A Hell of a Storm

“Insightful.” —The Wall Street Journal * “Noteworthy…readers will come away better informed about antebellum history and how it mirrors current events.” —Booklist

The fascinating story of how a new law in 1854—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 was shaped by a series of sectional compromises—the Constitutional Convention, the Missouri Compromise in 1820, and the Compromise of 1850. While these accords formed an imperfect republic, or “a house divided,” as Abraham Lincoln put it, the country nevertheless remained united. But then in 1854, this three-generations system suddenly blew up with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, leading to a nearly fatal rupture in the union, described here by David S. Brown in riveting detail.

The act declared that planters, if permitted by territorial laws, could bring their enslaved people to the land extending from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains—the core of Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, which had formerly been reserved for free labor. Northerners were shocked that free soil might now be turned over to slavery, and they responded defiantly. In the bill’s wake the conservative Whig Party (winners of multiple presidential elections) gave way to the “radical” Republican Party, which, within six years, 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 contemporary events. Through chapters on Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, and Harriet Tubman, along with a cast of presidents, poets, abolitionists, and black emigrationists, Brown weaves a political, cultural, and literary history that chronicles the rise of the Republican Party, 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 left 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.