1854 was a momentous year in America, marked notoriously by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The legislation declared that territories west of the Mississippi River could allow slavery if their residents and respective territorial legislatures voted for it. This bill wiped clear a generations-old truce of sectional compromise within the American government that first started with the Constitutional Convention in 1787. The bill’s author, Stephen Douglas, remarked at the time of drafting the legislation that the bill’s opposition, primarily from Yankee abolitionists, “will raise a hell of a storm.” David S. Brown, author of A Hell of a Storm:The Battle for Kansas, the End of Compromise, and the Coming of the Civil War, wryly noted in reply to Douglas’s quote “and so it did.”
This book is a walk through a stormy year in American life. The Kansas-Nebraska Act effectively killed one political party, birthed its replacement, and drove the longstanding dominant party in American politics into a minority status that took generations for it to exit fully from. The Underground Railroad was in full transit, helping Blacks escape slavery through the work of Harriet Tubman and others. 1854 also was marked by the conclusion of the Exhibition of Industry of All Nations, a World’s Fair held in Manhattan, as well as the opening of Japan to American trade. The year also included the death of the last of the founding mothers (a spouse of one of the Founding Fathers) of the United States. Abraham Lincoln found his political voice and an aspirant to the White House, Stephen Douglas, effectively lost his over the course of this important year.
A Hell of a Storm is a fast-paced trip through a year that changed much of America’s trajectory, sending it quickly towards a Civil War that would soon kill hundreds of thousands of American men in a few years’ time.
MY RATING: 4.5
