A Strife of Tongues: The Compromise of 1850 and the Ideological Foundations of the American Civil War

Near the end of a nine-month confrontation preceding the Compromise of 1850, Abraham Venable warned his fellow congressmen that "words become things." Indeed, in politics—then, as now—rhetoric makes reality. But while the legislative maneuvering, factional alignments, and specific measures of the Compromise of 1850 have been exhaustively studied, much of the language of the debate, where underlying beliefs and assumptions were revealed, has been neglected.

The Compromise of 1850 attempted to...