SECTIONAL CONFLICT
“A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe
this government cannot endure permanently
half-slave and half-free.”
Senatorial candidate Abraham Lincoln, 1858
OUTLINE OF U.S. HISTORY
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In everything of which it has made a boast — excepting its education of the people, and its care for poor chil- dren — it sinks immeasurably below the level I had placed it upon .”
Dickens was not alone . America in the 19th century, as throughout its history, generated expectations and passions that often conflicted with a reality at once more mundane and more complex . The young nation’s size and diversity defied easy gener- alization and invited contradiction: America was both a freedom-loving and slave-holding society, a nation of expansive and primitive frontiers, a society with cities built on growing commerce and industrialization .