A house divided against itself cannot stand

The ante-bellum history of the United States is modelled as the competing expansion of urban, slave and citizen farmers expanding into a frontier occupied by indigenous Native American and Mexican peoples. The resulting ''irrepressible conflict'' illustrates a circumstance in which all of the actors can be described as exhibiting democratic political institutions to a significant degree. In this instance, peoples rationalized their opposed interests and implemented them through representative governments. Wars are likely to be particular events to be analyzed as an aspect of a total social conjuncture and are unlikely to be explicable in a uniform fashion across various economic and political circumstances.