Hell of a Storm: The Battle for Kansas, the End of Compromise, and the Coming of the Civil War

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