"Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the U.S. Congress"
WILLIAM LEE MILLER WINS PRIZE FOR BEST BOOK ON CONGRESS

     CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA., May 2 - William Lee Miller, professor of
Political and Social Thought at the University of Virginia and author
of "Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States
Congress" (Alfred A. Knopf), has won the D.B. Hardeman Prize for the
best book on Congress published in 1996.  The $1,000 Hardeman Prize,
funded by a grant from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation, is
awarded annually to recognize an outstanding book on Congress from the
fields of biography, history, journalism, and political science.
Entries are judged on the basis of their contribution to scholarship
on Congress, and to the public's understanding of Congress or a major
legislative issue: literary craftsmanship; originality; and depth of
research.
     In his widely praised study, Miller recounts the nine-year fight
in Congress, from 1835 to 1844, to end the gag rule against petitions
opposing slavery.  Miller allows readers to rediscover the central
importance and the power of the debate over slavery through the words
of the debaters themselves, taken directly from the pages of the
Congressional Globe and other documents of the period.  While many
books have been written about slavery and the role of Congress in that
debate, often they have been shaped and influenced by the coming of
the Civil War.  But Miller takes readers back decades before the war,
when slavery was a firmly entrenched institution in American economic
life and political thought.  He tells the story of the incredible
effort made by a handful of members of Congress, led in the House by
John Quincy Adams, to face this central moral dilemma in the life of
the young Republic.  The debates of Congress, as printed in the
Congressional Globe, the forerunner of today's Congressional Record,
were widely reproduced in 
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newspapers of the era, and served, as Miller says, as a "more potent
equivalent of today's C-
SPAN."  Miller is Thomas C. Sorensen Professor of Political and Social
Thought at U.Va.
     The D. B. Hardeman Prize was established in 1978 to honor a noted
authority on the history and operations of Congress who served as an
aide to Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn. 
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                                                                                                           May
1, 1997

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