This Hallowed Ground by Bruce Catton - Outstanding Read!

This Hallowed Ground

by Bruce Catton

A Review

There are not enough superlatives to do justice to this book.  I read it as a teenager and bought it in a Washington bookstore for my son but ended up reading it again myself.  As many reviewers have noted, if you read only one book about the Civil War, read this. Bruce Catton has a lyrical poetic style that weaves colorful anecdotes with sweeping prose that makes about as much sense as anyone can of the horror of America's bloodiest war by far.
First published in 1955, before the civil rights movement entered into the consciousness of most educated Americans, This Hallowed Ground was remarkably prescient, referring repeatedly to the painful issue not just of slavery but of race and of the inevitable reckoning that would have to come if the "peculiar institution" were abolished once and for all.  Eight years before Martin Luther King was to deliver his "I Have a Dream Speech," Catton could see that almost a century after the Civil War, the United States remained a work in progress.
Catton avoids the pitfalls that trap many historians, such as a compulsion for detail that misses the forest for the trees, or a contemporary interpretation whose bias makes later readers wince.  When Catton drills down to a battlefield, he gives just enough detail to create a vivid word picture but is adept at zooming out and showing us how the battlefield fits in the campaign, and the campaign in the war, and the war in the history of America.  Long before Ken Burns' PBS Civil War series had been conceived (Burns was only 2 when the book was published), Catton peppered his narrative with extracts from letters and diaries of the ordinary men who had a front row seat to this extraordinary history.
Perhaps because of all the shouting going on in American politics today about what it means to be an American and the proper scope and power of the federal government, there was something eerily contemporary about the book's opening. Following arrests made in Baltimore, "when Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney issued a writ of habeas corpus to set one of these free, President Lincoln blandly ignored it... The Supreme Court had indeed been flouted, the Constitution had been stretched, perhaps even broken (depending on one's point of view), scores of people were being held in prison without due process of law... No matter.  Maryland was not going to go out of the Union."  And I could not help think of today's political attack ads when reading that "men who were whipping themselves up to the point where they would refuse to try to get along with one another were, at the same point in time, doing precisely the things that would bind them together forever whether they liked it or not. "  But for all the harsh words, today's acrimony has not spilled over into violence, as it did on the senate floor in the opening scene of the book with the  1856 caning of Senator Charles Sumner.  But the compulsion of demonizing one's adversaries remains:  "All of the things that were slipping beyond hope of easy solution - ... varying interpretations of the American dream - all of these somehow might hinge on what was done about Kansas, so that the wrong phrase in an enacting clause could mean earth's best hope lost forever."
If Catton's work had been fiction, it would have been rejected for lack of plausibility.  Given the carnage of the war that was to come, why would volunteers be so eager to fight that "soldiers sent home in Indiana threatened to shoot their colonel"?   
How could it possibly be that the house chosen to host the surrender that would end this terrible war would be that of Wilmer McLean, a Virginian who found his Bull Run home too caught up in the war's opening battle, so moved to Appomattox?  Who knew that Grant not only owned a slave at one point but didn't care all that much about slavery one way or the other until about 1861?  Or that the two generals most instrumental to ending the war were both from Ohio and overlapped at West Point (Grant was a senior when Sherman was a plebe)?  Or that on the very morning that Sherman was to accept the surrender of General Johnston he received a telegram telling him of Lincoln's murder?  And the contrast between General Lee - "tall, gray, one of the handsomest and most imposing man who ever lived, dressed today in his best uniform, his sword belted at his waist" and the man who received his surrender "US Grant, rather scrubby and undersized, wearing his work in close, with mud spattered boots and trousers and a private's rumpled coat with his lieutenant general stars tacked to the shoulders" at a surrender ceremony where Grant had to borrow ink from the Lee and Lee had to borrow paper reflected staging too perfect for a good fiction editor.
His writing pulls you in and keeps you riveted such as with this description of Antietam:

There never was another day like Antietam. It was sheer concentrated violence... it had all of the insane fury of Shiloh with this difference:  at Shiloh the troops were green ... at Antietam the men were veterans and they knew what they were about... so that the dawn to dusk fight above Antietam creek went into the records as the most murderous single day of the entire war.  

Sherman's march to the sea is described in a way that rivals the far more biased and regional fiction of Margaret Mitchell:  "Smoke filled the sky like a gigantic ominous signal as Sherman's army pulled clear of the city [of Atlanta] and started for the sea… And so began the strangest, most fateful campaign of the entire war, like nothing that happened before or afterward. These federals were not moving out to find and destroy an armed enemy; the only foe that could give them a fight, Hood's army, was hundreds of miles off to the rear, and everybody knew it. They were not being asked to hurry; 15 miles a day was much less than these long legged marchers could easily make, and everybody knew that too. Their mission was to wreck an economy and to destroy a faith – the economy that supported the thin fading fabric of the Confederacy, the faith that believed the Confederacy to be an enduring creation and trusted in its power to protect and avenge."  The men were "conscious agents of this destruction; men who trampled out the terrible vintage of the grapes of wrath, led by an implacable general who was more and more coming to see a monstrous but logical destiny in his mission… For Sherman was not fighting and opposing army now; he was fighting an idea, knocking down the last shredded notion that the Southern Confederacy could exist as an independent nation, moving steadily and relentlessly not toward a climactic engagement but simply toward the end of the war."
The final days and aftermath of the Civil War are such well-trodden ground that it is surprising that no author before or since has really topped Catton's riveting description of the end:

Until this Palm Sunday of 1865 the word Appomattox had no meaning. It was a harsh name left over from Indian days, it belonged to a river and to a country town, and it had no overtones. But after this day, it would be one of the haunted possessions of the American people, a great and unique word that would echo in the national memory with infinite tragedy and infinite promise, recalling a moment in which sunset and sunrise came together in a street glow that was half twilight and half dawn.

Like a brilliant movie director, Catton pans his camera over the horrific cost and inevitable consequences of the Civil War in ways that make historical abstractions come alive:

Here and there all over the country where the mounded graves of half a million young men who had been alive and unsuspecting when all of this began. There would be more graves  to dig, and when there was time there would be thin bugle calls to lie in the still air on a handful of dust drifted down on a blanketed form, but most of this was over. A little more killing, a little more marching and burning and breaking and smashing, and then it would be ended.

Ended; yet, in a haunting way, forever unended. It had laid an infinity of loss and grief on the land; it had created a shadowed purple twilight streaked with undying fire which would live on deep in the mind and heart of the nation, as long as any memory of the past retained meaning. Whatever the American people might hereafter do when one way or another take form in color from this experience.

If Catton can be faulted, it is for a certain tendency to repeat but his prose is so lyrical, almost hypnotic, that he can be forgiven.  He also shares the compulsion of all historians to assign meaning to events, even if some things, perhaps most things, just happen.   Historians probably would not be historians if they did not discount the role of randomness, meaningless, and blind chance.  But I find myself so mesmerized by Catton's authoritative writing - at times he seems to have known the protagonists personally - that I find myself wanting to believe his sweeping, all-explanatory narrative.