A Hell of a Storm: The Battle for Kansas, the End of Compromise, and the Coming of the Civil War

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 “[opened Western] 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. (Sept.)