As I write Chapter 1, I will need to work on driving home the main historiographical insight of the chapter–that while  scholars often look to the latter part of the 1850s to explain the law’s failures, the story of the attempted federal expansion, beginning in September 1850, reveals crucial insights about the law and its limitations that would shape the contest over its enforcement for the rest of the decade. This chapter highlights the struggle over appointing additional U.S. commissioners, showcasing how the absence or ineffectiveness of these federal officers plagued the law’s operations from the outset. In doing so, I will of course need to address resistance–explaining how African American-led vigilance committees disrupted the law’s operations from the very beginning. Namely, I need to find the right balance when synthesizing the recent scholarship on resistance, such as the work of Richard Blackett, Robert Churchill, Stanley Harrold and Kellie Carter-Jackson. While I have an abundance of material on the ramifications of that pressure–from resignations of incumbent commissioners to prospective appointees getting cold feet and backing out–these new primary sources might not resonate with readers as much if the campaign of resistance is not well-defined. At present, I am mulling adding something along the lines of a historiographical paragraph summarizing how the recent scholarly literature has unearthed new insights about the resistance to the law and the pressure which helped disrupt the law’s enforcement apparatus.