A Hell of a Storm

Description

A Hell of a Storm
by David S. Brown

ISBN: 9781668022818
Hardcover, new

Brief Description:
From popular historian and author of the “marvelous” (The New York Times
Book Review) The Last American Aristocrat comes the fascinating story of
how in 1854, a new law—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. The
history of the United States includes a series of sectional compromises—the
Constitutional Convention, the Missouri Compromise in 1820, and the
Compromise of 1850. While these accords created an imperfect republic, or
“a house divided,” as Lincoln put it, the country remained united. But then
in 1854, this three-generations system suddenly blew up with the passage of
the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and here, David Brown explores in riveting detail
how the Act led to the sudden division of North and South. The Act declared
that planters, if permitted by territorial laws, could bring their enslaved
peoples to the land extending from the Mississippi River to the Rocky
Mountains—the core of Jefferson’s old Louisiana Purchase which had been
reserved for free labor. Northerners were shocked that free soil might now
be turned over to slavery and responded with unprecedented backlash. In the
bill’s wake the conservative Whig Party (winners of multiple presidential
elections) collapsed, and the radical Republican Party was born—in six
years it would take control of the central government, provoking Southern
secession. In A Hell of a Storm, Brown brings history to life in a way that
resonates with the events of present. Through chapters on Lincoln, Emerson,
Stowe, Thoreau, and Tubman, along with a cast of presidents, poets,
abolitionists, and black emigrationists, Brown weaves a political,
cultural, and literary history that chronicles the Republican party’s
creation and rise, the collapse of antebellum compromises, and the coming
of the Civil War, all topics that mirror current discussions about
polarization in our nation today. By illuminating the personalities and the
platforms, the writings and ideas that upended an older America and made
space for its successor, A Hell of a Storm reminds us that American history
is always being made, and it can be both dynamic and dangerous, both then
and now.