Bruce Catton's Civil War trilogy is a narrative history. It is history from the bird's eye rather than chronological--haven't we enough of that latter? you can hear Catton saying when he accepted this commission.
It is true we do have enough of the standard chronological, battle-by-battle ant's eye Civil War history. Catton was not going to retell the Battle of Chancellorsville because, he writes in footnote 4, "Chancellorsville has been exhaustively analyzed by highly competent critics" and then recommends four authors who do so.
But at times Catton's narrative is jumpy. There are a very few instances where one is puzzled that the bird's eye noticed a detail that it did. The analytical power of the bird's eye is sometimes limited, as all pov's are, either too close to the ground or too high up. I have not appreciated some of Catton's analysis, it is too fuzzy. The bird's eye can be, in a word, boring. It has not been recently. I dog-eared three straight leaves from 162-166 in the third volume and four of five. I have also written "Boring" at the top of, I think, three pages. By an overwhelming margin the dog-eared leaves in the three books outnumber the pages with "Boring" at top.
I do find myself a bit impatient just now. We are on the eve of Gettysburg forgodssake and after a description of Pennsylvania's citizenry that mostly rings true to this son of Pa. Catton on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand's. On the other hand the Army of the Potomac had more units of Pennsylvanians--all volunteers too!--than from any other state, "many of them coming from precisely these farms whose people looked so phlegmatic." One of them was my great-great grandfather. On the one hand there were riots in the anthracite coal fields. On the other, "It was easy to misinterpret" these. "Autocratic bosses" "squalid company towns," etc. The "hated enrollment officer" was "probably" just the pinata at hand. Well, maybe, but on the one hand wasn't the local boss of King Coal closer at hand? Hadn't the national conscription act, "all male citizens between twenty and forty-five," "unquestionably changed the American form of government. The President now had a power no President ever had before--the power to reach directly into the remotest township and exercise the power of life or death over the individual citizen." The quotes are Catton's so the act did. It really seems therefore that the riots in the anthracite fields against the enrollment officers were directed at the intended person.
On the one hand, I hate when Catton does this, and he does it not infrequently: When writing about the complexities of intention or act, he writes as he does here, "The currents ran both ways at once. If most of the discontent now so visible in the North came from men who had much to lose and wanted to save as much of it as possible, some of it came from men who had little to lose and might welcome a general overturn." On the other hand you have all those volunteer regiments. If you want to take the bird's eye perspective there is this also: Abraham Lincoln won Pennsylvania in 1860 by eighteen points over the trailing Democrat. At the ant's eye level Lincoln carried Cambria County by over fifteen percentage points in 1860. But in 1864 Lincoln damn near lost the commonwealth, prevailing 51.65% to 48.35%, and was swamped in my home county by fifteen points. That's a thirty-point flip in four years--when the war was as good as won!
Self-evidently sentiment in Pennsylvania had changed dramatically against Lincoln in four years, Catton does not make that point effectively and spends eleven pages not making it--and on the eve of Gettysburg. Deary me.
Catton is at his best, and when he is at his best he is luminous, when he writes narrative prose. This is a "narrative history", why doesn't he narrate more? Because sometimes he gets lost up there with the birds in the clouds of analysis.
