Tracing the sectionalization of American politics in the 1840s and
1850s, Michael Morrison offers a comprehensive study of how slavery
and territorial expansion intersected as causes of the Civil War.
Specifically, he argues that the common heritage of the American
Revolution bound Americans together until disputes over the
extension of slavery into the territories led northerners and
southerners to increasingly divergent understandings of the
Revolution's legacy. Manifest Destiny promised the literal
enlargement of freedom through the extension of American
institutions all the way to the Pacific. At each step--from John
Tyler's attempt to annex Texas in 1844, to the Kansas-Nebraska Act,
to the opening shots of the Civil War--the issue of slavery had to
be confronted. Morrison shows that the Revolution was the common
prism through which northerners and southerners viewed these events
and that the factor that ultimately made consensus impossible was
slavery itself. By 1861, no nationally accepted solution to the
dilemma of slavery in the territories had emerged, no political
party existed as a national entity, and politicians from both North
and South had come to believe that those on the other side had
subverted the American political tradition.