The Kansas-Nebraska Act was one in a series of measures designed to keep the country from splitting apart, one in a series of attempts to keep the nation from being irrevocably torn by slavery. As such, it was a failure. And yet, arguably this acts (like the legislative compromises that came before it, did do some good. While they obviously failed to silence the guns at Fort Sumter, they at least in some measure laid the groundwork for a spirit of compromise. After the slaughters at Bull Run and Manassas, at Gettysburg and Shiloh and Antietam, the nation could look back beyond the horror and the blood and the bodies gone forever underground to a time when compromise had seemed both good and possible to a time when – the horror of slavery torn out by the horror of war – it once again seemed possible and honourable and good, as McPherson (2003) suggests.
