The Kansas-Nebraska Act created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, opening new lands for settlement, and had the effect of repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820 by allowing white male settlers in those territories to determine through popular sovereignty whether they would allow slavery within each territory. It was designed by Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois.
The purpose of this act was to open up many thousands of new farms and make feasible a Midwestern Transcontinental Railroad. There was public consensus that such railroad should be built by private interests financed by public land grants. Several proposals in late 1852 and early 1853 had strong support, but in the end they failed because of disputes over whether the railroad would follow a Northerner or a Southerner route. When the bill was silent on the issue, slavery would have been prohibited under the terms of the Missouri Compromise. By a vote 23 to 17, the senate voted to kill the motion by laying it on the table with every senator from states south of Missouri voting for tabling.
Douglas publicly announced that the same principle that had been established in the Compromise of 1850 should apply in Nebraska. The conflict that arose between pro-slavery settlers in the aftermath of the act's passage led to the period of violence known as Bleeding Kansas, and helped paved the way for the American Civil War(1861-1865). President Franklin Pierce gave Douglas and his southern allies his support. The act passed Congress, but it failed in its purposes.