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There’s a few things Miller’s book is about.

Most centrally, it is about the Gag Rule, or really, the series of Gag Rules about slavery in the US House of Representatives in the 1830s. It is also about the birth of the abolition movement in the North, and is about President John Quincy Adams’ later tenure as a Massachusetts representative.

There’s also a number of more minor themes of course. An interesting one is the fact that the fight centered around the right to petition. It’s not something we really pay attention to these days, but it is actually the right with the longest recognition in English use. Miller also spends time going into the points of view clashing in these fights, and the impossibility of making a subject go away by refusing to talk about it.

There’s also a love for going through the old Congressional records on Miller’s part. There’s a lot of quotes from actual speeches as recorded in the two newspapers that covered the doings of the government. This is accompanied by a lot of commentary; explanations of the wider circumstances, summary of what’s been said leading to the part he quotes, etc. Unfortunately, there is a tendency towards just restating what has been said. Sometimes (often), the other bits involved means this enhances the quote he’s restating, but too often it is just a direct restatement without any purpose.

Other than that last problem, this is a great, well-written book, that is a great study of the US political process relatively early in its life. It deserves to be widely read. However, the Kindle edition deserves to be shunned. It is obvious that someone scanned the book, ran it through OCR, and poured it into ebook format, and never even looked at the result. The table of contents is a disaster, there’s a number of graphics present that are just the spine of the book from the scan, year references such as “I8 3 r” are common, the page header (title and chapter names) are left in (along with page numbers), and the start of each subchapter is a jumbled out-of-order mess.