The Crisis of Eighteen Hundred and Sixty-One in the Government of the United States

This book examines the reasons behind the American Civil War, including the sequence of events that led up to it. The American Civil War was a conflict fought within the United States between the Union («the North») and the Confederacy («the South»), the latter formed by states that had seceded. The central cause of the war was a dispute over whether slavery would be permitted to expand into the western territories, which many believed would lead to more slave states, or be prevented from doing so, with the expectation that this would ultimately lead to the extinction of slavery.