TWO GIFTED WRITERS

The Civil War era has attracted more than its share of talented writers. Unexcelled political drama, compelling individuals in and out of uniform, and storied battles provide rich material for anyone seeking to tell a gripping story. Each generation since Appomattox has produced splendid authors, beginning with participants such as U. S. Grant and Edward Porter Alexander. Winston Churchill explored the conflict in A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, the last volume of which, completed in the 1950s, devoted considerable attention to military events and personalities. Readers interested in the coming of the war have turned with profit for more than forty years to David M. Potter’s The Impending Crisis: 1848–1861. In our own time, Shelby Foote and James M. McPherson, whose appealing prose styles differ markedly, are probably read more widely than any other historians in the field.

Bruce Catton and Douglas Southall Freeman command far less attention now than when they drew me into the world of Civil War history more than fifty years ago. This is much to be lamented, for few authors have written so movingly and perceptively about the war. Between the mid-1930s and the mid-1960s, the pair produced a number of classic titles and achieved wide recognition. Freeman appeared on the cover of Time in 1948, and Catton received a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977.

A native of Michigan, Catton (1899–1978) cast the wider net in selecting subjects. He wrote a trilogy on the Army of the Potomac—Mr. Lincoln’s Army, Glory Road, and A Stillness at Appomattox—that heralded his appearance as a major author and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1954. Catton’s other books include a second trilogy, The Centennial History of the Civil War, comprising The Coming Fury, Terrible Swift Sword, and Never Call Retreat, published between 1961 and 1965; three volumes on U. S. Grant; a one-volume history of the North during the war titled This Hallowed Ground; and The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War, which earned a Pulitzer Prize special citation in 1961. The last of these, with Catton’s graceful text and well-chosen illustrations, remains unexcelled as an enjoyable introduction to the Civil War.

Catton’s narratives abound with memorable passages. In Glory Road, for example, he dramatically brings the Iron Brigade’s five Midwestern regiments onto the first day’s field at Gettysburg, where they would lose roughly two-thirds of their 1,800 men. “The Westerners fell into step and came swinging up the road,” writes Catton, in setting the stage for a bloody day’s work on McPherson’s Ridge and Seminary Ridge, “their black hats tilted down over their eyes, rifle barrels sparkling in the morning sun. . . . On the ridge to the west there was a crackle of small-arms fire and a steady crashing of cannon, with a long soiled cloud of smoke drifting up in the still morning air, and at the head of the column the drums and the fifes were loud—playing ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me,’ probably, that perennial theme song of the Army of the Potomac, playing the Iron Brigade into its last great fight.”8

Catton’s description, in A Stillness at Appomattox, of the explosion of the mine at Petersburg on July 30, 1864, is equally superb. “First a long, deep rumble, like summer thunder rolling along a faraway horizon,” caught the attention of waiting Union attackers, “then a swaying and swelling of the ground up ahead, with the solid earth rising to form a rounded hill, everything seeming very gradual and leisurely. Then the rounded hill broke apart, and a prodigious spout of flame and black smoke went up toward the sky, and the air was full of enormous clods of earth as big as houses, of brass cannon and detached artillery wheels, of wrecked caissons and fluttering tents and weirdly tumbling human bodies; . . . the landscape along the firing line had turned into dust and smoke and flying debris, choking and blinding men and threatening to engulf Burnside’s whole army corps.”9

Freeman (1886–1953) focused more narrowly on Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. The son of a Confederate veteran from Virginia and longtime editor of the Richmond News Leader, he published R. E. Lee: A Biography, a four-volume Pulitzer Prize winner that remains the most detailed life of Lee, and the trilogy Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command, a combination of battle narrative and biographical portraits of key officers in the Confederacy’s most important army. Freeman’s last project, a multivolume biography of George Washington, garnered a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1958.

Modern readers should keep in mind that Freeman embraced Lost Cause interpretive conventions—scarcely surprising, considering his background. His biography of Lee, though a bonanza of carefully mined factual detail, often veers toward hero worship. “Because he was calm when others were frenzied,” reads one passage, “loving when they hated, and silent when they spoke with bitter tongue, they shook their heads and said he was a superman or a mysterious man.”10

Yet Freeman’s descriptive prose and character sketches remain engaging and informative, as when, in Lee’s Lieutenants, he deals with the artillery fighting on May 3, 1863, at Chancellorsville. “At Hazel Grove, in short, the finest artillerists of the Army of Northern Virginia were having their greatest day,” he observes of cannoneers conditioned to face a more powerful foe. “They had improved guns, better ammunition, and superior organization. Officers and men were conscious of this and of the destruction they were working. For once they were fighting on equal terms against an adversary who on fields unnumbered had enjoyed indisputable superiority in weapons and in ammunition. With the fire of battle shining through his spectacles, William Pegram rejoiced. ‘A glorious day, Colonel,’ he said to Porter Alexander, ‘a glorious day!’”11

Catton and Freeman stand up very well alongside more recent narrative specialists. Their literary gifts evoke events and individuals in ways that justify more than one reading and place them among the distinguished chroniclers of the Civil War.