Two Roads to Sumter (review)

BOOK REVIEWS103 total significance in but a brief passage. Consider his evaluation of die wooden U.S.S. Cumberland and U.S.S. Congress as diey guarded die moutii of die James River only hours before their demise at the hands of die ironclad C.S.S. Virginia: Before the day ended a good many people looked at these ships, because each ship was about to die, dramatically and in the center of the stage. This was the last morning ... for all that the ships represented—a special way not merely of fighting on the sea but of moving on it and understanding it, of combining grimness and grace in one instrument. In a war that destroyed one age and introduced another, these ships stood as symbols of the past. Two basic ideas are developed in Catton's pages, and each is emphasized several times. First, the war in the beginning was for both the Union and the Confederacy a conflict to restore the cherished past. Lincoln maintained that the Union must be preserved, and Davis wished to preserve slavery and states' rights. Second, as the war got out of hand in terms of limited objectives , it developed into a contest against slavery, which is to say, a contest for freedom. To Catton, freedom is unlimited, and widi the impuke to freedom the war became a revolution, far-reaching and uncontrollable. It is at this point diat the author attempts again and again to make something more of die war than a struggle to free the slaves. He states diat die conflict gave a new concept, a new dimension to freedom in the United States. He infers, but does not state, that freedom came during the war and its aftermath to all people—North and South—who in one way or another had consented to slavery. The United States thus was committed to the task of making a working reality out of the brotherhood of man, a freedom broad enough to include all races and religions. Catton calk for a one-class citizenship. Never has a study been based on sounder research. Catton's research assistant , Mr. E. B. Long, ably conducted extensive investigations in over diree hundred major manuscript collections; several thousand newspapers, books, pamphlets, and periodicak were ako consulted. Footnotes abound, but do not do justice to the quantity of material consulted, and unfortunately are located at the end of the book and not at page bottoms. The text is attractively laid out widi imaginative chapter and sub-chapter titles. Catton has produced an all-time great in die field of Civil War history, and perhaps one of the giants of all historical writing and research. LeRoy H. Fischer Oklahoma State University Two Roads to Sumter. By William and Bruce Catton. (New York: McGraw -Hill Book Company, 1963. Pp. 285. $5.95.) Bruce Catton, the dean of Civil War military history, has joined with his son to describe America's agonizing years between 1846 and 1861. Using Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis as representative travellers on die roads leading to Fort Sumter, the Cartons follow them as sectional bitterness grows in a country which was, ironically, ako undergoing die na- 104CI VIL WAR HISTOR Y tionalizing impact of industrialism. They show how, step by step, die counsek of moderation—epitomized by Lincoln and Davis—were defeated, and extremists came to dominate both sections. Finally, only war could resolve differences, and the two moderate men became die leaders of diese immoderate forces. This book is obviously directed toward diat large audience so taken widi die Civil War. Bruce Catton has proved himself a master of popular history and here both Cattons live up to diis reputation. They bring to their narrative a grace of style and an awareness of irony. Manifest as these virtues are for the general reader, however, they are offset by two major and interrelated faults which have appeared in the earlier work of the elder Catton: first, the tendency to simplify complexities for the sake of readability, and, second, to seek out the dramatic incident and personality to heighten the story and its flow. When a book is written for a general audience historical complexities...