William Lee Miller. Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.
One problem with the history of the Antebellum period is that it is defined--both in terminology and in the public mind--by what came next; yet at the same time, in the public mind the Civil War is not so much the end product of decades of deliberate agitation in a context of an increasingly stark sectional division as a sudden event that negated everything that came before.
Miller's book is an account of the long campaign for free speech fought in Congress by John Quincy Adams and eventually some allies. Specifically, for the right of anti-slavery petitions from citizens to be heard in the House of Representatives. This entirely parliamentary battle preceded not only the Civil War by more than two decades, it also came before the increasingly heated and open political arguments which came in the decade just prior to the war.
This particular battle--bloodless, sometimes carried out in obtuse parliamentary jargon, and ostensibly concerned with issues of free speech about slavery rather than slavery itself--has understandably failed to register in the public consciousness, However, Miller makes an excellent argument that the debate, and particularly John Quincy Adams leading role in it, deserves to be more widely known.
The battles to come would be more intense, more explicitly about slavery, and ultimately much more deadly. But this extended legislative battle was an important step along the way, and Miller deserves credit both for bringing it to life and making a mostly-forgotten parliamentary battle into a fairly gripping narrative.
