Word: sumter
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Conflicting Traditions. The book that beat out such possibilities as Oscar Handlin's panoramic The Americans or William and Bruce Cation's Two Roads to Sumter is a meticulous and remarkably detailed account of the early government and social organization of the town of Sudbury, Mass., founded by Puritan settlers in 1638. Generations of orators have sweepingly proclaimed the early towns of New England "a unique experiment in self-government," while many historians have tacitly assumed that the early settlers brought with them a broadly homogeneous body of English law and administrative methods. Historian Powell's achievement...
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...
...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...
...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...
...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...