A Strife of Tongues

With this volume, Stephen E. Maizlish sheds new light on a much-studied event by writing “a cultural and intellectual history” of the Compromise of 1850 (p. 1). Rather than illuminating the compromise measures, this study highlights the growing ideological divide between the North and the South that the months-long congressional debate revealed and exacerbated. Maizlish sides with historians who see the Civil War as a clash between fundamentally different sections. Although he does not go so far as to say that the Civil War was inevitable, he responds to revisionists who emphasize contingency by asserting that “the clashing ideologies revealed in the debates” leading to 1850 “gave citizens in both sections a way of understanding those contingent events” in the ensuing decade (p. 6). One of this book's strengths is how clearly and vigorously Maizlish argues his thesis; that also may be its biggest weakness. Maizlish's drive to center sectional

Compromise · Contingency · Epistemology · Ideology · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Philosophy