James McPherson sees the US Civil War as stemming from “the sectional conflict between North and South over the future of slavery” (7). He does, however, examine how enslavement intersected with other issues and contexts in raising tensions between the North and South. In tracing the nature of the conflict’s development, he argues for the central role of enslavement in the pre-war American economy and regional conflict.

Enslavement created the conditions for conflict between the South and the North, but the trigger was the Mexican-American War and its annexation of vast amounts of new territories in the West. This one development “lit a slow fuse to a powder keg that blew the United States apart in 1861” (46) as bitter debates over whether or not the new states joining the United States would be free or pro-enslavement states escalated into violence.

However, McPherson believes that the way enslavement eventually led to the Civil War was not simply a matter of politics, but also social attitudes. McPherson does argue that the South and the North had significantly different cultures and societies, writing, “Most societies in the world remained predominantly rural, agricultural, and labor-intensive […] [the] South remained bound by traditional values and networks of family, kinship, hierarchy, and patriarchy.