The first session of the Thirty-Sixth Congress, which met from December 1859 to June 1860 was tumultuous but not productive of the legislation that histories recall – such as the Compromise of 1850, the grab-bag of legislation that was intended to put slavery as a political issue to rest once and for all; or the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 that revoked the Missouri Compromise and decreed that popular sovereignty henceforth would determine whether the federal territories would enter the union...