William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America, New York, The Free Press, 2002, p. 9, ISBN 0-7432-2771-9. URL consultato il 19 marzo 2016.
«Inextricably intertwined in the question was slavery, and it only became the more so in the years that followed. Socially and culturally the North and South were not much different. They prayed to the same deity, spoke the same language, shared the same ancestry, sang the same songs. National triumphs and catastrophes were shared by both. For all the myths they would create to the contrary, the only significant and defining difference between them was slavery, where it existed and where it did not, for by 1804 it had virtually ceased to exist north of Maryland. Slavery demarked not just their labor and economic situations, but power itself in the new republic... [S]o long as the number of slave states was the same as or greater than the number of free states, then in the Senate the South had a check on the government.»
