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.
