The 1850s were violent and tension-filled years in the United States, as arguments about slavery and states' rights exploded all over the country. Despite all the efforts of many lawmakers, the hostility between the North and the South seemed to increase with each passing month. A number of events in the early and mid-1850s contributed to this deterioration in relations between the two sides, from the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin to the bloody battle for control of Kansas. But the blows that finally broke the Union in two took place in the final years of that decade, as the North and the South finally saw that their vastly different views of slavery would never be resolved to everyone's satisfaction. "There were serious differences between the sections," wrote Bruce Catton in The Civil War...