In A House Divided, Mr. Sewell focuses attention on slavery as the main cause of why the sections of the country, North and South, became polarized, eventually leading to war. The author looks at sectional discord in the years after 1848 when a number of compromises had to be worked out over the extension of slavery into the territories. There came a time when the North and South were unable to find common ground, and according to Mr. Sewell, the Union finally broke asunder.
The author claims that the main division between North and South began to take place during the Mexican War over questions of slavery's expansion. He remarks that "so momentous was the question of slavery's expansion that proposals for its resolution sprouted almost as soon as the conflict with Mexico began". David Wilmot, a democrat from Pennsylvania, introduced a provision in Congress that slavery be excluded from any territory acquired from Mexico. White Southerners saw this as a challenge to the slave system everywhere.
Mr. Sewell points out that solution after solution was proposed to settle the controversy of slavery's expansion. Southerners were vehemently opposed to any territorial bill that denied them equal rights, including the right to hold slave property. The Missouri Compromise of 1850, which at one time many thought had ended the debate on slavery, was repealed and replaced with popular sovereignty by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska bill. This bill allowed the people to decide whether to allow slavery in the territory in which they lived. This created a "hell of a storm" throughout the North according to Stephen Douglas. To prove that sectionalism was heating up, Mr. Sewell gives statistics on the Kansas-Nebraska bill that shows nearly 90 percent of all Southerners voted for it while 64 percent of the Northern representatives cast ballots against it. Throughout the 1850's the North and South grew farther apart on one main issue, slavery. Then in October 1859, John Brown's raid left the South "feeling isolated, besieged, dishonored, and physically imperiled as never before". Many in the South believed that the North would resort to force, just like Brown, in order to stop slavery. Mr. Sewell goes on to say that the "chief effect of John Brown's foray was, of course, to strengthen the hand of the fiery advocates of secession". When Abraham Lincoln, a Republican dedicated to the idea that slavery was evil and should be dealt with as such, was elected President, the deep South felt there was no way out but separation. The South saw Lincoln's election and the appointments he would make to positions in the South as being able to foster an antislavery influence dangerous not only to their peculiar institution but to the very lives of Southern whites. With this in mind, seven states in the deep South seceded from the Union. The upper South chose to take a wait and see attitude, but when President Lincoln tried to reprovision Fort Sumter, it was fired upon from Charleston harbor. This act provoked President Lincoln to ask for 75,000 volunteers and four more states joined the Confederacy: the bloodiest war in American history had begun.
