The Great American Conflict

...Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, where Americans fought Americans, each side convinced of the rightness of its cause...

...He has obviously gone through scores of regimental histories—much dull stuff, much repetition—in order to come up with occasional priceless anecdotes which illuminate the actual conditions of the time...

...A diligent searcher will find interesting material...

...One could not expect to find the entire story of the Civil War in a book of some 400 pages...

...More eloquent than any formal tribute is this comment by a Union soldier who came across the body of a young Confederate after the fierce fighting in the mountains around Chattanooga: "He was not over 15 years of age, and very slender in size...

...For a day's ration there was a handful of black beans, a few pieces of sorghum and a half dozen roasted acorns...

...I examined his haversack...

...My grandfather was an unswerving Republican, because to him this was the party of Lincoln and Union...

...Grovel and Dunlap...

...Bruce Catton's latest book1 is largely based on the reminiscences of great numbers of Union soldiers, like my grandfather, combined with the standard political and military works on the Civil War...

...but the editing seems a little loose and undiscriminating...

...If there were many Northern veterans like him, and I suspect there were, they constituted a bloc of Republican votes just as solid and unchangeable as the Democratic votes in the Solid South...

...Lincoln's double role as political leader and commander-in-chief, the home front (except for an excellent description of the carefree enthusiasm that marked the beginning of the struggle) , economics, foreign policy, some minor theaters of combat, are omitted or skimped...

...I have often regretted that I was too young in my grandfather's lifetime to learn as much as I might of what war was like a hundred years ago, of how men felt when they came under fire, of how the raw recruit (and almost everyone on both sides was a very raw recruit at the beginning) evolved into the veteran...

...And yet these men, and the equally untrained ones on the Southern side, fought each other with a tenacity which the veteran soldiers of Europe could not have surpassed...

...Both volumes...

...The book is by no means all anecdotes, although these add much to its flavor and realism...

...A young man recently out of college, he enlisted as a private in one of the Ohio volunteer regiments and retired as a major after the capture of Atlanta by Sherman in 1864...

...Looking at it from the Union side, might not the war have ended sooner if the advance on Richmond in 1862 had been under the command not of McClellan, with his constant tendency to overestimate enemy forces, but of Grant, with his simple but adequate definition of the art of war: "To find out where your enemy is, get at him as soon as you can and strike him as hard as you can and keep moving on...

...Catton...

...From the Confederate side, for instance, might the war have been prolonged if Lee had remained on the defensive in Virginia (instead of marching to what proved to be decisive defeat at Gettysburg), and effective relief had been sent to vitally important Vicksburg...

...But Mr...

...But the years of campaigning in the Grand Army of the Republic had left an indelible stamp on him...

...The Civil War: The Picture Chronicle...

...I suceded in gaining thir rear and Burned a portion of thir camp at that place they wair not looking for me...

...There are many more detailed narratives of the Civil War, which has probably been treated more fully in history, memoirs and fiction than any episode in United States history...

...Like many others in my age group, I can remember a grandfather who was a veteran of the Civil War...

...Along with the stately and elegant prose of General Lee's farewell to his army, one has the scrawled and almost incredibly misspelled communication of a man of very different background, General Nathan Bedford Forrest, the brilliant guerrilla cavalry chieftain: "I had a small brush with the Enamy on yesterday...

...But the book is so good within the author's self-imposed limits that if a person could read only one work about the Civil War this would be a strong candidate for the choice...

...240 pp...

...While the end might have come more swiftly or more slowly, the issue of the struggle was almost predestined, given the maintenance of the will to win in the North...

...Catton describes the war from the Northern side, with much sketchier and more incidental treatment of the Confederacy, and although he is convinced that the better cause, abolition of slavery and preservation of national union, won, he is properly generous in his appreciation of the courage and devotion of the defeated...

...It is surprising and significant how many of the great battles of the Civil War ended in a virtual draw, with neither army broken and routed...

...Because of this saturation with the recollections of actual participants, from generals to privates, the atmosphere of what Horace Greeley called "the great American conflict" is recaptured down to the smallest detail...

...He was singularly mild and gentle in manner...

...there are no more encampments of old soldiers in their blue and grey uniforms...

...In contrast to Bruce Catton's admirably selective narrative, The American Iliad2 is a rough quarry of source material—eyewitness accounts of all kinds...

...Its companion volume, The Picture Chronicle, contains, besides interesting photographs, a chronicle of the war, brief sketches of the careers of leading generals on both sides and reproductions of some historic war letters...

...Grosset and Dunlap...

...I remember him as an old man, living in retirement on his farm in Ohio after a lifetime of newspaper work in Cincinnati...

...Evidently Forrest had given a practical demonstration of his own definition of the art of warfare: "Git thar fust with the most...

...by Ralph Newman and E. B. Long...

...He was clothed in a cotton suit, and was barefooted—barefooted on that cold and wet 24th of November...

...Or if a general of better gifts than the unlucky Bragg had been in command when half of the Federal Army was routed at Chickamauga...

...This word of exhortation to oxen was understood and the right turn came off...

...There is the story of the newly commissioned officer, forgetting the order for a right turn, shouting in despair at his company of farm boys: 'Gee, blank blank you, gee...

...I taken them by Surprise they run like Suns of Biches...

...by Otto Eisenschim] and Ralph Newman...

...10.00...

...Cat-ton, equally endowed with brilliance and lucidity, makes the outlines of grand strategy and the maneuvers of individual battles clear to readers with no pretension to special knowledge of the art of war...

...One of the author's gifts, as a journalist turned historian, is to master his material without letting the material master him...

...A neighboring farmer once said: "There's no one in these parts who rides a horse as straight in the saddle as old Major Chamberlin.' I have a shield with a record of his war service, all on the western front of the Civil War, with names of little towns and country crossroads in Tennessee...

...719 pp...

...To look at this mighty struggle in retrospect, after the last shot had been fired, the last bugle blown, the last flag furled, is to be tempted into a contemplation of "might have beens," some of which are posed by Mr...

...The Confederacy was outnumbered in manpower four to one, and the disproportion in industrial power was even greater...

...Although Mr...

...Now the last actors in the heroic and tragic drama have faded away...

...It is also a lucid and brilliant account of the course of the war, from the fateful firing on Fort Sumter to the final "stillness at Appomattox...

...Lee's greatness as a military leader, winning repeatedly against larger and better equipped armies, is especially illustrated in the repulse of McClellan when he was within sight of Richmond in 1862, and in the defeat of Hooker at Chancellorsville...

...and he was not a man who talked frequently or freely of his war experiences...