Mr. Lincoln’s Army – Bruce Catton, 1951 ★★★★½

Dying to Learn

Many books about the American Civil War begin with the Battle of Bull Run. Mr. Lincoln’s Army does, too, but not the normal way. It opens with the Second Battle of Bull Run, a contest which settled nothing except the plain fact the Northern Army was being run by idiots.

Ineptitude is a common theme of this first volume of a famous trilogy focused on the Army of the Potomac, specifically its painful struggle to find its feet and strike the decisive blow against the Confederacy.

It was all a question of leadership. “There would have been unqualified disaster if the generals had not been commanding men better than themselves,” Bruce Catton writes.

Thus an atypical opening which spotlights the struggles of the army’s railroad superintendent to get reinforcements to the site of the Second Bull Run disaster, where Union commander John Pope’s Army of Virginia is getting pummeled. All this time, a second Union force, led by George McClellan, hangs back. McClellan’s characteristic failure to act becomes a familiar problem as Mr. Lincoln’s Army’s goes on.

Union forces on the attack at Cedar Mountain. Catton writes: "Hardly anybody realized it at the time, but the Civil War soldier was going into action just when technical improvements in the design of weapons had created a great increase in fire power and had given the defense a heavy advantage over the attack."
Image from https://www.loc.gov/item/90708954/

What gave McClellan pause? Partly it stemmed from his not liking Pope much, nor the abolitionist objectives avowed by Pope’s supporters. Mostly it was a lack of nerve, not courage per se, but gumption.

Catton quotes a Union veteran:

“It always seemed to me that McClellan, though no commander ever had the love of his soldiers more, or tried more to spare their lives, never realized the metal that was in his grand Army of the Potomac…He never appreciated until too late what manner of people he had with him.”

The problem of McClellan as Union commander was familiar enough to me from Stephen Sears’s books on the subject, including a biography on “Tardy George” and books on two separate campaigns which put the general in a bad and even worse light. McClellan cost the Union more blood by not fighting than a stupider, more callous general ever could.

While widely admired in his day, McClellan's statuesque image became a problem long before his military service came to an end. Above, a statue of the general donated by a veterans organization to the City of Philadelphia in 1894 that stands in City Hall.
Photo by Caitlin Martin from https://www.associationforpublicart.org/artwork/general-george-mcclellan/ 

Sears knew and worked with Catton, so I expected more shade to be cast on McClellan in Mr. Lincoln’s Army. Though Catton does have criticisms, they are couched in terms of respect reflecting a more positive consensus view of McClellan at that time. He took an army which was perpetually “unlucky,” and gave them pride and unit cohesion that would serve them well and eventually make them into an army like no other in American history:

They were not McClellan’s army any longer, and they could never be again; they were Lincoln’s army now, or the country’s, or the army of some inscrutable tide that was flowing down the century to change everything they were used to and break the way for something unimaginable.

Did you catch what Catton did there? By transforming simple historical fact into something lyrical, even metaphysical, he suggests something more than the commonplace at the heart of the American experience.

As a history writer of extraordinary influence on his time and after, Catton’s ability to invoke an almost Whitman-like cadence and majesty to his explanations of strategy and tactics makes him special; enjoyable and awe-inspiring to admirers like me, and frustrating to critics and fault-finders, of which he has many.

Bruce Catton at work. His focus on the soldier was unique in its time. "Those men are all gone now and they have left forever untold the things they might have told us," he wrote in a 1962 preface to Mr. Lincoln's Army. "Here is my attempt to speak about them."
Image from https://www.manisteenews.com/briefs/article/Benzonia-walking-tour-to-focus-on-Bruce-14479541.php

Criticisms around Catton center on his acceptance of American exceptionalism, his penchant for the grand statement, and his failure to acknowledge the experience of Black Americans more centrally in his narrative. Gore Vidal likened him to Parson Weems, retailing moralistic fable as history. Just over nine years ago, in an often positive appraisal of Catton’s work, historian David Blight discussed Catton’s being “ambivalent about tragedy,” openly mournful about the war’s impact on Southerners to the point of dangerous romanticism.

It is a fascinating talk, well worth a listen. But Catton deserves honest appreciation, too, for a body of work that to this day offers a sturdy template for remembering a country’s greatest war. And Mr. Lincoln’s Army is how that template came into being.

The first thing you notice reading Mr. Lincoln’s Army is how personalized everything is. Catton begins by noting his own connection with Civil War veterans as a young boy, “grave, dignified and thoughtful, with long white beards and a general air of being pillars of the community.” Then we get that long, novelistic opening about this superintendent of railroads, Herman Haupt, and his frantic, failed effort to get McClellan to act. Haupt accomplished nothing, so why does he dominate the opening section?

I think Catton lingers over episodes like this longer than he needs to, but he does so in service to the basic approach that continues across the three books: historian as story-teller. Catton’s desire to tell a good story gets him in trouble with academic purists, but it also makes his work so captivating, in a way most popular histories strain to follow.

Catton covers many aspects of soldiering, including the food: "If the hardtack got moldy it was usually thrown away as inedible, but if it just got weevily it was issued anyway. Heating it at the fire would drive the weevils out; more impatient soldiers simply ate it in the dark and tried not to think about it."
Photo by Timothy O'Sullivan from https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/07/02/198042487/civil-war-soldiers-needed-bravery-to-face-the-foe-and-the-food

Take this account of a regiment from the rough side of Manhattan: Army rumor had it that before man could enlist in this regiment he had to show that he had done time in a prison: a libel, beyond question, but the army liked to believe it.

Or tricks pulled by enlistees: The boys would write “18” on a slip of paper and put it inside a shoe; then, when asked if they weren’t pretty young, they could truthfully say, “I’m over 18.”

His thumbnail portraits of Union commanders are fascinating. Oliver Otis Howard, after losing an arm in battle, returns to the front and greets a similarly maimed general: “Now we can buy gloves together.” Israel Richardson dresses so slovenly his men mistake him for an aged wagon driver. Ambrose Burnside is honorable but hopelessly out of his depth.

Irwin McDowell, who commanded the Union at First Bull Run, is despised by his corps not so much for ineptitude as for the straw hat he wears. Some soldiers claim he wears it so Southern sharpshooters can avoid accidentally killing off their prize enemy asset:

All in all, this army corps was basically as good as any in either army, but it suffered from the fact that McDowell, a good man and a capable general, was one of those soldiers born to bad luck. Nothing ever went right for him. The aura of failure, born of that first fight at Bull Run, trailed after him.

Catton's critique of Henry Halleck, overall Union commander in the war's first years, is devastating: "Halleck is quickly recognizable for what he actually was: a typical old-line government-service hack, to whom the tidy operation of an office is an end in itself, infinitely more important than anything the office can conceivably do."
Image from https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/henry-w-halleck  

Mr. Lincoln’s Army has moments of absurdist humor as well as gory tragedy, the latter of which dominates more as the book goes on. More than the leaders, the men who fought the battles hold his focus, which informs his approach and fuels his passion.

Why did these men fight? It is a question Catton often asks. Some New Englanders were ardent abolitionists who understood this to be a fight for human freedom, but other troops from more Western states just wanted a quick resolution so they could go home.

McClellan’s own thoughts were squarely on ending the threat of succession. His neutrality toward slavery was well-known by his enemies in Lincoln’s cabinet, who wanted to make an example of him. This earns McClellan some sympathy from Catton:

Nobody who doubted the need for ending slavery overnight would be allowed to have any hand in army affairs – although private soldiers who were not abolitionists would still, presumably, be allowed to die in battle, if perchance they were hit by Southern bullets.

I’m not sure if this exposes Catton as too friendly to non-abolitionist concerns by today’s standards; when he notes that Confederate leaders didn’t have to deal with “witch hunts” he was responding not to 21^st century progressives but anti-communists of the early 1950s who had hounded Catton for his long history of supporting liberal causes.

President Lincoln and his cabinet regarded McClellan's lack of progress with dismay and in the case of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (seated at far left), deep suspicion. Catton quotes one Union general: "On our part it has been a war of politicians; on theirs [the Confederacy’s] it has been one conducted by a despot and carried out by able generals."
Image from https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/File:Emancipation_proclamation.jpg

The need to find unity in a common cause proves elusive to the central characters of Mr. Lincoln’s Army, until the awful finale at Antietam, where, after much dawdling, McClellan managed to somehow avoid certain victory yet again, ending his time as Union commander.

Catton paints Antietam as a kind of moral victory despite the human carnage, as it led immediately to the Emancipation Proclamation. “There could no longer be a hope for a peace without victory,” Catton writes.

For the Army of the Potomac, a purpose to continue the war was found, Catton says, not in any presidential decree, but in the sacrifice of countless comrades, and a certain if unspoken knowledge those lives must not be lost in vain, whatever the odds in the war’s first years:

They were learning the reality of war, these youngsters, getting face to face with the sickening realization that men get killed uselessly because their generals are stupid, so that desperate encounters where the last drop of courage has been given serve the country not at all and make a patriot look a fool.

Mr. Lincoln’s Army is a slow starter, but it transforms quickly into a kind of emotional rollercoaster where men fight, die and go a little mad. By the time the book winds its inevitable way to Antietam, Catton’s narrative pitch has reached an intensity more akin to fantasy fiction than history, its carnage as vivid as in any Mathew Brady photograph of the battlefield. The only serious drawback for a reader is having to carve out time for the other two books in the trilogy when you are done with this.