A lice E lizabeth M alavasic . The F Street Mess

Conspiracy theories have long been a recurrent feature of American political history, and in the mid-nineteenth century none was more potent than the so-called “Slave Power” thesis. That theory, as articulated by its northern adherents, held that a small number of powerful proslavery southerners had warped federal policy not only to protect the peculiar institution where it existed but also to enable its spread into the western territories and beyond. Unlike previous scholarship that has dwelt upon the rhetorical power of the Slave Power conspiracy, particularly in galvanizing the nascent Republican Party, Alice Elizabeth Malavasic’s compelling new monograph The F Street Mess: How Southern Senators Rewrote the Kansas-Nebraska Act reminds us that northern observers had good reason to worry. The Slave Power, she asserts, was indeed real, personified by the junta of four U.S. senators and housemates whom peers called the “F Street Mess”: Robert M. T. Hunter and James Mason of Virginia, Andrew Butler of South Carolina, and David Rice Atchison of Missouri.

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