New York attorney Alvan E. Bovay had moved to the small town of Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1850. He quickly became a respected member of the community, and was instrumental in the construction of the single-story wooden framed schoolhouse. On the evening of 20 March 1854 he organized a meeting there for fellow opponents of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, at which the town committees of the Free Soil and Whig parties voted to dissolve themselves in favor of creating a new party. It is generally accepted that Bovay himself proposed naming the new party ‘Republican’ in homage to the Republican Party of Thomas Jefferson. The party’s first convention was held on 6 July 1854 on the outskirts of Jackson, Michigan, barely six weeks after President Franklin Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act into law. By this time Bovay had persuaded Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune, to promote the ‘Republican’ party. The party quickly built support and by 1856 it proved to be the dominant political force in the North when John C. Fremont, the first Republican presidential candidate, won 11 of the 16 Northern states.
Earlier, in February 1819, Representative James Tallmadge Jr., a Jeffersonian Republican from New York, had submitted two amendments to Missouri's request for statehood that included restrictions on slavery. Southerners objected to any bill that imposed federal restrictions on slavery and believed that it was a state issue, as settled by the Constitution. However, with the Senate evenly split at the opening of the debates, both sections possessing 11 states, the admission of Missouri as a slave state would give the South an advantage. Northern critics including Federalists and Democratic-Republicans objected to the expansion of slavery into the Louisiana Purchase territory on the Constitutional inequalities of the three-fifths rule, which conferred Southern representation in the federal government derived from a state's slave population. Jeffersonian Republicans in the North ardently maintained that a strict interpretation of the Constitution required that Congress act to limit the spread of slavery on egalitarian grounds. "[Northern] Republicans rooted their antislavery arguments, not on expediency, but in egalitarian morality." "The Constitution [said northern Jeffersonians], strictly interpreted, gave the sons of the founding generation the legal tools to hasten [the] removal [of slavery], including the refusal to admit additional slave states."
When free-soil Maine offered its petition for statehood, the Senate quickly linked the Maine and Missouri bills, making Maine admission a condition for Missouri entering the Union as a slave state. Senator Jesse B. Thomas of Illinois added a compromise proviso that excluded slavery from all remaining lands of the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36° 30' parallel. The combined measures passed the Senate, only to be voted down in the House by Northern representatives who held out for a free Missouri. Speaker of the House Henry Clay of Kentucky, in a desperate bid to break the deadlock, divided the Senate bills. Clay and his pro-compromise allies succeeded in pressuring half of the anti-restrictionist House Southerners to submit to the passage of the Thomas proviso and maneuvered a number of restrictionist House northerners to acquiesce in supporting Missouri as a slave state. The Missouri question in the 15th Congress ended in stalemate on March 4, 1819, the House sustaining its northern antislavery position and the Senate blocking a slavery restricted statehood.
The Missouri Compromise was very controversial, and many worried that the country had become lawfully divided along sectional lines. The Kansas–Nebraska Act effectively repealed the bill in 1854, and the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), both of which increased tensions over slavery and contributed to the American Civil War.
The United States had acquired vast amounts of sparsely settled land in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, and since the 1840s Douglas had sought to establish a territorial government in a portion of the Louisiana Purchase that was still unorganized. Douglas's efforts were stymied by Senator David Rice Atchison and other Southern leaders who refused to allow the creation of territories that banned slavery; slavery would have been banned because the Missouri Compromise outlawed slavery in the territory north of latitude 36°30' north. To win the support of Southerners like Atchison, Pierce and Douglas agreed to back the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, with the status of slavery instead decided based on "popular sovereignty". Under popular sovereignty, the citizens of each territory, rather than Congress, would determine whether or not slavery would be allowed.
Douglas's bill to repeal the Missouri Compromise and organize Kansas Territory and Nebraska Territory won approval by a wide margin in the Senate, but faced stronger opposition in the House of Representatives. Though Northern Whigs strongly opposed the bill, the bill passed the House with the support of almost all Southerners and some Northern Democrats. After the passage of the act, pro-and anti-slavery elements flooded into Kansas to establish a population that would vote for or against slavery, resulting in a series of armed conflicts known as "Bleeding Kansas". Douglas and Pierce hoped that popular sovereignty would help bring an end to the national debate over slavery, but the Kansas–Nebraska Act outraged many Northerners, giving rise to the anti-slavery Republican Party. Ongoing tensions over slavery would eventually lead to the American Civil War.
