Historian William C. Davis disputes that Southern culture was different from that of Northern states or that it was a cause of the war, stating, "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." Davis argues that slavery, not culture, was the cause of the war: "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."