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."