7. The Fugitive Slave Law. McMaster, History of the People of the United States, VIII, 44-48.

8. On the Underground Railroad. Hart, American History Told by Contemporaries, IV, 80-83.

9. The Story of the Christiana Riot. Hart, American History Told by Contemporaries, IV, 84-87.

10. The Death of Uncle Tom. Hart, American History Told by Contemporaries, IV, 62-65.

11. The Era of Railroad Building. 12. Improvements in Agriculture.

States, 216-225.

Smith, Parties and Slavery, 59-74.
Thompson, History of the United

13. Important Agricultural Crops. Thompson, History of the United States, 226-229.

14. The Merchant Marine. Thompson, History of the United States, 236-239.

ILLUSTRATIVE LITERATURE.

Poems: Longfellow, Lowell, and Whittier wrote antislavery poems during this period. Find as many of them as you can.

Stories: Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin; Kelly, Rhoda of the Undergrounds; Trowbridge, Cudjo's Cave; Adams, The Sable Cloud; Hungerford, The Old Plantation; Ingraham, The Sunny South.

Biographies: Schurz, Henry Clay; Von Holst, John C. Calhoun; Lodge, Daniel Webster; Lothrop, William H. Seward; McLaughlin, Lewis Cass; Hart, Salmon P. Chase.

QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS.

1. Trace upon a map the line of 36° 30′ across the continent to the Pacific. How much of California is north of this line?

2. What evidence do you find in this chapter that the Union was in danger in 1850?

3. If you had been living in 1850 would you have favored or opposed the compromise of that year? Which section really gained more by this compromise?

4. Was it wrong to disobey the fugitive slave law? Give reasons for your answer.

5. Have you any ancestors who came from either Ireland or Germany about 1850? If so, why did they come to America?

6. What was the first through line of railroad to connect the East and the Middle West? What important railroads connect those sections now?

Douglas reopens the slavery controversy

Why Douglas took this step

CHAPTER XX

SLAVERY DIVIDES THE UNION

The Quarrel Over Slavery Renewed.-In less than four years after the statesmen of the country declared that they had finally settled the slavery controversy by the Compromise of 1850 the quarrel over slavery in the territories blazed up even more fiercely than before. The rich corn and wheat

Stephen A. Douglas

lands west of Missouri and Iowa were beginning to attract settlers, and it became necessary to organize territorial governments in the vast expanse of Indian country. Accordingly, early in 1854 Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, introduced into the Senate a bill to create the territories of Kansas and Nebraska.

Both Kansas and Nebraska were north of 36° 30', in a region from which slavery had been excluded by the Missouri Compromise. Great therefore was the surprise

and greater still the wrath of the people of the North when they learned that the Kansas-Nebraska bill proposed the repeal of the Compromise of 1820 and left it to the settlers in Kansas and Nebraska to decide whether these territories should grow into free states or slave states. Senator Douglas said that the right of the people of a territory to make their own

laws about slavery had been recognized in the Compromise of 1850. Douglas was ambitious to get the Democratic nomination for the presidency in the next election, and with that end in view he was eager to win the favor of the Democrats in both sections of the country. He knew that the slaveholders in the South wanted more slave territory. They were so anxious to buy Cuba at this time that some of them went so far as to declare that it would be right for the United States to take that island by force if Spain persisted in refusing to sell it to us. Under these circumstances Douglas hoped that he would gain favor in the South by opening new territory in the West to slaveholding settlers, and he thought that the Democrats in the North could not seriously object to his doctrine of "popular sovereignty," because that simply meant letting the people of a territory manage their own government in their own way.

Kansas

The antislavery men in Congress opposed the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska bill with all their might. They showed that it would open all the unorganized territory of the country The passage to slavery and called it a bold scheme against American liberty. of the Senator Chase of Ohio, who led the free soil men, appealed to Nebraska the Senate to defeat the hated bill because it was "a violation bill of the plighted faith and solemn compact which our fathers made, and which we, their sons, are bound by every sacred tie of obligation sacredly to maintain." But in spite of everything that the friends of freedom could do, Douglas persuaded Congress to pass his measure and it became a law in 1854.

this act

Judged by its consequences the Kansas-Nebraska Act was one of the most important laws in our history. It stirred up strife between the North and the South as nothing else ever The consedid. The slaveholders were delighted with it. The anti- quences of slavery men were indignant that slave labor was given an opportunity to compete with free labor on the prairies of the West. The Kansas-Nebraska Act led to civil strife in Kansas, destroyed the Whig party, created the Republican party, and in the end brought about the downfall of the Democrats. Its passage in 1854 marks the beginning of seven years of bitter sectional strife which led straight to the outbreak of a great Civil War between the North and the South in 1861.

The Struggle for Kansas.-The first effect of the passage