Michigan Civil War Blog

On this day

August 29, 1978 OBITUARY Bruce Catton, Civil War Historian, Dies at 78 The New York Times News Services and The Associated Press Bruce Catton, a Yankee-born prolific writer on the Civil War whose anthology "A Stillness At Appomattox" won him a Pulitzer Prize, died Monday at 78, hospital officials said. Bruce Huron, administrator of Paul Oliver Hospital, said Catton had been admitted a week ago for an undisclosed respiratory illness. He lived in New York City, but maintained a summer home near here. Catton was a reporter with the Cleveland News, the Boston American and later with the Cleveland Plain-Dealer and a correspondent with the Newspaper Enterprise Association in Washington before he took several government posts. Among them was director of information for the U.S. Department of Commerce in 1945-46, and special assistant to the Secretary of Commerce in 1948. Catton won the Pulitzer Prize for historical writing and the National Book Award in 1954. Among his works on the Civil War was "Two Roads to Sumter," co-authored in 1968 with his only son, William Bruce Catton. He received the Presidential Freedom Medal in 1955 and then-New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller named him chairman of the state Civil War Commission in 1960. Among Catton's other books were "The War Lords of Washington," published in 1949; "Mr. Lincoln's Army," 1951; "Glory Road," 1952; "U.S. Grant and the American Military Tradition," 1954; "Banners at Shenandoah," 1955; "This Hallowed Ground," 1956; "The Coming Fury," 1961; "Terrible Swift Sword," 1962; "Gettysburg: The Final Fury," and "Michigan: A Bicentennial History," 1976. Catton was editor of American Heritage Magazine from 1954 through 1959. He was named senior editor of the magazine in 1959 and held that position until his death. Catton was born Oct. 9, 1899 in Petoskey, Mich., and married Hazel H. Cherry in 1925. She died of a heart attack in 1969 at the age of 69.

Catton gone

Even the most painstaking history is a bridge across an eternal mystery.  ~Bruce Catton, Prefaces to History

On August 28, 1978, michigan author bruce catton dies.

-- Note: I had intended to post this on 8/28/09 but, due to technical difficulties, I could not get in to my account; nonetheless, it was too important ('09 being the 110th anniversary of Catton being born) not to post

A poem (oh, yes!)

Memorial Wreath

In the green month when resurrected flowers
Like laughing children ignorant of death,
Brighten the couch of those who wake no more,
Love and remembrance blossom in our hearts,
For you who bore the extreme sharp pang for us,
And bought our freedom with your lives.

                                        And now,

Honoring your memory, with love we bring
These fiery roses, white-hot cotton flowers
And violets bluer than cool northern skies
You dreamed of stooped in burning prison fields
When liberty was only a faint north star,
Not a bright flower planted by your hands
Reaching up hardy nourished with your blood.

Fit gravefellows you are for Douglass, Brown,
Turner and Truth and Tubman. . . .whose rapt eyes
Fashioned a new world in this wilderness.

American earth is richer for your bones;
Our hearts prouder for the blood we inherit.

This gripping poem is from the pen of Detroiter Dudley Randall, writer and founder of Broadside Press, written for Memorial Day but stumbled upon today here. Couldn't wait 10 months til 2010 to put it online, for it's applicable every day any way.

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.

In defense of Catton

Mr. Rotov recently had a post on writers who don't understand references by Civil War era folk to the parables of Jesus: Civil War Bookshelf. Right on! A sad commentary on biblical illiteracy at the highest levels of scholarship.

The esteemed blogger (a regular read by yours truly) then listed titles that "are not normal turns of phrases in the speech of the Civil War era", the first being Terrible Swift Sword. But isn't a phrase from the first stanza of the contemporary Battle Hymn of the Republic to be considered speech of the Civil War era? To me, this is classic Catton--words with power and depth of meaning.

Still, I like his point.

Thanks, Eric

A big hat-tip to a writer and blogger who has stoked my interest in a specific CW topic over the years. "Thank you" goes out to Eric Wittenberg, who is a CW cavalry expert (see Rantings of a Civil War Historian). From a tip he gave me, I was able to locate how to purchase 'Michigan in the War', the Adjutant General's 1882 account of the state's participation in the WBTS, rather than taking notes from a library copy. I've been doing some analysis, based on prior research and the AG's report, and will be doing posts not too far down the road about Michigan's extraordinary contribution to saving the Union.