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a smaller Kansas Territory, directly west of slaveholding Missouri. The status of slavery in these territories was now to be determined by popular sovereignty, the vote of their inhabitants at some unspecified time in the future. The separation of the smaller Kansas Territory directly west of Missouri was clearly meant to invite proslavery settlers to claim the territory as a future slave state.
    Douglas grimly predicted that the bill would create a political storm in the North but introduced it anyway. He was right about the storm. Indeed, he had no idea. The outrage in the North gave birth to the Republican Party. The country was ripe for a new party. The Whig Party, always a loose coalition of interest groups, had finally all but disintegrated in the first few years of the decade, largely as a result of the tensions placed on political unity by southern Whigs claiming to be the staunchest defenders of slavery while northern Whigs presented themselves to voters as the principled opponents of the South’s “Peculiar Institution.” With the Whig Party’s demise, almost half the American electorate was in search of a new political home.
    The new Republican Party also incorporated diverse political elements. That portion of northern Whig voters who did indeed oppose slavery flocked to the new party, as did free-soil, or “Anti-Nebraska,” Democrats, as well as members of the old Free Soil Party. They were a disparate lot. Some favored high tariffs, others low. Some backed a national bank, others hard money. Some were abolitionists who believed in racial equality, others were racists who wanted to limit the spread of slavery only so that the territories would be exclusively a white man’s country. Yet there was an adhesive that bound the seemingly conflicting elements of the party: they all came together on a platform that called for no further spread of slavery. They could not prevent the passage of Douglas’s bill, but they now provided a major free-soil party that was strong enough to carry the North in elections and might, in a few years, be able to put together enough northern electoral votes to choose a president.
    BLEEDING KANSAS AND THE LINCOLN–DOUGLAS DEBATES
    Implementation of Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act proved even more problematic than its passage. Proslavery Missourians determined to see Kansas become another slave state by fair means or foul. Thousands of them, heavily armed and threatening, flocked across the Kansas line on the territory’s first election day, casting fraudulent ballots and intimidating antislavery and free-soil voters with threats of beatings, whippings, or worse. So effective were these Missouri “Border Ruffians” that the proslavery side won in a landslide that numbered several times more votes than there were eligible voters in the territory. The Pierce administration nevertheless certified the obviously fraudulent results and officially recognized the new proslavery government of Kansas, with its capital at Lecompton. Free-state settlers, along with the large majority of new Kansans who cared nothing for slavery one way or the other but disliked election fraud, held an unauthorized revote and elected a rival, antislavery government with a large majority of the territory’s legal voters. Pierce denounced the free-state government as illegitimate and threatened its adherents with dire punishment. It appeared as though slavery would triumph in Kansas.
    In May 1856 proslavery militia destroyed the free-state Kansas capital at Lawrence. Several days later, a small band of antislavery militia, led by hardcore abolitionist John Brown, retaliated with a stealthy nocturnal raid on the proslavery settlement of Pottawatomie Creek, where they killed several men in cold blood who had previously been threatening death to free-staters (i.e., settlers like Brown and his large family who favored turning the Kansas Territory into a free state). The details of the killings were disputed, but