The F Street Mess: How Southern Senators Rewrote the Kansas–Nebraska Act by Alice Elizabeth Malavasic (review)

Alice Elizabeth Malavasic tells the story, and indeed the backstory, of the Kansas–Nebraska Act, a piece of legislation passed in 1854 and commonly cited by historians as the catalyst of the rise of the Republican Party and the sectional discord that became civil war. Malavasic's narrative, which spans the years 1837 to 1861, recounts how a tight-knit group of Congressmen who lived together on F Street in Washington, DC—David Atchison of Missouri, Andrew Butler of South Carolina, and Robert Hunter and James Mason of Virginia—came to play a decisive role in proposing and defending the most controversial element of the Kansas–Nebraska Act: the repeal of the Missouri Compromise's 36' 30" line, which banned slavery north of this latitude in the Louisiana Territory. Malavasic is not the first historian to point out that the F Street Mess wielded considerable power in shaping and passing a piece of legislation associated, most commonly, with Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois. She acknowledges this by pointing to past works by Michael Holt, Allan Nevins, David Potter, and, most recently, Rachel Shelden in Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill, NC, 2013). What The F Street Mess adds to existing scholarship, Malavasic contends, is a deeper understanding of the role that the "group dynamic" among the four messmates played in constituting their outsized collective influence (14).

Malavasic meticulously guides readers through the Kansas–Nebraska debates' complex politics and historical context. She explicates, often with notable clarity, a range of legal arguments made in favor of, or against repeal of, the 36' 30" line and connects these positions to the partisan agendas and personal interests (mostly land speculation and reelection) of the men who formulated them. To keep things lively, Malavasic inflects her delivery with moments of literary flair meant to conjure a sense of historical atmosphere. A good example appears in the lead paragraphs of Chapter 4 where she describes the commencement of the 1853–1854 Congressional session. Malavasic begins by panning around the vast, ornate Senate chamber and establishing each F Street Mess member's location within it. She then shifts the reader's gaze to the "small unadorned" and "spindly" current-bill box on whose bottom shelf a new Kansas–Nebraska bill would most likely soon be placed (81). With a sense of foreshadowing, she finally adds, "whether it would be one of the few [bills] to make it to the narrow top shelf" before the session's end was "uncertain"; "what it would look like if it did" was quite uncertain as well (82).

The most intriguing aspect of the book lies in its overall conceptualization. Like Rachel Shelden, Malavasic points out that political histories can give insufficient attention to the ways that personal relationships shaped the political process. More commonly emphasized factors such as "ideology, party, and region" mattered, she readily acknowledges, but in certain instances "friendships" forged and sustained outside of legislative halls overshadowed these factors in determining the laws produced within them (17). Malavasic contends that the Kansas–Nebraska Act, specifically the Missouri Compromise repeal article, was just such an instance.

As valid and intriguing as Malavasic's framework is, it connects to an unsteady aspect of the book. While The F Street Mess provides thoughtful biographies of the individual messmates, it does not deliver a full enough sense of the Mess's group dynamic—the book's purported argumentative hinge—or the interpersonal elements that comprised it. In the first and second chapters, for instance, Malavasic makes much of John Calhoun being key to understanding the F Street Mess's cohesion and influence—"they were the heirs of Calhoun," she asserts (59). Yet these chapters, and subsequent ones, leave readers wanting deeper and more specific explanations of how each member personally understood this "inheritance" and how these understandings...