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Congress and the Crisis of the 1850s. Ed. by Paul Finkelman and Donald R. Kennon. (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2012. Pp. 231, notes on contributors, index. Cloth, $49.95.)
This is the third book in the series "Perspectives on the History of Congress, 1801-1877," edited by Donald R. Kennon, although the essays in this volume are only loosely tied to the history of Congress. Paul Finkelman does not even try to suggest common themes among the essays in his wonderfully written introduction. His own implicit theme is that national leaders failed to provide leadership during the decade, and he indicts the presidents after Polk for being particularly inept ("Fillmore's utter incompetence," for instance), (p. 3) Congress, he concludes, "only made the crisis worse" with the Compromise of 1850 and Kansas-Nebraska Act. (p. 2) He also maintains that there was just one issue - slavery, of course - that drove the crisis of the 1850s. These arguments actually contradict several essays that explicitly de-emphasize slavery or do not really engage the history of Congress.
The first two chapters, by Michael Holt and Finkelman, address the Compromise of 1850. Holt summarizes his previously published work on the topic (he does not include notes), and his emphasis on the party...