Thank you, Scribner, for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

I just finished A Hell Of A Storm: The Battle For Kansas, The End Of Compromise, And The Coming Of The Civil War, by David S. Brown.

At first, it appeared that this book was about the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which the author called “almost certainly the most lethal piece of legislation to ever clear Congress.” The act, whose passage was led by Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas, allowed slave holders to bring their slaves into the vast area between the Mississippi and the Colorado mountains, which had previously been closed to slavery by the Missouri Compromise. Brown’s view of the act is shared by such prominent historians as James M. McPherson (“the Kansas-Nebraska Act…may have been the most important single event pushing the nation towards civil war”) and Allen C. Guelzo (“The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 enjoys the dubious honor of being the only…legislation that caused a civil war.”)

The book started off strong. But, then once the act was passed, the focus of the book abruptly changed. I had been assuming that the author was going to devote the rest of the book to the consequences of the act in leading up to the Civil War. But, the author seemed to be much more interested in focusing just on the events of the year 1854. There was, of course, discussions of things that happened in other years, but it felt like those were more just for background info, for the prior to 1854 stuff, or just foreshadowing, for the yet to occur items. And there was much of the background pre-1854 stuff and not even even close to enough of the subsequent consequences of the act. I’m not complaining about the background, but am complaining about the lack of going forward to the consequences.

This took what could have a very good book and turned into a big disappointment. In the early stages of reading, I gave this one a chance at an A. By the time I was finished, I had to lower the overall grade to C. It was just a lost opportunity to turn what could have been a great book about the consequences of the act into just a look at the events, and important people, of one particular year. Goodreads and NetGalley require grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, a C equates to 2 stars. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).

This review has been posted at NetGalley, Goodreads and my blog, Mr. Book’s Book Reviews

I originally finished reading this on August 7, 2024.

Just to set your expectations if you plan to read this book about the passage and impact of the Kansas-Nebraska Act - it could just as easily, and perhaps should, have been titled “1854.” The book is really more about this particular moment in time in America than it is strictly about the divisive measure that became law that year. Kansas-Nebraska ends up serving as the springboard to a series of vignettes about the political and cultural notables of 1854, and the debates that swirled around slavery, rather than a close examination of the divisive Act itself.

I thought the book started out strong in tracing the background of how the Kansas-Nebraska Act came to be, and how it was a bad idea that only made divisions over slavery worse. Brown begins by going back to consider the drafting of the Constitution, whose compromises “prefaced rather than prevented a series of sectional disputes,” he writes.

Those papered-over disputes erupted anew when Sen. Stephen Douglas “lazily latched on to the convenient principle of popular sovereignty” in proposing and pushing through Kansas-Nebraska, upending decades of compromise to allow for slavery’s unfettered expansion, essentially all in the name of his own political ambition. While Brown offers little analysis of how and why President Pierce was persuaded to support the measure, which proved nearly as important as Douglas proposing it in the first place, he otherwise thoroughly follows its progression from proposal to reality, concluding that the Act was “almost certainly the most lethal piece of legislation to ever clear Congress,” and “the greatest miscalculation in American political history.”

Strong and compelling stuff there.

There’s more story to be told, though, and this is where Brown begins to both narrow his viewpoint and broaden his focus. He first aims to separate Kansas-Nebraska from most of what preceded, and followed, it. The Act, he argues, is often treated as just one more bullet point in a list of events that precipitated the Civil War - the Fugitive Slave Law, John Brown, Dred Scott, Lincoln’s election, secession. So a specific focus on Kansas-Nebraska is welcome.

But he then broadens his focus by introducing a large cast of characters, one chapter at a time, in an effort to illustrate how popular sentiment about slavery was shaped by Kansas-Nebraska. It’s here where it becomes difficult to consider Kansas-Nebraska in isolation. We get character sketches of notable individuals like Emerson, Thoreau, Garrison, Stowe, Tubman and - late in the book - Lincoln. Their stories are meant to illustrate how Kansas-Nebraska helped fuel antislavery sentiment, transforming the issue from a mere political question to a moral crusade.

It’s unclear, though, whether this antislavery sentiment was really fueled by Kansas-Nebraska alone, or in some cases, at all. Much of the moral outrage that the book’s cast of characters expresses comes in response to the Fugitive Slave Law, which hit many people more viscerally than the political debates over slavery’s expansion. As Brown considers the perspectives of writers and philosophers, the discussion becomes more abstract, more about the very nature of government and freedom, and less political and concrete about the consequences of Kansas-Nebraska and what should be done next.

What Brown ultimately seems to suggest is that the moral argument against slavery, combined with the political argument against Kansas-Nebraska, is what became the tipping point that led to war and slavery’s eradication for good. But he chooses to convey this point in the form of personality profiles and meandering side stories, which can add to the book’s readability but often obscure its thesis. I found this to be a distraction until I finally realized that the side stories aren’t meant to be side stories at all - they ARE the story.

So this book is essentially a cultural history of the year 1854. Kansas-Nebraska is meant to be the main event, and the through line in every individual’s story, but the thoughtful and thorough treatment of Kansas-Nebraska itself at the beginning doesn’t extend throughout the book. By the concluding chapter, Brown muses on everything from the 1854 death of Eliza Hamilton as the passing of an era, to New York’s World’s Fair that concluded in 1854, before swiftly summarizing in an epilogue everything that happened post-1854 in the slavery debate.

The writing can be engaging at times - Brown has a penchant for evocative descriptions of individuals and their hair, such as “the lavishly sideburned” Rep. William Richardson, “the luxuriantly maned Virginia agriculturalist Edmund Ruffin,” and “the neck-bearded editor” Horace Greeley. Largely, though, the book is written in a scholarly, ultra-literate, thesaurus-wielding style that I found somewhat ostentatious and off-putting: “It is tempting,” he writes at one point, “to interpret Walker as sui generis, a rare ruffian… and yet his outré legacy is far more ecumenical.”

Ultimately, the decision to focus on Kansas-Nebraska in isolation, and on personalities of the time whose viewpoints were purportedly influenced by Kansas-Nebraska, avoids many of the larger political questions that could have been pondered. It is true that later “causes of the Civil War” bullet points like John Brown, Dred Scott, Lincoln’s election and secession may not have happened, or happened in quite the same way, had it not been for Kansas-Nebraska. But was disunion, or some kind of reckoning over slavery inevitable? Was it uniquely Kansas-Nebraska that caused all the other dominos to fall, or would something else have done it regardless? If Kansas-Nebraska was indeed “the greatest miscalculation in American political history,” is it not deserving of a book of its own to explore this, without the cultural-history personality profiles that dilute its otherwise provocative message?

This book left me wanting more of what it started out with, and less of what it ended up with (not to mention less sui generis ruffians with ecumenical outré legacies). The antebellum era, and the individuals who lived through it, are fascinating - though this book about both felt to me a little less so.

I really was invested in what was going on and thought the historical element worked. It was a point in history that I had never heard of and thought the overall feel worked. David S. Brown wrote this perfectly and was really well researched.

Brown's book makes a good case for the importance of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and ensuing fight as the spark of the Civil War. He takes good care to show that this event did not develop within a vacuum, however. The prelude to the war's ultimate conflict was the westward expansion of the country and the prospects of slavery wrapped up in that expansion. There has been some good work centered around the lead up to the civil war (William Freehling's multi-volume history comes to mind); there are also some works that mention key components of the event- particularly with Lincoln's rhetoric and the issues of westward expansion. However, Brown synthesizes many different storylines and perspectives into one. He writes with detail but with an eye on the overall scope of the story; he keeps his writing tight and focused, creating an engaging narrative. This is a great addition to Brown's work, most recently his populist-centered look at Andrew Jackson. He does here as he did there, linking the story of America's spirit to larger events in the country's transformation.