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