Free Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson

generated by the victorious war of conquest is documented by Robert W. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The War with Mexico in the American Imagination (New York, 1985); but for the strong opposition to the war among Whigs and antislavery people, see John H. Schroeder, Mr. Folk's War: American Opposition and Dissent , 1846–1848 (Madison, 1973).
    The fateful consequences of the controversy over expansion of slavery into the territories acquired from Mexico are the starting point for the best single book on the sectional conflict leading to Civil War, David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis 1848–1861 (New York, 1976). A briefer study that emphasizes the breakdown of the second party system as a causal factor of secession rather than as a result of sectional conflict is Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York, 1978). The emergence of the Free Soil party is discussed in: Richard H. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States 1837–1860 (New York, 1976); Joseph G. Rayback, Free Soil: The Election of 1848 (Lexington, Ky., 1970); and Frederick J. Blue, The Free Soilers: Third Party Politics 1848–1854 (Urbana, 1973). The most concise account of the complex process that produced the Compromise of 1850 is Holman Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850 (Lexington, Ky., 1964).
    The hostility and violence generated by the fugitive slave law can be followed in: Stanley W. Campbell, The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law 1850–1860 (Chapel Hill, 1970); and Thomas D. Morris, Free Men All: The Personal Liberty Laws of the North 1780–1861 (Baltimore, 1974). The South's failed quest for economic independence in the 1850s is the subject of: Robert Royal Russel, Economic Aspects of Southern Sectionalism , 1840–1861 (Urbana, 1923); Herbert Wender, Southern Commercial Conventions 1837–1859 (Baltimore, 1930); and Fred Bateman and Thomas Weiss, A Deplorable Scarcity: The Failure of Industrialization in the Slave Economy (Chapel Hill, 1981). For southern efforts to acquire new slave territory by both legal and illegal means, see Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire , 1854–1862 (Baton Rouge, 1973); Charles H. Brown, Agentsof Manifest Destiny: The Lives and Times of the Filibusters (Chapel Hill, 1980); and William O. Scroggs, Filibusters and Financiers: TheStory of William Walker and His Associates (New York, 1916). Southern support for reopening the slave trade is documented in Ronald T. Takaki, A Pro-Slavery Crusade: The Agitation to Reopen the Slave Trade (New York, 1971). All these developments and other manifestations of southern nationalism are discussed in John McCardell, The Idea of a Southern Nation . . . 1830–1860 (New York, 1979). The preoccupation of southern politicians with the defense of slavery is the theme of William J. Cooper, Jr., The South and the Politics of Slavery 1828–1856 (Baton Rouge, 1978); while Clement Eaton, The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South (rev. and enlarged ed., New York, 1964), discusses the southern closing of ranks against outside criticism; Avery Craven's The Coming of the Civil War (rev. ed., Chicago, 1957) and The Growth of Southern Nationalism 1848–1861 (Baton Rouge, 1953) tend to justify southern sectionalism as a natural response to northern aggression. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York, 1982), analyzes that quality in southern culture that made southrons so touchy about affronts to their "rights."
    The best introduction to the free-labor ideology of the Republican party that underlay its opposition to the expansion of slavery is Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1970); while the fullest account of the matrix of politics, ideology, and nativism out of which the party was born is William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican