Publisher's Synopsis
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.