In A Hell of a Storm: The Battle for Kansas, the End of Compromise, and the Coming of the Civil War, David S. Brown identifies 1854 as the moment when “Jefferson’s southern-oriented, plantation-based, and Democratic Party-powered America” began to give way to what would become “Lincoln’s northern-oriented, factory-based, and Republican Party-powered America.” This great transformation had “everything to do” with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, introduced on January 4, 1854, by Illinois Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas and—after months of contention in the Senate and House, and in the public prints and public squares—signed into law by Democratic President Franklin Pierce on May 30, 1854. Brown calls it “the most lethal piece of legislation to ever clear Congress.” He follows a long line of historians in holding that the act put the nation “irreparably on the road to Civil War.” Its key explosive ingredient was the repeal of the Missouri Compromise of 1820’s prohibition of slavery in the Louisiana Territory north of 36° 30’. As Harry V. Jaffa wrote in Crisis of the House Divided (1959), that repeal, coupled with Lincoln’s opposition to it, was an “absolute