The F Street Mess

If the antebellum slave power had a physical address, it was not in Charleston, Richmond, or New Orleans, but at 361 F Street in Washington, D.C. There, during the eventful year of 1854, lived president pro tempore of the Senate David Atchison of Missouri, along with Andrew Butler of South Carolina and Robert M. T. Hunter and James M. Mason of Virginia, who chaired the Senate committees on Judiciary, Finance, and Foreign Affairs. Historians have long debated the influence of these powerful messmates, and in this book Alice Elizabeth Malavasic makes a forthright case for their decisive role in the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. United in politics and personal friendship, she argues, Atchison, Butler, Hunter, and Mason forced the bill's sponsor, Stephen Douglas, to include language invalidating the old Missouri Compromise limits on slavery's westward expansion. Both “the zenith and the nadir of the Slave Power,” in Malavasic's view, the Kansas-Nebraska Act led to the collapse of the second party system, a half decade of sectional strife, and ultimately the breakup of the Union (p. 17

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