SUNDAY REVIEW / CIVIL WAR EMBERS STILL GLOW

By Thomas Shess, Chairman, PillartoPost.org daily online magazine--Having read every major work on the American Civil War from Shelby Foote to Winston Churchill does not by any stretch make me an expert on the war between the states. However, as a writer and an editor I've made a career of offering my opinions. Some right, some wrong. 

But when it comes to the Civil War if I could choose only one author, who has researched and wriiten about that war, it would be Bruce Catton (1899 to 1978). And from his prodigious body of work I would choose A Stillness at Appomattox. 

 Published in 1953, it won both the Pulitzer Prize for History and the National Book Award for nonfiction in 1954. Awards help establish its reputation; the writing explains why it endures. A Stillness at Appomattox, the book is the concluding volume of Catton’s Army of the Potomac trilogy, following Mr. Lincoln’s Army and Glory Road. It stands comfortably on its own, taking readers through the Union army’s final year of fighting in Virginia, from winter quarters in 1864 to Robert E. Lee’s surrender in April 1865. 

Bruce Catton 1960s

Despite its title, this is a book about the long, punishing road to Appomattox, rather than simply the surrender itself. Let's discuss A Stillness..., Catton begins with a dance. At a Washington’s Birthday ball, officers and their guests briefly inhabit a world of polished boots, handsome uniforms, music and ceremony. The coming campaign hangs over the celebration. 

Many of these men will be dead before another winter arrives. That opening establishes the book’s governing tension: the distance between war as people imagine it and war as soldiers endure it. Then the music gives way to the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor and Petersburg. 

Grant, Meade, Sheridan and Lee occupy their necessary places, but Catton’s most compelling achievement is making the army itself a living presence. 

Drawing on soldiers’ letters, recollections and regimental histories, he gives ordinary men a place in a narrative too often reserved for commanders. 

 My opinion is that the book’s greatness lies in its control of emotional scale. 

Catton can explain the movement of an army, then bring the reader close enough to feel the exhaustion of the men moving it. His prose has rhythm and atmosphere, yet the story remains intelligible. You understand that campaigns depend on roads, orders and supplies; you also understand that somebody must keep walking in these warrior's boots. And what courage it took just to wake up to another day of war. 

Ulysses Simpson Grant emerges as the commander willing to sustain the pressure necessary to defeat Lee. But victory accumulates an appalling human invoice. The reader knows where the story is going, and that knowledge offers little comfort. Catton makes the final surrender feel earned through suffering. 

For me, the “stillness” of the title is the book’s most fitting presentation. After so much motion, noise and destruction, the absence of fighting becomes an event in itself. 

Relief arrives carrying grief. 

The achievement is literary as well as historical: Catton gives an ending whose emotional weight exceeds the familiar facts. There are limits. This is principally the story of a Union army in the eastern theater. Readers seeking an equally sustained account of slavery, emancipation, Southern civilians, Black Americans or the western campaigns will need other books. 

Catton understood slavery as the central cause of the war, but his emphasis on shared sacrifice and national reconciliation can soften the distinctions between what the opposing sides fought to preserve or destroy. 

Historian David Blight’s assessment recognizes both Catton’s extraordinary narrative power and that reconciliatory tendency. Those qualifications matter. They do not diminish my choice. 

For those new to Catton's work, A Stillness at Appomattox remains an exceptional introduction to Catton because it concentrates his finest gifts: clarity, sympathy, dramatic movement and an awareness of what victory costs. 

Bruce Catton, born October 9, 1899, in Petoskey, Michigan, grew up in Benzonia listening to Civil War veterans. He attended Oberlin College, served in the Navy during World War I and built a newspaper career before becoming a celebrated historian. 

In 1954 he became the founding editor of American Heritage. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and died August 28, 1978. 

Stepping back, where does he stand among the great Civil War authors? Easily in the first rank of narrative historians. That is my assessment, supported by the esteem of historians who followed him. Blight credits Catton with drawing him into Civil War history; Stephen W. Sears praised his transformation of ordinary soldiers into fully realized historical participants. I would place Catton alongside Shelby Foote for storytelling distinction, while choosing James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom for a broader single-volume understanding of the conflict. Catton’s particular territory is the lived experience of the Union soldier. 

Few writers have made those men feel so close, or made the passage from military glory to human loss so moving. Read A Stillness at Appomattox for the history—and for a demonstration of how beautifully history can be written. 

And, please know my esteem for A Stillness...does not diminish whatsoever, Shelby Foote's epic coverage of the Civil War or Doris Kearns Goodwin passion for the era. 

And as for all the books on Gettysburg, Jeffrey Hall's The Stand is a beacon in detail, but Bruce Catton's Gettysburg: The Final Fury delivers the emotional impact delivered in one of the most pithy and engrossing works. Via Bruce Catton, the embers still glow all these years later. 

Reading Catton is simply remarkable adventure in  itself.