By David S. Brown
With the passage of “An
Act to suppress the Slave Trade in the District of Columbia,” on September 20,
1850, the fight for and against slavery seemed to be over. It was the final
puzzle piece to be fitted into the Compromise of 1850, with its sister acts
finalizing the Texas border, California statehood, establishing a territorial
government for Utah, and a stricter Fugitive Slave Act. The debate over slavery
still raged, but the United States settled into an uneasy peace. That is until
January 4,1854 when Senator Stephen A. Douglas reported his Kansas-Nebraska
bill to the main body of the United States Senate. Stephens’ bill sought to
overturn the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and established the idea “popular
sovereignty” assigning each new territory the power to decide by a vote of its
residents to enter the Union either as a slave state or a free state. After
months of debates, the bill was passed by both the Senate and the House of
Representatives and signed into law on May 30, 1854 by President Franklin
Pierce.
David S. Brown
explores how the Kansas-Nebraska Act unexpectedly became the greatest
miscalculation in American history, dividing North and South, creating the
Republican party, and paving the way for the Civil War in his book “A Hell of a Storm: The Battle for Kansas,
The End Of Compromise, and the Coming of the Civil War.” Though the
subtitle of this book implies a focus on the Kansas-Nebraska act and the events
in “Bleeding Kansas,” the narrative does not. The author himself states in
interviews that he had always wanted to write something on Henry David Thoreau
and the publication of “Walden” in
1854. That same year George Fitzhugh, published his most powerful attack
on the philosophical foundations of free society, “Sociology for the South,
or, the Failure of Free Society.” In
it Fitzhugh was critical of the industrial
north & argues for a return to agrarianism as it existed in the South.
Taken together with the “Walden,” “Sociology
for the South” and the
Kansas-Nebraska Act form the framework of Brown’s narrative.
“A Hell of a Storm”
often tangentially strays away from the Kansas-Nebraska Act and Bloody Kansas,
instead in Brown’s narrative the Kansas-Nebraska Act functions like a stone
thrown into the middle Walden Pond and its outward rippling effects.
Among others featured in Brown’s book are Stephen A. Douglas, the “doughfaced” Senator from Illinois and the author of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and his rival both in love and politics, Abraham Lincoln who would go on to be the 16th President of the United States; Ralph Waldo Emerson, the essayist, lecturer, philosopher, minister, abolitionist, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century; the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Harriet Beecher Stowe; William Walker, the filibusterer who organized unauthorized military expeditions into Mexico and Central America with the intention of establishing colonies where slavery could flourish; Senator Henry Clay from Kentucky, the “Great Compromiser,” who introduced the failed omnibus bill which Stephen Douglas broke up the bill into its individual parts which were passed by Congress one bill at a time, making the Comprise of 1850; Salmon P. Chase who would go on to become the 23rd Governor of Ohio, United States Senator from Ohio, 25th United States Secretary of the Treasury during the Lincoln Administration, and the 6th Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court; Horace Greeley, the neck bearded founder and editor of the New York Tribune; Anthony Burns, a fugitive slave from Virginia whose capture and trial in Boston, and transport back to Virginia, generated wide-scale public outrage in the North and increased support for abolition; Sojourner Truth; there is a whole chapter dedicated to Martin Delany, who staunchly advocated African Americans to leave the United States to settle in Central or South America as he feared racism would trump everything in America; Eliza Schuyler Hamilton, wife of founding father Alexander Hamilton who died in 1854; Harriet Tubman; John Brown; Alvan E. Bovay, one of the founders of the Republican Party; who led the crusade to ensure that the Kansas Territory would enter into the United States as a free state; and United States Congressman and abolitionist Joshua R. Giddings.
Given its slightly misleading subtitle I still would absolutely recommend “A Hell of a Storm” to those interested in the antebellum era. It is extremely well researched and written in an easily read narrative.
