The Cattons Chart Demise of Moderation

Civil War historians should find 1963 a congenial year. It marks the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, at a time when racial conflicts dating back to that document are nearing resolution. No writer appreciates the year's drama more than Bruce Catton, author of A Stillness at Appomattox and nearly a dozen other distinguished popular histories of the Civil War.

Catton's latest book, however, will disappoint his past readers. Written jointly by him and his son, Two Roads to Sumter evaluates the decisions that brought the bombardment in Charleston harbor on April 12, 1861. To exemplify the parting roads taken by North and South, the authors study the careers of the wartime Presidents, Lincoln and Davis. Although this device unifies the book efficiently, it frequently presents tenuous historical parallels; Davis was born in Kentucky just a year before Lincoln, but his intellect needs considerable stretching to match Lincoln's stature.

Two Roads to Sumter describes a partisan distrust plaguing the whole political background of the War. The Cattons argue that North and South fought because the moderates in both sections receded toward extremism until compromise on slavery and secession became impossible. "By the end of 1859 the two sections had essentially lost the power to communicate." Basic and forth-right disagreement on the democratic ideal of freedom and the nature of the Union drove Americans into belligerent postures whose consequences they did not want.

Most men in the North and most men in the South unquestionably wanted to find some peaceful solution to the controversy that was splitting the country...The tragedy was that in the end the moderate way collapsed. The nation had stumbled into a situation where it was no longer possible to be moderate.

Intransigent

As early as 1857, the authors contend, Democratic and Republican leaders had become intransigent, so that the future Presidents' moderation "would become operative only when the other side retreated from its present position. Yet neither Lincoln nor Davis could regard a retreat from his particular position as aught but surrender--hence there would be no retreat at all."

The middle-of-the-road position of Stephen Douglas, who sponsored the Kansas-Nebraska Bill in 1854, was unsatisfactory because it ignored the moal issue at the heart of sectional differences. As a result, the Cattons conclude, there could be no reconciliation between the sections: "No conceivable brand of statesmanship could find workable middle ground between slavery as a threat to the Declaration of Independence and slavery as a moral, social, and political blessing."

Racial Debate

Lodged in Two Roads to Sumter is a belief that the problem of the antebellum debate has been preserved intact in modern opinion on civil rights. How can a person hold and express temperate views without risking total defeat of his principles?

The advocates and opponents of slavery decided that only radical convictions could be honest and effective--this is the judment of Two Roads. The present generation must decide whether a century has made this decision obsolete--whether opponents can now be trusted enough to compromise. Must segregationists resist all civil rights reforms, and integrationists demand immediate broad reforms, to win even parts of their programs? Are the two camps really irreconcilable, as people thought they were in the 1850's?

Although Two Roads struggles to be dispassionate, its sympathies obviously lie with the Northern cause. Lincoln let pressures push him "to the brink of demagoguery" with his violent House Divided speech, but the gravest failure of moderation was in the South. Davis and other Southern leaders betrayed their temperate beliefs when they abandoned temperate methods as inexpedient.

Only by using extreme language on the slavery issue, they reasoned, could they avoid being branded appeasers by rivals, which seemed a sure road to defeat at the polls. It had become easier, in the South as elsewhere, to prey upon the fears and excite the prejudices of the electorate than to take the higher ground.

Pro-slavery Democrats distrusted their own people quite as much as they distrusted the North and the Republicans. Their weakness, not necessity, substituted opportunism for honest appeals for patience and unity. "Speaking for local effect" thus tainted both the moderation and the integrity of the Davis faction:

Their gravest blunder, and in retrospect the least excusable, was the notion that they could participate--even lead--in whipping up the most extreme and uncompromising attitudes among their constituents and local party delegations, then restrain these attitudes in time to avert misfortune.... By going so dramatically and forcefully on record in favor of the extreme position, Davis and his colleagues encouraged, if they did not ensure, the political result they did not really want...."

Judgments

The first criticism to be directed at Two Roads to Sumter is that it fails to sustain its judgments. A spirit of historical understanding sometimes causes the authors to confuse equivocations and reassessments. They continue, for instance, to call Lincoln a moderate while asserting that "there was no moderation" in his slavery-containment policy. After stating that "Democratic unity had been little more than a facade for months," they declare that in the Democratic convention of 1860 "a break was by no means inevitable." A page later, the Cattons note that "there was nothing meaningful left to compromise," then reverse themselves once more by refusing "to see any gray pall of inevitable doom hovering over the Democratic deliberations."

If contradictions mar the main theme of Two Roads to Sumter, omissions and blithe generalizations make all of its interpretations suspect. The book neglects the economic reasons for the War without so much as refuting them, implying that slavery and secession alone were at issue. It never explains adequately why the North regarded the Union as sacred, or why Lincoln initially joined the Whigs. And even as popularized history (no footnotes or bibliography), Two Roads is excessively given to glib, cliched, and romantic insights.

In Charlestown, the Cattons detect "a faint but undeniable whiff of decay" under the city's genteel tradition." Brierfield, Davis's estate, is said to have been in the Scarlett O'Hara tradition, and governors' messages are said to have "popped and rattled across the Gulf states like a chain of firecrackers." The authors also claim that "no two men in all the nation held views about the [Kansas-Nebraska] crisis with firmer conviction than did Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis." And to everyone but the reader, "it was obvious, from almost every angle, that the [1860 Republican] party had put together an excellent combination [in its platform]."

Historical Drama

A habit of treating American history like a stage production further discredits the book's judgments. Foreshadowing well-known historical events is thin entertainment and thinner history; passing gradiose sentences from a century-high pedestal of hindsight is bad technique and bad historical explanation. Two Roads does both too often. For example, it was "not only unnecessary but foolish" for Douglas backers to allow a change of procedure at the 1860 Democratic convention. At the beginning of 1860, 32 million "extras" stood behind the "odd stellar assortment" of political players in the sectional drama. And no moderate argument had "one-tenth the cumulative emotional impact" of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, which "extremists could not have managed better if they had written a script for it."

Two Roads to Sumter is too palpably designed for the casual readers to be a valuable piece of scholarship. Many of its thoughts on political moderation are shrewd and timely, but a sensational tone exhibits them to poor advantage. For the Messrs. Catton, as for Lincoln and Douglas in the 1858 Illinois senatorial campaign, it appears that "exact historical accuracy was less important than an appealing argument."