The act overturned the Missouri Compromise by allowing legislatures of the Nebraska and Kansas territories to determine whether to permit or abolish slavery.
The first attempt to cross the Missouri River by the new route was made by the Massachusetts party, under the charge of Martyn Stowell, of which I was a member.
The Nebraska City ferry was a flat boat worked by a Southern settler named Nuckolls, who had brought slaves there and who declared we should not cross.
Mr. Nuckolls yielded to our persuasive force, aided by that of his neighbors, many of whom were free state in sympathy, and perhaps even more by the profit he found by the large ferriage tolls we promptly paid.
[6][full citation needed]During that period, several local newspapers openly editorialized against the presence of blacks in Omaha, for the Confederacy and against the election and re-election of Abraham Lincoln.
[7][full citation needed] Nebraska Territory Governor Samuel W. Black vetoed two antislavery bills during these years, arguing that popular sovereignty, as defined by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, made it the responsibility of the drafters of the state constitution to outlaw slavery, as opposed to the Territorial Legislature.
There were many legislators who argued that Nebraska simply did not need a law because slavery did not exist "in any practical form" in the state.
He claimed that since there were few slaves in the territory, passing a slavery ban was an unworthy use of time, and that the issue should instead be raised if Nebraska earned statehood.
[11] The veto message was called "the weakest paper we have ever known to come from a man of the Governor's pretentions and acknowledged ability" by the Nebraska Advertiser in 1861.
[13] Although the Territory prohibited slavery, at first the legislators limited suffrage to "free white males", as was typical of many states.
Kagi made his sister's farm a stop on the Underground Railroad to house slaves escaping from the South.