The F Street Mess : Southern power in the antebellum senate and the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act

Abstrac

Kansas

This chapter discusses the internecine warfare that erupts in Kansas after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act known as Bleeding Kansas. It focuses David Rice Atchison’s leadership of proslavery forces on the ground in Kansas while the remaining members of the Mess lead the senate fight for passage of Kansas’ proslavery constitution. The chapter concludes with the caning of Charles Sumner and the northern democracy’s devastating loses in the 1856 elections.</p

The Power to Repeal

This chapter examines how the F Street Mess managed the floor debate and passage of the Kansas-Nebraska bill in the United States Senate. The chapter pays particular attention to Douglas and the Mess’ institutional control and procedural knowledge versus the opposition’s lack thereof.</p

Epilogue

The epilogue looks are the roles played by Atchison, Hunter, and Mason during the Civil War and their post war lives. Only Hunter endeavoured to return to public life after the war but was unsuccessful. </p

Senatorial Junta

This chapter examines the institutional power of the F Street Mess during the 33rd Congress including their influence over President Franklin Pierce and Stephen Douglas, the author of the proposed Kansas-Nebraska bill. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the F Street Mess forced a rewrite of the bill’s language which repealed the original 1820 restriction against slavery above the 36 30 and replaced it with the principle of congressional non-intervention, better known as popular sovereignty. </p

The F Street Mess

Pushing back against the idea that the Slave Power conspiracy was merely an ideological construction, Alice Elizabeth Malavasic argues that some southern politicians in the 1850s did indeed hold an inordinate amount of power in the antebellum Congress and used it to foster the interests of slavery. Malavasic focuses her argument on Senators David Rice Atchison of Missouri, Andrew Pickens Butler of South Carolina, and Robert M.T. Hunter and James Murray Mason of Virginia, known by their contemporaries as the “F Street Mess” for the location of the house they shared. Unlike the earlier and better-known triumvirate of John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster, the F Street Mess was a functioning oligarchy within the U.S. Senate whose power was based on shared ideology, institutional seniority, and personal friendship. By centering on their most significant achievement—forcing a rewrite of the Nebraska bill that repealed the restriction against slavery above the 36 30 parallel—Malavasic demonstrates how the F Street Mess’s mastery of the legislative process led to one of the most destructive pieces of legislation in United States history and helped pave the way to secession.</p

We Must Settle This Question

This chapter discusses the continued political consequences of the Kansas-Nebraska Act as the disintegration of the F Street Mess becomes a metaphor for the disintegration of the country. In 1860 Abraham Lincoln is elected president and the Democrats lose control of the senate, the last bastion of the slave power. Secession quickly follows and on July 7, 1861 Hunter and Mason, the two remaining members of the F Street Mess, are expelled from the senate for conspiracy against the Union. </p