<論説>カンザス・ネブラスカ法案 : 若干の背景

Abstract

一八五四年のカンザス・ネブラスカ法案により、合衆国中央部に二つの准州が組織された。この法案には奴隷制、インデアン政策等々の問題が絡んでいるが、そのうち最も重要なのは鉄道問題である。ミズーリ協定の廃棄と住民主権論の出現とを包含するこの法案の動機の一つとして、中央若しくは北部ルートの大陸横断鉄道建設への障碍を除去する事があった。そして、その障碍の一つとはインデアン・カントリーを白人に開放することへの反対であった。本論文はこのカンザス・ネブラスカ法案の若干の背景を扱う。その際、従来あまり注目されてこなかった大陸横断鉄道の問題に重点が置かれる。また、本論文は南北戦争に先行する十五年間における最大の政治的争点であるところの憲政史の上でのテリトリーにおける奴隷制の問題への序論でもある。

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 created two new territories in the center of the United States. But the Act did more than create two additional territories, showing how it was interrelated with the Pacific Railway issue, the slavery question, the Indian policy and other great problems of the time. The Act, involving the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and the emergence of the doctrine of Popular Sovereingty, was one of the incidents in the struggle over the location and construction of a railway to the Pacific. Of several motives to desire to organize these two territories was removing serious obstacles to the construction of the railway by a central or northern route. One of the great obstacles to it, the opposition to opening the Indian Country to whites, likewise animated mainly by the disinclination on the partisans of a southern route to contribute to the removal of such an obstacle. It is the object of this paper to deal with some backgrounds of the Act, particularly with the transcontinental railway issue, which has not received its just deserts from historians. And the paper also makes itself to be an introduction to the dominant issue of the fifteen years preceding the Civil War, the slavery in the territories in terms of Constitutional History, which is to be treated in the next paper.