sectionalism

There are various factors that led to sectionalism in the United States in the early 19th Century. These factors include the Missouri Compromise, Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the Mexican War. The issue of popular sovereignty lay behind a crisis in 1845. The Missouri Compromise had prohibited slavery in the lands that made up Kansas and Nebraska. Yet the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 overturned that compromise by proposing that the question of slavery in those territories be decided by …

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