may 30, 1854 - The Kansas-Nebraska Act

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Important People:
This act let the people of Nebraska and Kansas choose whether their state was a free state for a slave state. With Nebraska being a territory the southerners could not lay claim to the land, but they did not want to rush making it legal because slavery would be outlawed there. This upset the balance between slave and free states. It angered the Whig party because it ignored the Missouri Compromise. The North felt like if the Compromise of 1820 could be ignored so could the Compromise of 1850.

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