FERGUS M. BORDEWICH has written a lively, attractive book about a fearsome and almost intractable crisis: the tangle of issues involving expansion and slavery that confronted the political class of the United States in 1850. Sectional passions ran so high then that there was a real danger of secession, perhaps even civil war. But thanks to two senators - Henry Clay and Stephen Douglas - and numerous bit players, Congress adopted a package of compromises that allowed the country to stumble along in one piece for 11 more years. The proximate cause of the crisis of 1850 was America's lopsided victory in the Mexican War (1846-48), which resulted in a huge accession of land, from the Rio Grande to the Pacific. How would it be parceled into territories and states? Would they admit slavery? Although slave states and free states had maintained an edgy equilibrium since the Missouri Compromise three decades earlier, quarrels over the new windfall threatened to upset the sectional balance. Mexico, the loser whose land the United States had ingested, had abolished slavery, but Texas, a slave state, claimed a vast hinterland as far west as Santa Fe. Southerners wanted new territory open to slavery, whether it belonged to Texas or not. The California gold rush made resolving these questions all the more urgent as hordes of forty-niners clamored for laws and representation. The politicians trying to solve these problems back in Washington made a gaudy cast of characters. The three most famous were aged lords of the Senate. Henry Clay of Kentucky had lost three runs for the White House, but he still knew how to win over a room. Bordewich quotes one rapt listener: "He spoke to an audience very much as an ardent lover speaks to his sweetheart." Daniel Webster of Massachusetts matched Clay in oratorical gifts: the same witness called his voice "resonant, mellow, sweet, with a thunder roll in it which, when let out to its full power, was awe inspiring." Clay and Webster were Whigs and nationalists. The Democrat John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, once a nationalist, had become an unyielding partisan of slavery who was willing to take the South out of the Union to preserve it. When a young woman worried that he was "too much excited" by politics, he replied that he was "not excited, only intense." These three jostled with younger Senate colleagues, including Stephen Douglas, a rambunctious Illinois populist; the New York abolitionist William Seward, short and mildmannered, but capable of inflammatory rhetoric ("There is a higher law than the Constitution," he declared); and Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, Calhoun's follower in the Gadarene rush to secession. The president was the Whig Zachary Taylor, elected in 1848, a Mexican War hero with no previous political experience. Despite being a Louisiana plantation owner, he wanted to put California on a fast track to statehood as a free state. He viewed Southern secessionists with wrath. " If they attempted to carry out their schemes," he told one senator, "they should be dealt with by law as they deserved and executed." Vice President Millard Fillmore, a more accommodating man, presided over the mosh pit of the Senate. There were two possible ways through the tangle. Clay conceived of a great bargain that would weave together something for everyone: admitting California as a free state, opening New Mexico to slavery and shrinking Texas, while simultaneously abolishing the slave trade in the District of Columbia and imposing a tough federal fugitive slave law. Douglas, by contrast, favored voting on these issues piecemeal. Clay's strategy was to assemble a supercoalition of moderates and not-so-hard-liners from both extremes; Douglas aimed to build different majorities on each question as it came up. Clay moved first, introducing his grand compromise at the end of January, and the Senate debated it exhaustively for the next six months. THE process was punishing. Single speeches could stretch over days; Clay alone spoke dozens of times. The debate was interrupted by death and farce. Calhoun expired at the end of March, predicting the Union would last only 12 more years (close enough). In May 500 Southerners, organized by the governor of Mississippi, mounted a freelance invasion of Cuba, hoping to wrest it from Spain and make it a new slave state. They were easily repelled, but the attempt showed the determination of Southern die-hards to expand slavery wherever they could. In July, Taylor died of what was probably acute gastroenteritis, brought on by eating contaminated food on the Fourth. Clay's grand compromise was finally voted down at the end of July. The center had not held; abolitionists and secessionists alike celebrated. Then Douglas went to work. His tactics, Bordewich writes, relied "less on grandiloquence than on tireless, mostly unrecorded negotiations, which were carried out as often as not over copious cups of wine" in a Senate snack bar called the Hole-in-the-Wall. The elements of Clay's plan, once they stood alone, passed both the Senate and the House rapidly (the long months of prior discussion, and everyone's weariness, no doubt sped the process). By the middle of September each compromise had passed. Douglas crowed: "We are united from shore to shore, and while the mighty West remained as the connecting link between the North and the South, there could be no disunion." Bordewich, the author of several books on American history, is a good writer - he knows when to savor details, and when to move things along - and a good quoter of others. "America's Great Debate" describes an event that is both an important episode in itself, and a prequel to the Civil War: in 1854, Douglas's golden legislative touch turned to poison when a bill he sponsored, opening the territories of Kansas and Nebraska to slavery, reignited the controversies he had helped quiet four years earlier. My only quibble is with Bordewich's introduction, which strains for present relevance. There he holds up the debate of 1850 as an example of "how much can be accomplished by the persuasive power of well-crafted English." But does his book bear him out? Some of Clay's and Webster's words shine here, but many of them, preserved without the power of their delivery, lie dull on the page. Their colleagues wallowed in fustian and threats: Henry Foote of Mississippi drew a pistol on Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri on the Senate floor; but after a full dose of Benton, who could blame him? Bordewich also says the debate of 1850 can teach us about "the nature of compromise." It can, but the lessons are not all encouraging. The compromise that Clay, Douglas and others hammered out bought time for a new two-party system to emerge: the Republican Party would provide a home for men like William Seward, who failed to win its presidential nomination in 1860 but became the righthand man of the victor, Abraham Lincoln. The compromise of 1850 did not, however, resolve the underlying intransigence of South and North. It did not even try, for the task could not be accomplished by traditional horse-trading. The final resolution of the twin problems of slavery and nationhood would not come until it was written in blood. Henry Clay's 'grand plan' was voted down by abolitionists and secessionists. The center had not held. Richard Brookhiser's most recent book is "James Madison."

Washington: The Making of an American Capital, 2008, etc.) recounts the amazing story of the cliffhanging compromise hammered out in both houses of Congress in 1850 that pitted the rival pro- and antislavery factions against each other and saved the country, temporarily, from dissolution. The war with Mexico four years before had added 1.2 million square miles to the western United States, while slavery, thanks to the cotton gin, had exploded exponentially. Would the new territories comprise slave states or free states? How to maintain the balance in the Senate and House of Representatives between them? Bordewich portrays a colorful cast of characters--Democrats, Whigs, Free Soilers and abolitionists--whose passionate rhetoric attained lyrical heights and brought the debate about America's very identity to the forefront. Chief architect Henry Clay, in ill health and at the end of an eminent career, brandished a fragment of George Washington's coffin and warned his colleagues of the dire consequences of disunion. Urging forbearance on both sides, Clay laid out the components of a plan accounting for the admission of California and New Mexico without restrictions (meaning they would decide themselves about slavery), resolving the disputed borders with Texas, abolishing the slave trade in Washington, D.C., and soothing Southerners' concerns over fugitive slaves. Warring factions--on the South, led by senators John Calhoun and Jefferson Davis, and on the North, led by Daniel Webster and William Seward--threatened to defeat the omnibus bill, until the rhetorical arm-wringing by the "steam engine in britches" Stephen A. Douglas squeezed a compromise and the necessary passage. Acquiescence to the Fugitive Slave Law, however, would henceforth haunt the lawmakers. A thrilling history lesson filled with pistol waving in the Senate, "backroom confabulations," the death of a president and old-fashioned oratorical efflorescence.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

In this vivid, insightful history of the bitter controversy that led to the Compromise of 1850, journalist Bordewich (Washington: The Making of the American Capital) reminds us that Southerners dominated all branches of the federal government until 1850. Every president had owned slaves except the two Adamses, and Southern states still made up half of the Senate. The territorial bonanza after the 1845-1847 Mexican war threatened their control because California and New Mexico's governments excluded slavery. Outraged Southern leaders refused to accept this, paralyzing Congress for months. A compromise designed by an aged Henry Clay failed, but was quickly revived and passed thanks largely to Stephen Douglas. It admitted California as a free state, put off the status of the remaining territory, and strengthened the fugitive slave law. Despite narrow passage and wildly abusive debate, it was a dazzling achievement that temporarily staved off civil war. Political history is often a hard slog, but not in Bordewich's gripping, vigorous account featuring a large cast of unforgettable characters with fierce beliefs. 16 pages of b&w photos, 2 maps. Agent: Elyse Cheney, Elyse Cheney Literary Associates. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Like Robert Remini's At the Edge of the Precipice (2010), this book focuses on the Compromise of 1850. At greater length than Remini, Bordewich quotes and paraphrases congressional speeches and not only those by high-stature senators like Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Daniel Webster about permitting slavery into territories taken from Mexico. By integrating the speeches of lesser-known legislators, Bordewich illustrates Congress' paralysis over the slavery issue, which, as 1850 elapsed, posed a genuine prospect of a civil war that would have begun in New Mexico, which slave-holding Texas prepared to invade. Developments in this offstage drama and in a separate action by slavery expansionists out to capture Cuba periodically parallel Bordewich's main narrative of the parliamentary course of Clay's compromise proposals. Bruiting the debates as expressed in the language of bills, amendments, and the era's ornate oratorical styles, Bordewich, a historian of the Underground Railroad (Bound for Canaan, 2005), so tautly recounts sectional and personal divisions that readers will feel in doubt about whether the outcome will be compromise and Union or secession and war.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist

The congressional debate that resulted in the Compromise of 1850 has long been considered the most dramatic in US history. By re-creating it in vivid detail, journalist Bordewich shows why. His book immerses readers in the clash of egos, ideologies, and events that forged the agreement many hoped would permanently resolve the crisis caused by the Mexican War and the expansion of slavery. Although the compromise ultimately failed in that regard, it did postpone the coming of the Civil War for ten years and, by doing so, perhaps saved the Union. Bordewich gives all the actors--great and small, both inside and outside Washington--their due time on stage, and in the end, readers emerge from the clash almost as exhausted as the participants. In comparison to today's politicians and what passes for political debate, these men, though certainly flawed, do look like giants. In a time characterized by divisions as bitter as any, they found a way to resolve their differences. Despite the fact that the author gets a little too preachy in the last couple of chapters, this is an excellent book. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. D. Butts Gordon College (GA)