Anyone who has been reading Civil War history for years becomes disillusioned and dismayed, like the combatants themselves, charging when fresh but plodding when weary, yet somehow always renewed for the next battle just over the hill: further explanation. No book, no set of books, no lifetime of books will ever serve to encompass the Civil War. There is no way to contain the understanding and let it be. Bruce Catton's trilogy reads like the mighty campaign it must have been at the time--launched in 1955, in the shadow of Brown vs. Board of Education, and consummated in 1965, the year after the Civil Rights Act--and if none of it goes to waste, all of it is still not enough.Catton is of the highly readable strain. He also is a writer of battles, generals and strategies, with some wonderful insights about history as well as some silences that, to a 21st-century reader, seem odd. He is Southern-flavored, not grossly but consistently, and the reader will hear stirring music when Catton writes about Lee, Forrest, Stuart and the rest of the gray knights (Union generals, even Grant, are only grudgingly praised, and their achievements are usually attributed to luck where the Confederates are cited for skill). There are magnolias and a coda to the Lost Cause. Sherman is brutal and sinister, but the brutality of the slave system is never raised.Catton is good at many of the ironies; Robert E. Lee kept the Confederacy alive and fighting much longer than otherwise; is he honorable for his fatal fidelity? Would the South have kept its slaves and its defiance indefinitely if it had quit sooner, on better terms, without Lee's leadership? Was Lee's generalship, which led to hundreds of thousands more lost lives on both sides, a sacrifice that helped pay for the slaves' freedom?He is not good at some other ironies. He mentions several times the multimillion-dollar schemes to repay the South for its lost slaves, never once raising the idea that the slaves themselves might have been due something for their stolen lives.A book like "Battle Cry of Freedom" will give you more of the sinews of wartime, and less of the romance. "Lincoln at Gettysburg" is a much better explanation of the ideology and political transformation, and the power of Lincoln's words and ideas. Catton's trilogy, by contrast, gives pride of place to the fighting, and the back-and-fro surges of both sides' military fortunes.It might be unfair to point out, given the universe of books purely about Lincoln, that Lincoln is barely visible in Catton's history. But honestly, at times he seems like a bit player. When he does appear, he seems venal, semi-competent, driven by events. (And yes, Lincoln did confess that he was driven by events more than he drove them, but he doesn't deserve to be as peripheral and unsubtle as he appears here.) Yes, Jefferson Davis also comes off poorly, but still it's true that the Confederates with their unrebutted claims to being the true guardians of constitutional liberty seem to get the best soundtrack from Catton. Lee's surrender ... Catton does it extraordinarily well. Even if Lee were to be bumped off his pedestal, as Catton does not, this is a powerful, eerie moment. The gray soldiers marching out of camp, vanishing like ghosts into an undreamed-of country. The author's point that if Lee had not delivered an almost godlike capitulation the nation could have dissolved into decades of freelance butchery and division ... The breach closed, in the end, bloodlessly ... except that the 21st-century reader thinks of something, and someone, else. The blacks. They are most absent from Catton's story. They never speak (one or two "Glory!"s when Lincoln visits fallen Richmond). They never act, except to drift and wait. They are "the Negro," enlisted in the Federal forces, dragooned in the end into the Confederate ... and left sitting, passively, by the wayside, as the book concludes. No violence visits them, no lynchings await, no poll taxes, in Catton's telling; all is blank. There is no Underground Railroad, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," Juneteenth, or Harriet Tubman. Surely Catton would have made this right had he written a decade or two later.And now on to the Reconstruction ...
Final volume of the Civil War history. It tkaes the reader from the period of late 1862 and the Battle of Fredricksburg through Lee's surrender and Lincoln's assassination but leaves the question of reconstruction alone. He only hints at how difficult it will be and how unique a position Grant and Sherman left the country in - that is, an honorable peace (for the defeated) that really made it unlikely that there would be continued guerilla fighting in the years ahead. Had they been more vindictive that might have been an end to the Republic.
What do You think about Never Call Retreat (2001)?
Volume Three of Catton’s Civil War historical trilogy maintains the level of excellence of the first two. A lot of books have been written about the battles of the Civil, as if the armies stood around for weeks or months, then randomly decided to fight. Catton ties together the military, political, and social considerations in a series that brings as much sense as can be derived from such a universal cluster. Released in 1965, looking back 100 years, some of the parallels to what’s going on today are eerie.
—Dana King
Now that I'm at the end of the trilogy (this one covers post-Antietam to Appomattox), I continue to be in awe of Bruce Catton and I think I've figured out why.1) He excels at putting you in the time and place. He allows the events to unfold and provides a great deal of background into how seemingly disparate actions tie together.2) He deals with the various twists and turns without resorting to overly-dramatic story-telling. So many authors jump from drama to drama; Mr. Catton tells the story in between those dramatic high points so that the reader is given an opportunity to see the causes and the motivations and the reservations and the fears that led to the next dramatic high point. Some readers may object that he doesn't get too much into the details of the dramatic high point itself, but I think that Mr. Catton respected his readers enough to assume that they are already aware of the basic outline of the story and the details of such battles as Gettysburg or the Wilderness.3) His characters are not men of marble, but men of clay. Lincoln is not perpetually wise; he sometimes stumbles towards his final solutions to problems. Grant does not come east with a ready-made plan to end the war; he has to try various tactics before he figures out how to beat Lee. Lee is not always the brilliant strategist and tactician; he is as reliant on information (and on the incompetence of his opposition) as anyone would have to be in order to be successful in his position.All-in-all, this is a thoroughly wonderful read and I will one more time assert that anyone who has not read Mr. Catton's work does not have a very deep understanding of the American Civil War.
—Jeff
