During the long decade from 1848 to 1861 America was a like a train speeding down the track with an engineer or brakes. New territories acquired from Mexico had vastly increased the size of our nation, but debate over the status of slavery within them paralyzed the nation. While southerners gained access to the territories and a draconian fugitive slave law in the Compromise of 1850, northerners despised being turned into slave catchers. In the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, Congress repealed the ban on slavery in the remaining unorganized territories. In 1857, the Supreme Court held in the landmark Dred Scott case that all bans on slavery in the territories were unconstitutional while northern whites, blacks, and fugitive slaves resisted the 1850 fugitive slave law. In Congress, members openly carried weapons and Representative Preston Brooks assaulted Senator Charles Sumner with a cane, nearly killing him.
     This volume - the third book in the Perspectives on the History of Congress 1801-1877 series - features some of the most distinguished historians in the nation examining many of these issues, helping us to better understand the failure of political leadership in the decade that lead to the Civil War.  Edited by USCHS Chief Historian Donald R. Kennon, Ph.D, and Albany Law Professor Paul Finkleman.  Hardcover, 231 pp, 2012.