This Hallowed Ground:  A History Of The Civil War, by Bruce Catton

I really wish I would have read more of Catton’s work earlier.  Although I was familiar and fond of his illustrated history of the Civil War as a child, it has only been very recently when I have bothered to read more into his works, and have found a writer whose personal familiarity with Civil War soldiers and his own reflections on the larger causes and implications of questions of freedom and unity have richly informed his works written throughout a lengthy and productive career as a popular Civil War historian.  This particular book is a shorter but also more pointed one volume history than similar efforts by contemporaries like Henry Steele Commager.  It tells popular history, but popular history with an edge to it, an edge of the darker motivations and internal tensions that were present in black and white, North and South, and that would have prompted a sensitive reader to more thoughtful and nuanced conclusions about the Civil War than are typically drawn by most writers.  Perhaps that nuance and that edge are not appreciated by everyone, but I certainly would have found them useful in my own studies as an encouragement of my own approach, as I do now.

This book is about 400 pages long and could have been a great deal longer (as most one volume histories of the Civil War are).  The author begins with a chapter on some of the more noteworthy events that hastened the Civil War (1), including the westward travel of freeholders and slaveholders, the violence in Kansas, and Sumner’s speech and the response of Butler to it.  After that the author looks at the beginning of the Civil War, the call for troops, and the federal commitment to a fight to the finish and the early struggle in Missouri (2).  This leads to a discussion of the rise of romantics like McClellan and Fremont who were not skilled at fighting (3) but who had plenty of opportunities to lead, before the author examines the terrible music of increasing conflict including early efforts to free blacks viewed as contraband, the struggle to lead volunteers, and the invasion of the deep south (4).  Catton moves on to discuss those aspects of 1862’s fighting that presaged a long war ahead, like Shiloh and the Peninsula campaign (5) as well as the turning point that followed the high water mark of Perryville and Antietam and the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation (6).  The continuing struggle and the battles at winter at Stones River and Fredericksburg follow (7), as well as the swing of the pendulum in Grant’s struggle to take Vicksburg and Hooker’s unsuccessful campaign that ended at Chancellorsville (8).  At this point, the author talks about the fatal invasion of Pennsylvania that marked Lee’s last advance and the successful close of the Vicksburg campaign after a siege (9).  The Chickamauga and Chattanooga campaigns offer the last of the might-have-beens for Confederate victory (10) before the mood gets increasingly serious.  The author then closes with three chapters on the decision to invade in both Georgia and Virginia (11), the battles that ensured the conquest of Atlanta and Hood’s defeats in Tennessee (12), and the final conquests of the war (13), followed by various notes, acknowledgements, and a bibliography.

In terms of the chronology of the war, the author manages to hit most of the high points in both the Eastern and Western theater.  The author is notably thin on material on the Trans-Mississippi front, but this accounts from his desire to save space and the recognition that these campaigns were definitely marginal to the main event.  And in a single volume history of the Civil War, one doesn’t have much time for marginalia, like blockade runners and obscure campaigns in Florida and New Mexico.  The tale of campaigns and battles is woven with the discussion of the importance of leaders who had strategic vision, were able to master the logistical matters that separated victory from starvation and defeat, and who were able to grasp the political realities of the Civil War and how its fighting was fatal to slavery even if the vast majority of people North and South were deeply racist.  As a one-volume history this book definitely deserves a read even now for those who want to know more about the Civil War and how and why it was fought.  Catton manages to draw deep insights from largely familiar facts.