The growing diversity of northern and southern cultures since colonial times reached a point in 1860 where the two societies could not longer exist as the same nation. At that point the only way to keep the nation whole was civil war. The main reason why the Civil War broke out was the deep-seated sectionalism of the nation at that time. Comprising that sectionalist feeling is: the battle between the rights of states and central governmental authority, congressional conflicts over the admission of new states, and the diversity of the societies and economies of the north and south.

The differences between the northern and southern culture and economic bases naturally create a barrier between the societies. The southern traditional agrarian slave system depended heavily on its predominant crop, cotton. The nature of cotton makes it a labor-intensive crop, which was worked by slaves who had no chance of elevating...