Catton and the Lost Cause

Several CW blogs I've read over these several years take the position that the 'Centennial school of writing' was all about battles, soldiers, the romance of war, and subscribership to the Lost Cause. In this class they place a writer like Bruce Catton. I come, however, not to bury him.

First, my biases. Catton was a Michigander, so I'm naturally on his side. My other known bias arises from a childhood fascination with the War and familiarity with the premier writer on the War--not Foote, not the Williamses, not Freeman, not even Sandburg, who I later discovered was a Michigander during the writing of Lincoln: The War Years. Catton had a style that was unique, beautiful, occasionally transcendent, and award-winning. No one was better.

The Centennial school critics (I demur to the accusation/classification) claim that disciples overlooked the complexity of the conflict and its causes, focused on melodramatic story lines, and packaged up a neat interpretation of the war that, on the Northern side, deified Lincoln, demonized McClellan, and worked other historical errors. On the Southern, they assert that the 'Lost Cause mythology' is the companion part of that conspiracy devised to hide the ugliness of the main cause of the War: human bondage.

Do I merely imagine that Catton is put into this category? You decide from this example: "even writers like Bruce Catton, who viewed the war primarily from a Northern perspective, accepted many of the Lost Cause assumptions."

Was Catton a Centennial/Lost Cause romantic? To find out, I went to my Catton library shelf and pulled a book at random. It was the 1956 This Hallowed Ground: The Story of the Union Side of the Civil War, published by Doubleday. Interesting title, don't you think. Perchance was Catton attempting to pose a counterpoint to Jubal Early historicity?

If just a story-teller of fables, shouldn't we expect Catton to downplay slavery? Early in the book comes this paragraph:

"At the very bottom of American life, under its highest ideals and its most dazzling hopes, lay the deep intolerable wrong of slavery, the common possession not of a class or a section but of the nation as a whole. It was the one fatally limiting factor in a nation of wholly unlimited possibilities; whatever America would finally stand for, in a world painfully learning that its most sacred possession was the infinite individual human spirit, would depend on what was done about this evil relic of the past. Abraham Lincoln had once called it 'the great Behemoth of danger,'[fn] and now it was forcing men into war." (p15) 

And Catton is not blind to the failed aftermath of the war, where the shining promises of the 13th/14th/15th Amendments were subverted. The book's concluding paragraph tells of an evening when the Army of the Potomac's V Corps paraded around its D.C.-area encampment with candles in their gunbarrels, celebrating their ultimate victory over the Rebellion, a torchlight procession that made the nighttime luminous. Then Catton pens this conclusion:

"The night would swallow everything--the war and its echoes, the graves that had been dug and the tears that had been shed because of them, the hatreds that had been raised, the wrongs that had been endured and the inexpressible hopes that had been kindled--and in the end the last little flame would flicker out, leaving no more than a wisp of gray smoke to curl away unseen. The night would take all of this, as it had taken so many men and so many ideals--Lincoln and McPherson, old Stonewall and Pat Cleburne, the chance for a peace made in friendship and understanding, the hour of vision that saw fair dealing for men just released from bondage. ..."

Three more beautiful sentences remain, but I stop here, where Catton's first two make the point. The book emerged two years after Brown v Board of Education and not long after the Montgomery bus boycotts first raised up a young preacher named King. Did Catton write about slavery as a cause of the War? Did he write about how its legacy continued to undermine the Nation's promise? You be the judge.

I do not canonize Catton. I'd like to research more than time permits now to gain a fuller picture of the man and the writer. I do believe his Michigan upbringing within the heritage of the Northwest Ordinance had a lot to do with his more rounded view of the War.

It is not always the fault of its historians that America has often failed to grasp the underlying raison of the Civil War. Even Catton embraced myth, but not as Freeman did. That requires further examination and explication (ugh, big words!). It is perhaps more up to us to demand and defend a truer portrayal of the War, a type of history I believe Mr. Catton sought to write.

Comments

[Karin Risko]

Hi John (Jack):

Enjoyed reading many posts on your blog. Checked out your bio and wholeheartedly agree with your statement "More recently I've come to realize that Michigan's key contributions to saving the Nation are not appropriately recognized or appreciated. This blog is part of an effort to rectify this error." I too personally am working on a project that will rectify this in southeast MI.

Publicly, I'm working to help promote the legacy of Civil War hero General George Armstrong Custer and his Monroe, Michigan connections. Check out our blog and please pump up the famed 7th Cavalry. The Monroe County Historical Museum has on loan for a limited time an interesting exhibit called Trevilian Station. The collection contains Custer’s personal effects that were captured on June 11, 1964 by Confederates at Trevilian Station, Virginia. These items were taken home by a Confederate soldier, stashed under the bed, and lost for 135 years. Many other great exhibits as well.

Please check out our blog and pump up Custer and Monroe Michigan's contributions to the Civil War. Let's work together to promote the great history of this state.

blogsmonroe.com/custer/

And join us for the Custer Celebration Event scheduled for Oct 3 - 11. Although this year's focus is his western years, Civil War buffs will find the event interesting as well.

Karin

[nimmijones]

Catton discovered that, while a civil war, of all wars, is the most probable to engender “irreconcilably wild feelings” and “incurable hatred,” that did not find in the United States.
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Nimmijones

http://www.treatmentcenters.org/michigan

[Mark Douglas]

Very intersting, thanks for the insight.

I read Catton in high school. And if you want to read about the battles, the flow of the war, read him today.

But if you want the big picture, he does not supply it. I feel now rather cheated, frankly.

Not by Catton, but by the poltically correct nonsense we have learned that nearly absolves the South of any possible guilt. As if nothing can be said that might dissatisfy any Southern apologist.

I had to get away from the text books, away from the Catton and Freemans and Footes.

Thank God for Google books. They digitized 10 billion (or whatever) pages of books, newspapers, and pamphlets, no doubt saving many from impending dust.

I learned an entirely different view from the South's own works -- their own books from 1840-1860. Their own newspapers. Their own documents.

Things like the Five Ultimatums, issued by the South at literally the same moment the seceded. Does Catton mention these ultimatums? No, I don't remember them anyway.

These were central, these were the summation of Southern demands, FROM the Southern leaders AT exactly the start of the Civil War.

All of the ultimatums were about the spread of slavery. The South was threatening the North, that if the North did not allow the SPREAD of slavery --by violence --- then the South would attack.

How on earth do you miss that?

How do you not report what the Southern newspapers cheered, and what Southern leaders announced loudly and proudly?
'
The Southern newspapers called the Ultimatums "THE TRUE ISSUE".

SHow me where Freeman, or Foote, or Catton, or anyone, even mentioned those.

Show me a single text book EVER printed in the US, which listed the Five Ultimatums.

Were these unkown things? No, they were boasted about, reported North and South, and cheered in the South.

If Catton mentioned such things, he did not draw attention to it. These Ultimatums were so extreme, so outlandish, but so revealing, it should have been the TITLE for at least a dozen history books.