The changing architecture of Iberian politics (1974-92) Book

Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederacy, and Abraham Lincoln, the future president of the United States, were born only 100 miles apart in Kentucky. Thus begins this excellent history of the United States in the 19th century leading up to the opening shots of the Civil War, valuable not only for vivid character portrayal, but also for the broad scope that conveys the feelings of the times. The reader will understand why people took the positions they did not just on slavery but on industrialization and the economies of different areas of the young country.

Using the lives of the two men, Bruce Catton in his lyrical style follows the intricate path leading to formal armed conflict, but before that intensely fought in Congress and on the frontier between the defenders of slavery and those who wanted it restricted, if not eliminated. This book frequently departs from the personalities of Davis and Lincoln to paint a far broader picture while never losing the connection to them.

Only the very few wanted a war though almost everyone saw it coming. The South became ever more demanding of the North, not just to admit that slavery should continue but in expecting active support for it through the capture of fugitive slaves. Congressional, presidential and Supreme Court action that favored the South strengthened Northern resolve before the opening shots by the South toward Ft. Sumter.

Catton describes all the significant events of the period and the legal acts driving them such as the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Fugitive Slave Act, and the Dred Scott decision. The politicians are portrayed in their personal complexity, and political party conventions come across in all their heat. Above all, Catton is at pains to explain why attitudes, not just those of Davis and Lincoln, developed as they did. This is a passionate account.

Wikipedia states that Bruce Catton wrote popular history that, though well researched, was "not generally presented in a rigorous academic style." The reader benefits from this far from dry history. Catton sets the scene for the Lincoln-Douglas debates as follows:

"The setting was Illinois, whose flat fertile prairies and bustling small-town streets were product and symbol of the nation's westward growth. It was late summertime in Illinois and late summertime, too, for the rural America that had fathered these people...Rural America was in retreat and the mark of its conqueror was also among the stage props for the debates: in this campaign the candidates came and went by the railroad, whose dark iron tangents already laced the level countryside and bound it forever to smoking chimneys and crowded docksides far away to the eastward and beyond the sea."

Speaking of the debates, "The Little Giant", Stephen Douglas is presented in depth well deserved for the very important figure he was.

One can lose oneself in history well told. I did with Two Roads to Sumter