I make little effort to “keep up” with current literature. Ars longa, vita brevis est. With so many great books of the last two thousand years still on my to-do list, it seems inefficient to limit the field to the last two issues of the New York Review of Books. I think my principle is sound, but of course it means that I will never get around to some very important books published during my own lifetime. But every now and then the Library of America allows me to catch up just a little. I must have been in junior high school when the first volume of Bruce Catton’s three-volume history of the Army of the Potomac appeared (Mr. Lincoln’s Army [1951]), soon followed by Glory Road [1952] and A Stillness at Appomattox [1953]). This trilogy made quite a sensation, winning for its author both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Later Catton wrote considerably more about the American Civil War. He was not an academic historian but a journalist with historian's chops and a powerful narrative style. Some have regarded his work as “middle-brow”; but now that I have belatedly gotten around to it, I find it rather wonderful.
The opportunity was thrust upon me by the Library of America, which recently republished the trilogy in its usual elegant format in a single volume.* This alone would be sufficient to declare the work(s) a classic. The Civil War must be the most written about topic in American history. The centennial events of the 1960s inspired a publishing binge, one that continued through the very popular television mini-series by Ken Burns. The last thing I read about the Civil War was another Pulitzer Prize book, Battle Cry of Freedom (1988), by my colleague and friend James McPherson. There will be no actual last word on the subject, but to my amateur eye Battle Cry of Freedom comes close. Let a thousand flowers bloom. One epic event will spawn many epic books. Horace said that the Trojan War was the only subject for the epic.
Part of the brilliance of McPherson’s book is its range. Its subject is a fairly broad historical period—the subtitle is “The Civil War Era”--and it deals much more seriously than does Catton’s with political and social history. Catton—in this trilogy—rarely strays far from military history. Mr. Lincoln’s Army deals with the first year of the War, focusing on the early battles, and especially on the peninsular campaign (the failed attempt of the Union army to capture the Confederate capital, Richmond, by marching from the southeast up the peninsula between the James and York Rivers). The subtitle could have been “The Conundrum/Tragedy/Paradox of George McClellan.” I refer, of course to General George B. McClellan, the supreme commander of the Union forces in the War’s first year, the unsuccessful Democrat presidential candidate in 1864, and more than ten years later Governor of New Jersey. During the War he was also known as “Young Napoleon” or “Little Mac,” the Big Mac still happily unknown.
History (meaning here the work of historians) now takes myriad forms, but I still believe that historians should always recognize, as etymology does, its connection with story, a crafted narrative. Catton is a great story-teller, and the story he tells about George McClellan is fascinating both as structured narrative and psychological suggestion. And much of his story seems highly relevant to the current national moment, which often seems to suggest that we are in the grip of a cold civil war. The only divisions in the America of 1861 were not limited to those between North and South. Within the Union Army leadership there were serious conflicts of thought, mistrust, and dislike just as there were hotter heads and cooler heads among the intrusive politicians in Washington and in the state houses. I found the third long chapter in the first volume, “The Era of Suspicion,” particularly illuminating. For there was suspicion galore. Lincoln was not spared his share, nor was McClellan. What does he know about fighting? Why won’t he fight? Suspicion ruled the sublime and the ridiculous? Why are certain officers so solicitous of the civilian property of the enemy, including the chicken sheds and the fat hens therein ? Why are the camp fires of that Illinois bunch so smoky? What is the war really about? Lincoln’s official line was that the war was necessary to “preserve the union”, regarded as an unquestioned, sufficient terminal good in itself. The line in the Confederacy was that the issue was “states’ rights,” an issue current in southern political thought long into the twentieth century. But just beneath the surface the war was always about the South’s “peculiar institution”, human bondage, whether this was actually stated or not; South Carolina did not secede over an abstract political theory. The issue was far more material. A huge part of the material wealth of the South resided in the fungible assets of the enslaved souls on which it was founded.
McClellan was in many ways an admirable soldier and man. But he absorbed the notion that he uniquely had been personally entrusted with the possibly divine mission of saving the United States of America. He didn’t quite have a God complex; but it certainly was at the archangelic level. With such frangible cargo in his hold, he tried never to sail on storm-tossed waters. War, alas, is by nature a tempest. Soldiers under his command loved him for his sincere and cautious concern, or prudential restraint, and he basked in their hurrahs. He was not about to act rashly. The exasperated President came to fear he would never act at all. He famously told McClellan: “but you must act”. The general was impressive in his wind-up. But where was the delivery? He was ever preparing, marching, camping, decamping, laying log highways, and waiting for better weather. He generally overestimated the strength of opposing forces, sometimes ludicrously overestimated it. There developed between President and Generalissimo what might be called a healthy mutual disrespect. On the question of slavery McClellan seems to have been a “moderate”: he was of course against it, but moderately. He regarded the baying abolitionists in New England as a part of the cross he bore. But right from the start there was a large and principled presence within his own Union army that was immoderately hostile to slavery. Attitudes toward John Brown, executed in 1859, are a good indication of opinion. R. E. Lee had called Brown’s exploit the “most infamous crime” in American history. But to thousands in blue he was a martyred hero. A sizeable section of the Union Army came from the “new” frontier states on which the slavery debate had in recent decades been focused. Anti-slavery sentiment was particularly strong in the regiments of German-Americans under McClellan’s command. Those who fled Old Europe in the long wake of the reactionary aftermath of the 1848 revolutions had not come to America in admiration of its curious sectional deference to chattel slavery. One is apt to be impressed by what people say and do in the face of mortal danger, and especially when actually marching toward it; what large numbers in the Army of the Potomac were already doing was belting out “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free!”—part of Julia Ward Howe’s new words to the tune of “John Brown’s Body. That was at the beginning of 1862.
McClellan was finally forced to act. The Peninsular Campaign—attacking the South from the south, so to speak—was not without its brilliance of design. McClellan almost certainly could have captured Richmond had he not been spooked by the Yankee ghost horde of his imagination and the perennially faulty intelligence on which he relied. (Grant took the Confederate capital only in April of 1865.) But history, and most of all military history, is full of what-ifs. For the lack of a nail…McClellan had the ironic success of indirectly making R. E. Lee, strategic genius, the Confederate commander-in-chief who would bedevil the Yankees for a long season yet. So Lincoln finally had to invite more abusive second guessing by replacing “Little Mac”, and to begin the surprisingly long search for a commander with the sufficient strategic skill accompanied by the killer instinct. On to the next volumes.
*Bruce Catton, The Army of the Potomac Trilogy. Library of America, 359. (New York, 2022), pp. 1277.
