ABSTRACT
The narrative of events moves in a straight line from the Mexican War to the Civil War, with the election of 1844 as an ominous curtain-raiser. When the old party system collapsed, the prospect of civil war came nearer by a giant step. Kansas was in a state of virtual civil war, and newspapers across the land turned every minor skirmish into a bloody battle. During and just after the War of Independence, slavery was abolished in all the Northern states, and the Ordinance of 1787 excluded it from the great Northwest Territory, embracing the modern states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. In the North, the anti-slavery movement launched into its great crusade, and sustained it down through the years to the Civil War, in face of fierce and sometimes violent opposition and a stolid mass of indifference. An informal political alliance between West and South had operated for most of the first half-century of United States history.
