=411. Disappointment of the South: Kansas-Nebraska Bill.=—The South was not only unable to secure Cuba and other slave territory, but could not help seeing that the advantage it had anticipated from the Fugitive Slave Law could never be realized. Some new measure was necessary, or all the benefits of the Compromise would go to the North. Such a measure presented itself in the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, put forward by Senator Douglas of Illinois. This bill was framed on the untenable theory that the Missouri Compromise had been overthrown by the Compromise of 1850, and that the provision that slavery could not exist north of 36° 30′ was no longer binding. In accordance with this theory, the author of the bill proposed that the Missouri Compromise should be declared “inoperative and void as being inconsistent with the principle of non-intervention by Congress with slavery in the states and territories.” It was also proposed that all the lands of the Louisiana Purchase north of 36° 30′ should be organized as territories and in due time should be admitted as states, either free or slave, as the voters of each territory might determine. The great question was thus to be settled, not by United States law, but by what came to be called “Popular Sovereignty.” =412. Indignation of the North.=—The bill aroused the greatest political agitation the country had ever known, for the opponents of the measure took the ground that it turned over to possible slavery a vast tract that had forever been dedicated to freedom. They said it was an outrageous violation of contract to take away half of the Missouri Compromise, when the advocates of slavery had enjoyed the advantage of the other half, as they had in the admission of Missouri as a slave state above the line of 36° 30′. The bill was opposed with the utmost vigor by Seward, Sumner, and other anti-slavery leaders, but it was passed and became a law, May 30, 1854.