My Review of David Brown's "A Hell of a Storm: The Battle for Kansas......."

 1854: The Hinge Year on the Road to Civil War

 

Historian David Brown has given us an important and very readable book on how the events of 1854 set America on course to our civil war. The critical event was the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act which broke the Missouri Compromise of 1820 by allowing the territories north of 36 degrees 30 minutes latitude to decide for themselves whether or not they wanted to allow slavery under the doctrine of popular sovereignty. Prior to that enactment slavery was prohibited in most of the Louisiana Purchase. The notion of popular sovereignty was first introduced by Senator Stephen Douglas in the 1850 compromise that brought California into the Union, but, allowed for the New Mexico and Arizona Territories to vote on whether or not they wanted slavery. Stephen Douglas would then build on the 1850 compromise to champion the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

 

The notion of popular sovereignty seems quaint today, but I would note we are yet again living with this on the issue of abortion. The overturning of Rowe v. Wade returned the question of abortion to the states where each state would determine how it deals with this question.

 

Leading the charge against the Kansas-Nebraska Act was Free Soil Party Senator Salmon P. Chase. Chase would go on to help found the new Republican Party in 1854, become Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury, and then become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. His leadership on this issue established him as a national figure and the issue brought Abraham Lincoln out of his successful law practice into the national limelight. The growing chasm between north and south was occurring against the backdrop of rising industrialization and a growing abolition movement. It would become a battle between free labor and slavery.

 

So great was the controversy over the act, that the Whig Party would collapse as the northern Whigs could no longer countenance being in the same party as the southern Whigs. Most of the northern Whigs became Republicans and the Democrats solidified their position in the South and picked up those northern Whigs who didn’t become Republicans. The reason why the act passed was because the slavery-oriented Democratic Party was at the height of its power controlling the presidency and both houses of Congress. Indeed the New Hampshire native Franklin Pierce was the last Democratic president to receive a majority vote for president until Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.

 

Brown brings into the mix Harriet Beecher Stowe of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” fame published in 1852, Henry David Thoreau and his “Walden Pond” (1854), and Harriet Tubman’s underground railroad. All of this was going on in and around 1854. Further, in 1854 the full ramifications of the Fugitive Slave Law, part of the 1850 compromise, was being felt in the North, especially Massachusetts.

 

David Brown gives us a very real sense of our country heading towards civil war. Unfortunately, the parallels for today are more than disquieting.