House Divided

The decade before the outbreak of the Civil War in the United States was marked by fierce political divisions, domestic terrorism, and contentious debates over what the expanding nation should be. Presidents Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan have been judged to be among America’s worst, but were they victims of circumstances no politician could have surmounted? Examine the tumultuous decade of the 1850s to explore how the deeply entrenched attitudes of the time made the tragedy of the Civil War all but inevitable.