Signed by Franklin Pierce on May 30, 1854, the Kansas–Nebraska Act organized the Kansas and Nebraska Territories under Stephen Douglas's doctrine of 'popular sovereignty': settlers, not Congress, would decide whether slavery would be permitted. The Act repealed the Missouri Compromise's 36°30′ line. The immediate result was 'Bleeding Kansas' — a small civil war between pro- and anti-slavery settlers — and the birth of the Republican Party from the wreckage of the Whigs. Combined with Dred Scott v. Sandford three years later, it convinced many Northerners that peaceful containment of slavery had failed.