<\/p>\n
“The F Street Mess — How Southern Senators Rewrote the Kansas-Nebraska Act,” written by Alice Malavasic, associate professor in the History, Philosophy and Social Sciences Department, now is available from The University of North Carolina Press<\/a>.<\/p>\n Pushing back against the idea that the Slave Power conspiracy was merely an ideological construction, 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 \u201cF Street Mess\u201d for the location of the house they shared. Focusing on the Senators’ most significant achievement — forcing a rewrite of the Nebraska bill that repealed the restriction against slavery above the 36\u00b0 30\u2032 parallel — Malavasic demonstrates how the F Street Mess\u2019s mastery of the legislative process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>\n