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

Many scholars have assessed the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. The clear majority of them believe its passage and implementation were prime causal factors that brought on the American Civil War. Most of these works treat two of the primary factors: the law’s significance and historic meaning and the drive to expand slavery among the states. The primary work continues to be James A. Rawley’s Race and Politics: “Bleeding Kansas” and the Coming of the Civil War (1969), and the most recent work, The Nebraska-Kansas Act of 1854 (2008), edited by John R. Wunder and Joann M. Ross, focuses on the long neglected Nebraska aspect.

Less attention has been given to the detailed political history required for the law’s passage, particularly in the US Senate, and the context of these developments. This then is the subject of the new work by Alice Malavasic, The F Street Mess: How Southern Senators Rewrote the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

It appears that four senators from slave states wanted to pass this new law. They include Robert M. T. Hunter and James Murray Mason, both of Virginia; Andrew Pickens Butler, South Carolina; and David Rice Atchison, Missouri. The “F Street Four” coalesced around this potential new law, often referred to as the Nebraska bill, and even found a gathering place to live, a house on F Street—hence the title of the book.

Politics was undergoing a massive change. The passings of John C. Calhoun and Henry Clay eliminated some of the law’s founding senators. These men enjoyed great respect from the F Street Four, but it was clear that all three were in their twilight years. Perhaps to some degree, the F Street Four wanted to pass a revised act as a tribute to the elder senators.

The primary contribution of this tightly focused political history is its prosopography (that is, collective biography) of the four senators. Each enjoyed strong support in his home state, and each fought his way to the top of his political state pyramid. In the process of writing this book, Malavasic uncovered extensive sources at the local and state levels, and she masterfully puts them all together. The result is that we have a much greater understanding of what was actually behind the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Of the famed four senators, Atchison is perhaps the odd man out. He was primarily concerned about western issues and potential settlement in Kansas, and he saw his alliance with the three other senators of the Deep South as a necessary aspect of freeing up the lands in Kansas and Nebraska and making further development in Missouri possible. Much of the previous historical discussion has centered on Douglas and railroad investment west of Chicago. Now that we see the actions and goals achieved by the F Street senators, that seems less important.

The Civil War was not kind to any of the Southern senators responsible for the Kansas-Nebraska Act, as Malavasic shows by tracing their lives during and after the war. Some escaped and returned only to find their homes burned. The last surviving senator, Robert Hunter, “remained to his death uncompromising, unsuccessful, and unrepentant, the very epitome of the Slave Power” (197). Those who contributed to America’s greatest catastrophe obtained their earned reward.