This book is interesting in that it not only examines the key political issues of the antebellum period but also delves into the culture of the time, especially that of South. But the author's views are tilted toward those of the antebellum South. He goes to great length in describing the Southern plantation system with its incorporation of slave labor and compares it somewhat favorably with the industrialization and the "so-called" free labor of the North. In addition, the exaggerated Southern claims of social superiority seem to strike a chord with the author.

A great deal of the book is consumed with describing the reactions and views of leading spokesmen and of various publications in the North and the South concerning major antebellum political developments. The question of the Mexican Cession and the Wilmot Proviso in 1846 moved the question of slavery squarely into the political system resulting in the formation of the Free Soil Party and talk of secession in the South. The Compromise of 1850 quieted some voices, but only until the next expansion of slavery.

Interestingly, of all of the political crises of the mid-1850s where slavery was front and center, that is, the Kansas-Nebraska bill, the bleeding Kansas crisis, and the Dred Scott decision, the author claims that the Southern response was relatively moderate compared to the extremists of the North. Yet that moderation seemed to have evaporated with the John Brown raid at Harpers Ferry. And the Southern reaction to Lincoln's election the next year was beyond shrill and ultimately self-destructive.

I think it is fairly obvious that this author regards the Civil War as occurring as a result of emotionalism and opportunism run amok. And despite the fact that the South was unwilling to honor the untainted election of a President and failed to comprehend that all of the conservative candidates together far outpolled the Republican, I believe that the author holds that Northern forces largely provoked the Southern secession and then were unwilling to accept that fact by offering some kind of compromise.

This author fails to grasp, or at least state, that slavery and its ramifications were the great moral issues of the day. Of course, tremendous emotionalism was evoked by the issues. And those issues could not be simply managed or downplayed in the Second American Party system. Slavery was conceptually wrong for America and produced an unsustainable divide between two sections of the country. Emotionalism may have obscured that fact then and now, but it is superficial as an explanation for the Civil War.

To me, the dullest part of the Civil War began at Fort Sumter. The greatest deficiency of Ken Burns' celebrated documentary (enough to make it almost useless)is that he spent almost no time on the causes. I have always found the political maneuvering between North and South, between the two great parties(and within them as well), the occasions when secession and war almost happened, and the dramatic compromises that held off disaster to be essential for understanding the war and why it was fought the way it was. The political battles over the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Lecompton Constitution are more interesting to me than the dramas of Antietam, Chancellorsville or Gettysburg.

Avery Craven was one of the so-called "revisionist" school of American historians, those academics who asserted that there was blame for the war on both sides, that condemned radical abolitionists and Southern fire-eaters equally. Although he may not have intended it, Professor Craven makes an even more interesting assertion. There were not two sides in this affair but three. The West(what would now be the Middle West)was a region with its own economic interests. And this region, for the most part, wouldn't have gotten all that worked up about slavery if its farmers could have gotten their goods to market. But Southern political ineptitude and indifference to Western interests alienated that region from the South and probably cost the South the war.

All in all, an excellent history of the antebellum United States. Whether you agree with Professor Craven's ideas or not, this book is well worth your time.