BUILDING A HOUSE DIVIDED: Slavery, Westward Expansion, and the Roots of the Civil War

The long view of the path to the Civil War, as charted through the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian eras, reveals the critical fault in the nation's foundation, exacerbated by slaveholding expansionists like Jefferson, Jackson, Polk, and Douglas, until the house they built upon it could no longer stand for two opposite ideas at once. Photos.