Sectional difficulties were nothing new to Americans. From the end of the Mexican War to the beginning of the Civil War, however, the United States experienced turmoil on a massive scale that gathered momentum as the decade progressed.

Tensions over Expansion, 1848-51

One source of this bitter debate was, strangely enough, a result of the most successful war ever waged by the United States. Determined to gain clear title to Texas and to force the sale of California, President James K. Polk provoked a conflict with Mexico in 1846. Two years later, U.S. troops had overwhelmed Mexican forces, and Mexico was forced to cede a vast amount of land including all or most of present-day New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado.

Americans now faced the question of whether these territories would be admitted as slave states or as free states. The debate over the expansion of slavery were intense and often bloody. Southerners argued that property was protected by the Constitution, so the new lands should be open to all forms of property, including slaves. Abolitionists, eager to see slavery's end, recoiled at the thought of its expansion to territory where it had never existed. Southerners countered by encouraging southern nationalism with such vehicles as the Nashville Convention. Between these two extremes, the majority of Americans urged caution.

Uncle Tom's Cabin

The sectional conflict came to dominate many aspects of American life. The release of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) made tangible for the northern reading public the horrors of slavery; white Southerners condemned the novel as an unfair caricature of their "peculiar institution ." Students at the University of Virginia gathered on the Lawn to burn the novel in protest. In the North, however, the novel sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and a play based on the novel attracted huge audiences.