In the Congressional elections of 1858, following the Lecompton controversy, the Democrats had once more lost control of the House of Representatives; there having been chosen 113 Republicans, 93 Administration Democrats, 8 anti-Lecompton Democrats, and 23 South Americans, as they were called; that is, members, mainly from the slave-States, opposed to the Administration.
[Sidenote] "Globe," December 5, 1859, p.

3.
This Thirty-sixth Congress began its session three days after the execution of John Brown, and the election of a Speaker was the first work of the new House of Representatives.

The Republicans, not having a majority, made no caucus nomination; but John Sherman, of Ohio, had the largest following on the first ballot, and thereafter received their united efforts to elect him.

At this point a Missouri member introduced a resolution declaring: "That the doctrines and sentiments of a certain book called 'The Impending Crisis of the South--How to Meet It,' purporting to have been written by one Hinton R.Helper [of North Carolina], are insurrectionary and hostile to the domestic peace and tranquillity of the country, and that no member of this House who has indorsed and recommended it, or the compend from it, is fit to be Speaker of this House." This resolution was aimed at Sherman, who with some seventy Republicans of the previous Congress had signed a circular indorsing and recommending the book upon the general statement that it was an anti-slavery work, written by a Southerner.

The book addressed itself to non-slaveholding Southern whites, and was mainly made up of statistics, but contained occasional passages of intolerant and vindictive sentiment against slaveholders.