A Hell of a Storm by David S. Brown
The role of the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) in precipitating the Civil War was once a topic touched on in most every American social studies textbook. But most social studies teachers never taught it as well as David S. Brown. A history instructor at Elizabethtown College, Brown sees the legislation, which opened the Western territories from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains as potential future slave states. He sees the legislation as no mere milestone on the road to war but as the absolute turning point.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act upended all previous compromises on slavery, triggered the rise of the Republican Party (in those days, it was the liberal party) and the ascent of Abraham Lincoln, fostered the animosity behind the Dred Scott decision, John Brown’s insurgency and, finally, secession by the Southern states. Brown makes the case that these events “owed something small or large to the decisions made on slavery and territorial development during the fateful Kansas-Nebraska debates.”
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