History Bee Practice Test

The main idea here is popular sovereignty—the idea that residents of a territory should decide whether slavery would be legal there. The Kansas-Nebraska Act told the people in Kansas and Nebraska to vote on slavery for their territories, effectively overturning the Missouri Compromise line that had kept slavery out of those areas. Because slavery could be decided by vote rather than by a fixed geographical rule, both pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions rushed to influence who settled the territories, leading to intense conflict and violence known as Bleeding Kansas. This clash over who would control the fate of slavery in those lands is what sparked the widespread controversy.