The "stimulating, richly informed" ( The Wall Street Journal ) story behind the Compromise of 1850, which preserved the Union on the eve of the Civil War"original in concept, stylish in execution…provides everything history readers want.…The characters seem as vivid, human, and understandable as those who walk the halls of Congress today" ( The Washington Post) . The Mexican War introduced vast new territories into the United States, among them California and the present-day Southwest. When gold was discovered in California in the great Gold Rush of 1849, settlers petitioned for admission to the Union. But the U.S. Senate was precariously balanced with fifteen free states and fifteen slave states. Would California be free or slave? So began a paralyzing crisis in American government, sparking the longest debate in Senate history.

Fergus Bordewich brings to life two generations of senators who dominated the great debate. Luminaries such as John Calhoun, Daniel Webster, and Henry Clay were nearing the end of their long careers. Rising stars such as Jefferson Davis, William Seward, and Stephen Douglas would shape the country's politics as slavery gradually fractured the nation. The Compromise saved the Union from collapse, but it did so at a great cost. America's Great Debate takes us back to a time when compromise was imperative, when men swayed one another in Congress with the power of their ideas and their rhetoric, when partisans on each side reached across the aisle to preserve the Union from tragedy.