the kansas-nebraska act of 1854 opened a vast new area of the American heartland to settlement but it also opened the region to the possible spread of slavery and ignited a firestorm that launched the country on the path to Civil War the territory was acquired from the French 50 years earlier in the Louisiana Purchase it had been set aside for Indians and closed to white settlement but business interests wanted it mainly to build a Transcontinental Railroad through it the Indian rights were rescinded and Senator Stephen Douglas introduced a bill to organize the region into two territories Kansas and Nebraska a necessary step for future development Steven a Douglas the senator from Illinois who was really the most prominent political figure of the 1850s even though he never was elected president developed this idea he called popular sovereignty which was basically that the people of the territories should decide for themselves whether or not they wanted to have slavery Douglass believed he needed at least a possibility of allowing slavery in the new territories to get the support of Southern Democrats for his bill but Douglass had played with fire the act overturned the Missouri Compromise which three decades earlier had banned slavery anywhere north of latitude 36:30 so in effect with the kansas-nebraska Act did was these stabilize the understandings that were part of the territorial question and the result was bleeding kansas bleeding Kansas was the name given the outbreak of violence in that territory sparked by this new legislation there was a civil war in Kansas between the pro-slavery and the anti-slavery forces it was never clear who was going to decide to the first ten people into a territory to side anti-slavery settlers raced to Kansas to try to be the people who would decide the issue thousands of pro-slavery settlers crossed on the slave state of Missouri to counter them often violently and cast ballots in favor of making Kansas a slave state as well by 1858 clashes between the two sides had claimed 200 lives this violence eventually spilled over into the Civil War which would go on to claim 200,000 lives by 1865