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America's civil war was caused by our country's original and continuing regionalism and lack of unity. In fact, the Civil War was the end of an era. That era began in 1789 with the establishment of a new constitutional government born in compromise and with promises unfulfilled. Our country was, in fact, a "nation incomplete." That incompleteness was characterized by a union of diverse and separate states, who actually had no real sense of "nationhood," as they kept to old habits of regional loyalties and put local considerations above any loyalty to the Federal union.

From its first day of existence, the United States was a nose-holding series of compromises. Take slavery, for instance. Southern states would have never ratified the Constitution without significant concessions on the part of the northerners. Southern states representation in the House of Representatives was also based slave population. Slaves, of course, could not vote, but individual slaves were counted for the purpose of population as three-fifths of a person.

Until about 1820, American attention was diverted from the issue of slavery as the new country struggled to stay out of the way of Napoleon and eventually got involved with a second war of independence with England. But the slavery issue once again promised to tear the country apart when Missouri (a slave territory) applied for statehood. Abolitionists violently opposed admission of an additional slave state with two more pro-slavery votes in the Senate.

Again, the leadership sought compromise. In the end, Maine, a free-state was brought into the union along with Missouri. Also, lawmakers agreed on a north-south demarcation line (Missouri's southern border) below which slavery would be allowed. Known as the Missouri Compromise, this agreement would hold until 1850, when Senator Stephen Douglas would engineer an unsatisfactory group of compromise to allow Kansas and Nebraska territories to enter the union, where the residents could vote on whether to accept or prohibit slavery. Dissatisfied northerners saw Douglas' work for what it was: the wreckage of the Missouri Compromise, and the basis for a shooting war in "Bleeding Kansas."

Between 1850 and 1861, the Union hung by a thread, as a series of weak, pro-southern presidents bent over backwards to meet southern demands. Egregious judicial decisions, such as the famous Dredd-Scott case, continually demonstrated the minority southern states' strangle hold on the federal government,

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