William Bruce Catton - Two roads to Sumter

TWO ROADS

SUMTER

$5.95

Using the GQrly lives and careers of A bra-ham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis as theme and framework, two brilliant historians tell the tragic story of the march by North and South along the

TWO ROADS TO SUMTER WILLIAM & BRUCE CATTON

Two Roads to Sumter is the result of the first collaboration between the famed his torian Bruce Catton and his son William. Their book is focused on America in the 1850s, and as the title implies, it is a study of the North and South as they began their long, heartbreaking march to Civil War.

In contrast to this larger view, the book also examines the formation and diver gence of Abraham Lincoln's and Jefferson Davis's attitudes during the most emotion-laden and complex period of American history.

The Cattons begin their story in Ken tucky, not only because so much of the conflict was visible there, but also because it was the birthplace of both Lincoln and Davis. As the book continues, the reader is given, in parallel form, the growth and development of both men, showing the similarities and differences in the moral and intellectual forces that shaped two figures who were to become the war (continued on back flap)

JACKET DESIGN BY RUPERT FINEGOLD

973-711

Catton

Two roads to Sunrter

63-09665

TWO ROADS

T Q-,S ; H

* f ,. :

BOOKS BY BRUCE CATTON

America Goes to War

Army of the Potomac (3 vols.} i. Mr. Lincoln 9 s Army

2. Glory Road 3. A Stillness at Appomattox

Centennial History of the Civil War

i. The Coming Fury 2. Terrible Swift Sword

Grant Moves South Michigan's Past and the Nation's Future

This Hallowed Ground

U.S. Grant and the American Military Tradition The War Lords of Washington

WITH PRANK ARETAS HASKELL

Battle of Gettysburg

WITH WILLIAM CATTON

Two Roads to Sumter

EDITED BY BRUCE CATTON

American Heritage Book of Great Historic Places

American Heritage Book of the Revolution

American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War

First Year of American Heritage

TWO ROADS

TO SUMTER

by William and Bruce Catton

McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc.

NEW YORK TORONTO LONDON

TWO ROADS TO SUMTER

Copyright 1963 by William and Bruce Catton

Printed in the United States of America. All Rights Reserved, This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form without written permission of the publishers.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 63-13930 10254

To David Bruce

[CONTENTS]

Introduction /

ONE Like a Crouching Lion 5

TWO The Shaping Years 24

THREE Sunlight & Shadow 57

FOUR Moderation Challenged, 1846-1854 80

FIVE Moderation in Retreat, 1854-1858 112

six Moderation in Eclipse, 1858-1860 152

SEVEN The Campaign of 1860 IQ&

EIGHT And the War Came 243

INTRODUCTION

The two cabins were less than one hundred miles apart, in what was then the half-settled wilderness of west-central Kentucky. There are monuments on both sites now, and historical markers, and museum-piece restorations of the frontier setting in which the two boys were born. The region still carries its indefinable air of his tory once in the making, and thoughtful tourists who make the pilgrimage to either spot will find much to contemplate. An ironic coincidence, surelynothing morethat the two men who opposed each other as chief executives of a divided nation in 1861 should have their origins less than a year apart in the backwoods of Ken tucky. Yet in the lives of Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln, as in the fateful controversy that led their country into war, much that gave meaning was present in the rugged land from which they sprung.

The American Civil War is far too big to be explained solely in the lives of two men. The size of the struggle was greater than the size of any of the participantsexcept possibly for the hun dreds of thousands of nameless Americans of both sections who carried most of the load and paid the ultimate price. Yet when one tries to see just how this war came about, why the people on both sides fought so hard and what the whole of it finally means,

one does come back to the two protagonists, the two American presidents who faced one another in the most terrible war America has fought.

They were of their respective peoples, and they spoke for them; they were wholly representative, in their hopes, their achieve ments and their failures; and they came from the same place. They were two Kentuckians who at last came to speak for (and to demand much of) the two sections which began as one and which came to be so tragically hostile and in the.blood and smoke of unlimited war laid the foundation for a new unity and a new definition of the meaning of American freedom.

Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis did not bring the war about. They were, as the word went then, moderates, sharing a common vision of the ultimate value of an undivided country, hoping that the country could compose its differences without loss of blood. But the war came, partly in spite of these men and partly because of them, and when it came they fought one an other, and led others to fight, so tenaciously that the nation had its most fearful trial by combat. Lincoln and Davis were both the leaders of their peoples and the victims of their times. 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; beyond any doubt these two leaders wanted the same thing. 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.

So the country tried to work out a solution by violence. The solution it finally got was imperfect and is today incomplete, and we still have problems. As we grapple with these problems we are driven to go back and try to see how the whole thing happened to explore the terrible drift toward war, to try to understand why Americans a little more than a century ago defined freedom in ways so different that they had to fight. One thing we can see clearly; at least the business came from the heart. Somehow, in the very center of America, radically diverse understandings of the meaning of the American experiment took shape. These di verse understandings were built-in; they came out of what Amer

INTRODUCTION

leans were and hoped for; and when the showdown came no one quite knew how to reconcile them and work out a synthesis.

So these two moderate men, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, became leaders in a war which was fought altogether with out moderation. Perhaps one way to gain a comprehension of what happened then is to trace the parallel careers of these two men whose origins were so close and whose backgrounds were so similar. What follows here is an attempt to show how and why their paths went so far apart and at last met so tragically; an effort to see where and how their stars became so crossed.

Two Kentuckians: one went this way, the other went that way, and of the men who followed them 600,000 lost their lives. This book tries to examine what those separate ways were, why they were taken, and what they led toward.

[ONE]

LIKE A CROUCHING LION

Always America looked westward. The nation was built on hope, ambition, and a contradictory bundle of dreams, and the pattern seldom varied. Whether they came to worship God in a fresh atmosphere, or to find security and fortune from a continental supply of cheap land, or merely, as one sardonic New Englander put it, to catch fish, the men who first crossed the ocean and the men who followed or went beyond them in later years had their eyes on a spot real or imagined, but always somewhere over the western horizon. First it was the fringe of settlements along the Atlantic coast. Then it was the uncharted back country a few miles inland. By the middle of the eighteenth century the restless vanguard which always drew the nation westward in its wake was crossing the wooded Appalachians into the vast, rich basin of the Mississippi. Once this region took shape in men's imagina tion as the new American West, the country's future was assured. For several generationsfrom the expulsion of Bourbon France as a New World power till the age of Andrew Jacksonthe core of this new West was Kentucky. Kentucky in its heyday was both symbol and target of national growth, a vital focus and crossroad of American empire. Strung out along the south bank of the Ohio from the western Appalachians to the Mississippi, its dense forests