A Hell of a Storm

Starred review from July 22, 2024
Historians tend to present “a carefully curated inventory of provocations” when explaining “the collapse of sectional compromise” that led to the Civil War, but that collapse was experienced in real time as a single momentous event, according to this lively account. Historian Brown (The First Populist) recaps the passage of the “explosive” Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which he argues “profoundly affected the way that both northerners and southerners saw themselves—and each other.” Previously, “most Americans seemed eager to set their sectional quarrel aside,” as evidenced by generations of compromises over slavery—the most recent having been the Missouri Compromise of 1850, which guaranteed that slavery wouldn’t spread to the Western territories but that fugitive slaves would be returned to the South. However, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which “ free soil to slavery,” prompted “a great whirlwind from the North, a burst of... outcry.” A series of vibrantly narrated vignettes demonstrate the Act’s radicalizing effect: Northerners began shipping “Bibles and guns” to Kansas to aid John Brown’s until-that-point quixotic insurgency; “a group of townspeople in remote Ripon, Wisconsin,” broke with the Whig party, and began referring to themselves as “Republicans”; and “genteel” abolitionists like Ralph Waldo Emerson were suddenly calling for violence. Readers will be entranced by this sharply drawn study of sectarian feeling.

September 1, 2024
Historian and biographer Brown's seventh book examines the federal Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Illinois' U.S. Senator Stephen Douglas wrote the legislation to bring order to a vast western territory; "Nebraska" actually included Nebraska, Montana, and parts of Colorado, the Dakotas, and Wyoming. To obtain support from slave-state legislators, Douglas included "popular sovereignty," empowering settlers to decide whether their state would be free or allow slavery. Paradoxically, this enlarged the antislavery movement and hastened emancipation, in part due to some people becoming abolitionists because they felt the act gave Southerners, the "slave power," too much authority. The book's main plotline is the drafting and debate of the Kansas- Nebraska Act, public reactions, and events in Kansas after the bill became law. Brown offers a noteworthy account of how the Constitutional Convention negotiated slavery and how slavery became baked into Southern society and politics. He also includes biographical sketches of Harriet Beecher Stowe, her Southern detractors, Emerson, Thoreau, Lincoln, fugitive slaves, and enslavers. Readers will come away better informed about antebellum history and how it mirrors current events.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 1, 2024
How an incendiary piece of legislation brought on a national crisis. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 was, as Brown explains here, "almost certainly the most lethal piece of legislation to ever clear Congress." In reversing the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and allowing slavery to expand into vast new western territories, the act deepened divisions between North and South and pushed the country toward civil war. This engaging history first examines the precarious balance struck between sectional differences at the nation's founding, then charts its dramatic demolition in the mid-19th century. Brown offers revealing studies of central figures in this historical period, from politicians Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln, to authors and social commentators Harriet Beecher Stowe and Ralph Waldo Emerson, to abolitionist activists Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. Particularly rewarding are the author's analyses of Stowe'sUncle Tom's Cabin and its indictment of "those various northern networks of complicity--merchants and insurers, lawyers and creditors--that [kept] the business of bondage strong, expansive, and legal." Emerson's complex attitudes about racial differences are also given sensitive and revealing consideration: "Unable to grieve for a race he did not know, Emerson ultimately entered the public outcry against slavery when he recognized the institution as an infringement ofwhite freedom." Another intriguing and persuasive feature of this book's commentary is its suggestion that the polarized conditions of antebellum America parallel those of the contemporary moment. Brown's ultimate conclusions are apt, compelling, and memorably expressed: "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." A lively, incisive examination of the social and political background of a tumultuous era.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.