“This book is a masterpiece. . . . Elegant, witty (mystery fans will note a good number of Sherlockian allusions), and learned, Slavery and the American West is the finest book written on the 1850s since David Potter’s classic study of two decades past.” — Civil War History
“Serious historians will find Morrison’s book well worth reading. It captures the key events that led to civil war while superimposing them on a framework of western expansion.” — Military Review
“A welcome study, a well-written authoritative work that provokes new answers to old but scarcely exhausted questions about the origins of America’s greatest upheaval.” — Slavery and Abolition
“A strong book that is thoroughly and copiously documented. . . . Slavery and the American West brings a range of fresh insights that will help historians rethink the conceptual framework of antebellum politics.” — Kansas History
“A thoroughly researched, carefully reasoned account of antebellum politics. . . . This book is an intellectual tour de force.” — North Carolina Historical Review
“This book is a masterpiece. . . . No historian who pretends to understand the sixteen-year countdown to Civil War will be able to ignore it.” — Civil War History
“Slavery and the American West shows in exhaustive detail just how the controversy over the expansion of slavery grew increasingly bitter and divisive until it provoked the departure of the lower South states in response to Lincoln’s election in 1860 on a platform of containing slavery.” — New York Review of Books
“Morrison’s vigorous, thoroughgoing examination of the slavery extension issue, along with his ringing assertion of its significance, will insure that the underlying drama at work in the political arena during the 1840s and 1850s will always be given its rightful place in future accounts of the coming of the Civil War.” — Reviews in American History
“Michael Morrison’s important new book shows how expansionist appeals to the new nation’s 'manifest destiny' at first subsumed and mitigated, but ultimately exacerbated sectional antagonisms. Slavery and the American West is a fresh and provocative contribution to our understanding of the process of party disorganization and sectional mobilization that brought the union to its final crisis.” — Peter S. Onuf, University of Virginia
