James Rawley: Race and politics – “Bleeding Kansas” and the Coming of the Civil War

Race and Politics offers an analysis of the controversies that followed the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. The question of whether the still unsettled Kansas Territory should be slave or free divided the nation into hostile and ultimately irreconcilable camps, creating conditions that only civil war could resolve. The author demonstrates, however, that the fundamental issue was not slavery as such but race: whether the country, its egalitarian slogans notwithstanding, could tolerate the expansion of African Americans, slave or free.