Two Roads to Sumter: Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis and the March to Civil War - Softcover

This book focuses on America in the 1950's ?and shows how North and South became increasingly isolated from each other and started down the two roads to the Battle of Fort Sumter and all-out war. Concurrently the book examines the formation and divergence of the attitudes of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis (both born in Kentucky) during the most emotion-laden and complex period of American history. The authors have caught the pulse and sweep of the era - when the great railroads were built; the tremendous land-hungry westward expansion of the people; the development of the great industrial empires of the North and the great farm empires of the South and the major factors which, woven together, precipitated the Civil War.

As a child living in a small town in Michigan, Bruce Catton (1899-1978) was stimulated by the reminiscences of the Civil War that he heard from local veterans. His education at Oberlin College, Ohio, was interrupted by two years of naval service in World War I and was subsequently abandoned for a career in journalism. While he was employed as a reporter for the Boston American, the Cleveland News, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer (1920-26), Catton continued his lifelong study of the Civil War period. He subsequently worked for the Newspaper Enterprise Service (1926-41) and for the U.S. War Production Board. In 1954 he became a member of the staff of American Heritage magazine, and from 1959 he served as its senior editor.