the newly formed anti-slavery Republican Party came to power and dominated the electoral college. In the 1860 presidential election , the Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln , but the divide among Democrats led to the nomination of two candidates: John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky represented Southern Democrats, and Stephen A ...
The Freeport Doctrine was articulated by Stephen A. Douglas on August 27, 1858, in Freeport, Illinois, at the second of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.Former one-term U.S. Representative Abraham Lincoln was campaigning to take Douglas's U.S. Senate seat by strongly opposing all attempts to expand the geographic area in which slavery was permitted.
Douglas was helped considerably by the work of Thomas Ewing Jr., a noted Kansas Free State politician and lawyer, who led a legislative investigation in Kansas to uncover the fraudulent voting ballots. A new referendum over the fate of the Lecompton Constitution was proposed, even though this would delay Kansas's admission to the Union.