Some historians have argued that North and South were fundamentally alike: capitalist, racist, democratic for whites, largely Christian, largely British in culture. Other historians have argued that the regions were fundamentally different: capitalist, democratic, and modern in the North and anti-capitalist, undemocratic, and anti-modern in the South, even of different British ethnicities. Readers who would like to orient themselves in the scholarly discussion may traces its outlines in Edward Pessen, "How Different from Each Other Were the Antebellum North and South" American Historical Review 85 (1980): pp. 1119-1149, and the discussion that follows and in Drew Gilpin Faust, "The Peculiar South Revisited: White Society, Culture, and Politics in the Antebellum Period, 1800-1860" in Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham, ed. John B. Boles and Evelyn Thomas Nolen (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987): pp. 78-120.

One reason I have focused on the border is to see more clearly the differences slavery made. Several books have suggested the importance of the border for understanding the Civil War. D. W. Meining, The Shaping of America, vol. 2, Continental America, 1800-1867 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 475-89, emphasizes the "complicated geopolitical structure" along the border. Kevin Phillips, The Cousins' War: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America (New York: Basic Books, 1999) also emphasizes the scale and importance of the border. William Freehling, in The South Versus the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), argues that the upper South did not fully share in the devotion to slavery evinced in the lower South. While the upper South did take a more circuitous path to secession, I believe it did so as another route to preserve slavery.

The literature on the politics of sectionalism and the coming of the Civil War is one of the most highly developed fields in United States history. An excellent overview and sampling of the evolution of that field can be followed in Michael Perman, ed., The Coming of the American Civil War, third edition (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1993). As in the debate over regional distinctiveness, scholars have divided into schools. One group emphasizes intrinsic economic and cultural conflict and the projection of that conflict through ideology and a politics built around that ideology. Leading exponents of this view are Eric Foner's Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), Eugene Genovese's The Political Economy of Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970) and James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Other historians take the opposite view, emphasizing the complexity and relative autonomy of the American political system, its internal drives, divisions, and personalities. In the eyes of these historians, the twists and turns of the 1850s can only be understood by understanding the political system itself, which was not merely a reflection of social divisions. The leading exponent of this view is Michael F. Holt. See his The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992) and The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Other historians have emphasized the interaction between social relations and political history. Models of this reflexive model are William Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), Daniel W. Crofts, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secessionist Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), and William G. Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion: Virginia and the Second Party System, 1824-1861 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996). These books show the complex role politics played in the mid nineteenth-century United States.

My own interpretation tries to take the contextualization of politics to an even more specific level, measuring not aggregate statistical tendencies but the behavior of individuals on the county level. Other examples of this approach are Daniel W. Crofts, Old Southampton: Politics and Society in a Virginia County, 1834-1869 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992) and Paul Bourke and Donald Debats, Washington County: Politics and Community in Antebellum America (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). Such studies, including this one, show there was no easy correlation between individual attributes and political behavior, either in the North or in the South. This finding leads me to emphasize the interaction between relatively stable local identities and a swirling context at the state and national levels. Political loyalties and decisions came at the intersection of these various levels of political behavior. Only a dynamic model that pays close attention to language as well as voters' and counties' material characteristics, to interaction over time, to institutional boundaries and pressures, and to events and passions can account for the political behavior that brought on the Civil War. Politics was neither a passive reflection of a general ideology nor a self-contained system.

While his work did not descend to such empirical efforts, David M. Potter, more than any other scholar, has influenced my approach. His essay, "The Historian's Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa," in his The South and the Sectional Conflict (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), 34-83, helps us to set aside the easy assumptions we often make about the way the Civil War evolved.