Appalled and paralyzed. Abandoned and betrayed. Cowed and bowed. Thus did Frederick Douglass describe the North in the wake of the compromise measures of 1850 that seemed to enshrine concessions to slavery permanently into the American political system. This study discovers in a feature of political anti-slavery discourse--the condemnation of an enfeebled North--the key to a wide variety of literary works of the 1850s. Both the political discourse and the literature set out to expose the self-chosen degradation of compromise as a threat at once to the personal foundation of each individual...