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 sine qua non of the advent of the Civil War.”

“Bleeding Kansas”—the localized civil war between pro- and anti-slavery settlers in the Kansas territory between 1854 and the start of full-blown Civil War—was a direct result of this catastrophic legislation. Other results came on fast and hard: John Brown’s Pottawatomie massacre (part of Bleeding Kansas) and his later raid at Harpers Ferry; the collapse of the party system, the disappearance of the Whig Party, and the rise of the Republican Party; the infamous Dred Scott decision; and the breakdown of the “once sacred system” of historic compromises that had held the Union together for 80 years. All “owed something small or large” to the “decisions made on slavery and territorial development during the fateful Kansas-Nebraska debates,” writes Brown. Most fatefully—I say this with slightly more emphasis than Brown does—the repeal of the Missouri Compromise “aroused” Abraham Lincoln and brought him back into politics. The Peoria speech Lincoln delivered in October 1854, in direct response to Douglas’s legislation, was of a sort he had never delivered before. As Jaffa wrote in these pages, “it marked the first and fullest elaboration of the political, rhetorical, and philosophical strategy that he would pursue to the end of the decade and, indeed, to the end of his life” (“Lincoln in Peoria,” Fall 2009). 

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All of which is why Brown calls the Kansas-Nebraska Act “the greatest miscalculation in American political history.” Thousands of partisan and scholarly pages over 170 years have examined the question of Douglas’s motives from every angle: Douglas was ambitious to become president and needed to court the South; Douglas was serving the railroads; Missouri politics determined the event; Douglas was driven by financial interests; Douglas was an avid Manifest Destiny expansionist; Douglas was an estimable democratic statesman attempting honestly and intelligently to deal with the great problem of slavery, and so on. For those wanting to plumb the depths of the miscalculation, Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided is unrivaled.

Brown himself does not deeply probe the miscalculation or attempt to provide a conclusive account of it. A professor of history at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, Brown has written several books, including biographies of Andrew Jackson (see “King Mob,” Fall 2022), Henry Adams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Richard Hofstadter (nominated for a Pulitzer). In A Hell of a Storm he offers a description of America—a moving picture of the American Mind, increasingly agitated by the question of slavery expansion—in the pivotal year 1854: 

In 1854 some 26 million people lived in the United States, more than 3 million of whom were enslaved. Most Americans resided above the Mason-Dixon Line; nearly one-third of all inhabitants were New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians, and Ohioans. Of the ten cities with populations exceeding fifty thousand, only two, Baltimore and New Orleans, were southern. A majority in both sections lived on farms.

This America was in crisis. Brown thinks Lincoln expressed the essence of the crisis in his House Divided speech in June 1858, when he asserted: “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free…. It will become all one thing or all the other.”  

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The subject of Brown’s book is “how this ancestral tug-of-war [between freedom and slavery] began to turn decisively toward freedom during the Kansas Nebraska brawl.” The structure of the book is to look back, in two introductory chapters, to the original compromises with slavery in the American Founding and the series of crises and compromises that followed in the years between 1787 and 1854. This is a preamble to the body of the book, which consists of 18 chapters marching chronologically, roughly month by month, through the year 1854, beginning in January with the introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and ending in December with Harriet Tubman making yet another raid into Maryland to free slaves. The events recounted in these chapters build upon one another, telling the story of an American house increasingly divided against itself until it could no longer stand. The epigraph to the unnumbered concluding section, “Coda: Meanings,” is a passage dated December 31, 1854, from Alexander Stephens—identified as the future vice president of the Confederate States of America. It reads in part: “A day of new things…is at hand.” 

The book’s title is taken from remarks reportedly made by Stephen Douglas to Whig senator Archibald Dixon of Kentucky, during what became a famous carriage ride around the American capital on January 18, 1854. Two weeks before, Douglas, as chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, had submitted a bill to the Senate “to organize the Territory of Nebraska,” a vast swath of the Louisiana territory stretching from 36° 30’ in the south northward to the Canadian border (at 49° north latitude) and from the Missouri River on the east westward to the continental divide in the Rocky Mountains. Accompanying the bill was an explanatory report from the Committee on Territories. The bill itself made no reference to the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which prohibited slavery forever in the Louisiana territory above the 36° 30’ line. But Douglas’s report—which Jaffa calls “a masterpiece of political rhetoric [deserving] the closest scrutiny by every student of the legislative process”—stated explicitly that the bill intended neither to affirm nor to repeal the Missouri Compromise prohibition. On January 23, less than a week after the famous carriage ride, Douglas introduced a revised version of the bill in the Senate. This version divided Nebraska into two territories, Nebraska and Kansas, and explicitly declared the Missouri Compromise’s prohibition of slavery in the territories to have been “superseded” by the principles of the Compromise of 1850 and so “inoperative.” The carriage ride had a great deal to do with those momentous revisions.  

Since introducing the bill on January 4, Douglas had heard from Dixon and other Southerners that the South would have nothing to do with his Nebraska Act if it did not explicitly repeal the Missouri Compromise’s slavery prohibition. Senator David Atchison of Missouri, president pro tem of the senate and next in line for the presidency, let it be known that Nebraska would “sink in hell” before he would let it be organized as free soil. He pledged to “extend the [slave] institutions of Missouri over the territory at whatever sacrifice of blood or treasure.” The bill would never pass without Southern support. In the carriage, Douglas assured Dixon—who was finishing out the late Henry Clay’s term—that he was willing to change the language of the bill to incorporate the repeal of the Missouri Compromise prohibition. Arriving home, Dixon reported to his wife that Douglas had said, “By God, sir, you are right, and I will incorporate it in my bill, though I know it will raise a hell of a storm.” It did. That storm is Brown’s theme. 

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Brown gets his facts straight, tells a good story, and keeps up a brisk pace. In his few pages on the original compromises with slavery in the Constitution—the three-fifths clause, the fugitive slave clause, and the protection of the slave trade for 20 years—he reasonably concludes, as did Lincoln, that without these concessions to “white southern sensibilities,” “the Constitution would never have been ratified.” He quotes James Madison’s prescient observation in the Constitutional Convention “that the states were divided…not by their difference of size…but principally from their having or not having slaves.” The great division in the United States “did not lie between the large & small States; it lay between the Northern & Southern.” It was South Carolina and Georgia who were most insistent on protecting slavery at the Constitutional Convention. Brown could have gone further back and noted how South Carolina and Georgia had been the principal causes of the deletion of Jefferson’s denunciation of slavery from the Declaration of Independence in 1776.  

These divisions between North and South, already manifesting themselves in the drafting of the Declaration and at the Constitutional Convention, would raise their heads in the 1790s with the Alien and Sedition Acts and the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. Next came the decade-long New England secession agitation following the Louisiana Purchase (1803); the Missouri Crisis and Compromise (1819–1820); the nullification crises of the 1820s and ’30s; the crisis over the annexation of Texas; and finally, the crisis—temporarily subdued by the Compromise of 1850—over acquisitions of territory following the Mexican-American War. Brown narrates with verve this 80-year roller-coaster ride of crises and compromises, spicing his narrative with living and breathing personalities and local color. 

Following his preamble, Brown launches himself upon the year 1854 with two chapters on the introduction of and early debates over the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Then come chapters and parts of chapters on several well-known Americans who participated in one way or another in the growing agitation over the slavery question during that fateful year: Harriet Beecher Stowe (February); Ralph Waldo Emerson (March); Salmon Chase, Charles Sumner, Edward Everett (February through May, continuing the Kansas-Nebraska Act debates); William Lloyd Garrison (July); Henry David Thoreau (August); Abraham Lincoln (October). Woven through the stories of these more familiar figures and their contribution to the drama of 1854 are lesser known names and more and less remembered events: publication by anti-slavery leaders in the Senate of the Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress to the People of the United States—an incendiary pamphlet that in Jaffa’s words “made all compromise or even polite intercourse between themselves and Douglas a virtual impossibility”; Alvan Earle Bovay (pronounced Bovee), whose persistence and determination contributed significantly to the founding of the Republican Party; Eli Thayer, founder of the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company, which aimed to “put a cordon of Free States from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico,” giving potent meaning to Horace Greeley’s legendary “Go West, young man!”; filibusterer William Walker, who made several ill-fated attempts to carve out empires south of the border, and died by firing squad in Honduras; Anthony Burns, whose escape from and forcible return to slavery caused riots in Boston and outrage across the North; William Lloyd Garrison’s burning of a copy of the Constitution at a Fourth of July celebration; George Fitzhugh’s Sociology for the South, a full-throated defense of slavery from a “data-driven whisperer of moonlight and magnolia mythology”; Martin Robison Delany and free blacks’ advocacy of emigration from America; and Eliza Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton’s widow, who happened to die in the fateful year, 50 years after her husband’s untimely death. 

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Brown frequently turns from his main theme and thesis to mention facts that are sometimes vivid or entertaining enough in themselves, but often seem to have nothing obvious to do with his story. To take one of many examples, when Boston was convulsed over the capture of Anthony Burns and his return to slavery, local ministers called their congregations together in the Boston Music Hall to discuss the crisis. Brown adds in parentheses “(site of an Oscar Wilde lecture some years later).” One is pulled up short and slightly disoriented. Why not mention a Bruce Springsteen concert? As a result, the reader sailing smoothly through the chapters feels time and again that the narrative ship has drifted off course and run aground on another island of possibly charming but irrelevant detail. A related idiosyncrasy is Brown’s habit of tossing a strikingly odd word or phrase into an otherwise innocent sentence. Alluding to James Madison’s 5’4”, 100-pound frame, he speaks of the “succinctly assembled Madison.” Is that even right? Was Madison “succinctly assembled”? If one must speak like this, wouldn’t it be better just to say the “succinct Madison”? Brown describes how the great Alexis de Tocqueville “confabbed” with American politicians and “chatted up” a United States senator. Did Tocqueville ever “confab” with or “chat up” anybody? The repeated effect of this habit on the reader’s attention is like that of a ladybug landing just above the eyebrow of a woman with whom one is trying to have a serious conversation.  

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History does not arrange itself neatly into the conventional years of men. For Brown to package his drama as he does in a twelve-month period is unavoidably to frame the drama artificially, and this distorting artifice feels strained at times. But years and dates, however conventional, do come naturally to a country. Every country has years and dates by which it holds onto its past and passes it on. We are approaching the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence. In his last extant letter, written just two weeks before he died on the 50th anniversary of July 4, 1776, Thomas Jefferson prayed: “let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of [our] rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.” 

The way in which we annually honor and celebrate our Independence Day tells us a great deal about who we are as a people, a country. Whatever the limits of David Brown’s approach, by the time he gets to the end of his story he has shown us why a patriotic American, a “sincere believer” in the principles of the Declaration, might take the occasion of the Fourth of July, 1854, to burn the Constitution, and he has prepared his reader well to begin to contemplate the last sentence of his book:

Ill served were the youth who came of age when a divided Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, in whose wake came a great reckoning, the measured resonance of an original sin that had long shaken the country—and stirs through it still.