"Politics and America in Crisis: The Coming of the Civil War" examines the developments between 1846 and 1861 that pushed the nation to war to see what they reveal about the North, the South, the people leading them, and the issues separating them.

As shown here, in the decade and a half before the actual outbreak of the war, the mostly southern Democratic Party's fortunes veered from a presidential election victory in 1852 to the shocking loss of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 an event that marked the coming of age of the young antislavery Republican Party. In examining that sharp reversal,...