I have finished Catton.
Before this morning I had planned on writing that in the end I was very disappointed. I've read enough books in my life that I don't like my time wasted. I began to think, about half-way through the third volume that Catton would offer no explanation for why the Civil War lasted so long; I was and am still disappointed that Murfreesboro was identified as Stone's River resulting in my confusion; that the character of Pennsylvania and of Pennsylvanians took up more pages than the Battle of Gettysburg did. I read Catton's footnote; what more was there for him to say that others had not? But he was commissioned to write HIS history of the Civil War not cite to that of others on the greatest land battle ever fought in the Western Hemisphere. This was a "narrative history" which means there was an omniscient narrator telling a story from the clouds. I don't think there was enough of that. I think Catton got lost in the weeds some. It occurred to me about the time I had these other thoughts that maybe Catton had just burned out. I thought volume one was great; volume two lost steam, I thought; and volume three was as an exhausted runner willing himself to the finish line. Never Call Retreat, the final volume here, was Catton's seventh book on the Civil War in thirteen years. A Stillness at Appomatox (1953) is his best-known work.
But, as I finished, I thought that Catton had answered, indirectly, by sheer repetition of and detailed accounting of the facts, the question foremost to me. If he had written directly he would have written that the Confederate States of America were destined to lose, were always going to lose, that it was not a matter of "contingency", that the cake was baked when it was put in the oven, and that the reason the war lasted so goddamned long was down to the generals on each side. McClellan and Burnside and Hooker were fools, that they all had in common; McClellan had the added, immeasurable, defect of inconstancy to the mission; Burnside was stupid as well as a fool; and Hooker was a cowardly cockcrow. Lee and Jackson, so long as he lived, and Stuart and Forest had a merry time literally running circles around these jackanapes. But Lee lost Jackson, and part of his mind with him, and Lincoln ran out of fools. When, in the last year, he gave overall command to U.S. Grant with Tecumseh Sherman and Phil Sheridan his chief lieutenants, well then, holy hell was unleashed on the Confederacy and the war was over in short order.
Catton's bird's eye picked out the transcendent military genius of this war when other writers who the undersigned has read have not as clearly identified. It was Abraham Lincoln. With HIS bird's eye of the disposition of forces it was Lincoln who saw first saw, in 1862, who saw most clearly, and who saw constantly how the war was to be won, by attacking Confederate forces at multiple points. Would he have had the generals to do it sooner.
I would have welcomed some "meaning" to the Civil War also, although I am fatally suspicious of deep meanings. The Gettysburg Reunions are always foremost in my mind on this score. What WAS the meaning of those? Of unprincipled Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.? Of killing without feeling? Catton's bird's eye returned rarely in Never Call Retreat, but it did return, and he DID provide meaning to the war and those weird reunions.
...unquenchable guerrilla warfare...had been hint[ed] at [and] was perhaps the one thing that would have ruined America forever. ...
The Civil War was not going to end that way. (emphasis added)
...Yet men have to live by their memories, and the memory of death and defeat is bitter enough to keep unforgiving men carrying their rifles across the hills for generations. Lee made it possible [by rejecting guerrilla war] for [Southern white] men to turn this memory into a strange source of strength, a tragic and moving remembering that provided a base on which the present could be accepted and the future faced. Because of what happened when he and Grant at last met, Lee when he left Appomattox...rode straight into legend, and he took his [white] people with him. The legend became a saving grace. The cause that had failed became The Lost Cause, larger than life, taking on color and romance as the years passed, remembered with pride and with heart-ache but never again leading to bloodshed. Civil Wars have had worse endings than this.
A little of it is due to Grant. It was not grim old Unconditional Surrender with whom Lee sat down...Instead it was a sensitive man...His terms were generous...Beaten [white] men were not to be paraded through Northern cities...
"A little of it"? lol.
See there are too many brackets with words that have to be added for that to be real. We may, I certainly do in 2022, beg to quarrel with Catton over how much Grant's "little bit of" generosity and letting Southern white "men...live by their memories" benefited the reconstructed United States of America and, writing in 1965, Catton acknowledged that post-war America has re-fought the Civil War constantly, and to this day, August 30, 2022. "The Lost Cause"...never again leading to bloodshed."? What, between whites? Certainly not for Blacks! Catton has this blind spot too many times. That though explains the reunions--which were exclusively reunions of white men. Still, it is something.
On the whole, for immediate post-war America, did the peace that was got not beat unending guerrilla warfare? Well...lol. Again, for whites, yes. But it must be said, and Catton knows it but does NOT say it: Bedford Forest DID reconstitute his loyalists into a guerrilla force, they were named the Ku Klux Klan, and they terrorized Black Americans for a century more.
Catton quotes, as does the Ken Burns documentary, a memoir written by a Confederate soldier, Berry Benson, which foretold precisely the reunions:
Who knows but it may be given to us, after this life, to meet again in the old quarters, to play chess and draughts...and again to hastily...[go] to the summons to battle?...And after the battle, then the slain and wounded will arise, and all will meet together under the two flags, all sound and well, and there will be talking and laughter and cheers, and all will say: Did it not seem real? Was it not as in the old days?
A dream...It's a meaning. It's his book and a dream is his meaning.
