Professor David Blight examines the road to the Civil War in this Yale lecture, focusing on John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry and the Lincoln Douglas debates as two pivotal episodes that hardened sectional division. The lecture traces how these events, combined with the election of 1860, led to secession and the outbreak of war, and considers the emergence of two rival constitutional orders in the United States and the Confederacy. Recorded in Yale's Battell Chapel as part of the DeVane Lecture series America at 250: A History, the course surveys United States history from 1776 to the present across lectures by three Yale historians. This class marks the transition from political crisis to open warfare in the semester long narrative.