Glory Road – Bruce Catton, 1952 ★★★★★

Death Before Victory

War is hell, a fact even honest combat histories often sidestep. Not to deny its ugliness, but rather to craft a narrative palatable to a broader audience. Bitter reality is acknowledged, but details not dwelt upon.

Glory Road is different. It is the Saving Private Ryan of American Civil War histories, a blow-by-blow account of the terrors of war not for the squeamish. In his depiction of the Battle of Gettysburg, the war’s turning point, Bruce Catton describes a Bosch-like canvas where eyes are shot out, maddened horses gallop on three legs, and men duck bullets behind the bodies of dead comrades.

One soldier is so horribly maimed that he is described putting a gun to his head and blowing out his brains. Meanwhile, others are directed to throw themselves into an exposed position, just to buy a few precious minutes after one general had put his part of the line too far out.

This was America in the 1860s. Catton writes:

It wore seven-league boots and scorned to look where it planted them, and each of its immense strides was made at immense human cost. And the army of this country, buckling down to it at last in a fight which had to go to a finish, was going to be very rough on enemy civilians, not because it had anything against them but simply because they were there.

Catton spends much time on the various leaders of the Army of the Potomac, but emphasizes the soldiers were more important: "What the army finally was to do, if indeed it was to do anything, would at last depend almost entirely on the men in the ranks."
Image from https://www.historynet.com/civil-war-soldiers/ 

People who talk about Catton as a pat sentimentalist must never have read Glory Road. It tells in stark terms the story of the bloodiest war in U. S. history, at a time its outcome was in doubt. However smooth Catton’s prose, the tone here is troubled and jagged:

Hardly half a dozen years had passed since the Know-Nothings had been a powerful political party, and a country which hated foreigners almost as much as Negroes was now using the one to enforce freedom for the other and was suffering from emotional indigestion as a result.

The middle volume in Bruce Catton’s “Army Of The Potomac” trilogy, Glory Road forms a trilogy of its own, focusing on three critical battles of the American Civil War.

At Fredericksburg in December, 1862, Union General Ambrose Burnside threw away his troops in senseless repeat assaults against an impregnable Confederate position. “His soldiers and the country might have been better off if Burnside had been more of a quitter, but that was one defect which he lacked,” Catton writes.

After Fredericksburg, Burnside remained in command. Then, in January, 1863, he led his troops in a disastrous winter offensive known as the "Mud March," losing countless horses and equipment and never meeting the enemy. Lincoln replaced Burnside soon after.
Painting by Mort Kunstler from https://www.mortkunstler.com/html/store-limited-edition-prints.asp?action=view&ID=172&cat=136

At Chancellorsville the following spring, a more strategically sensible Northern commander, Joe Hooker, enjoyed numerical advantage against a divided foe, only to lose his nerve at a critical moment. It is a tale of senseless waste, where wounded men are left to die in a burning field while the Army of the Potomac runs back to Washington.

Finally, at Gettysburg in the first three days of July 1863, George Meade wedged his troops into a meat grinder but gave them a chance at victory. As Catton notes, “the chance had been enough.” For the first time, Union soldiers knew what it was to see Robert E. Lee completely whipped.

The focus of this book is not on the Northern commanders but rather the men under them, what they experienced and how they endured. Exhaustion emerges as a key theme: “The phrensy of soldiers rushing during an engagement to glory or death has, as our boys amusingly affirm, been played out,” Catton quotes a Northern chaplain writing. “Our battle-worn veterans go into danger, when ordered, remain as a stern duty so long as directed, and leave as soon as honor and duty allow.”

That ugliness is only tempered in Catton’s account by the spirit of endurance that holds the Union army together, regardless of leaders. At Gettysburg, Catton writes, two straight days of carnage left it reeling, yet somehow imbued with a sense of purpose as they readied for one final, fatal day:

Somehow, invisible but sensed by everyone, a slow fuse was burning toward one final, supreme explosion. The battle was following its own course now, and perhaps nobody controlled it.

At Culp's Hill in Gettysburg, at the extremity of the Union right flank, three Confederate assaults in a row were beat off, with massive casualties to both sides. Catton writes: "There was no cheering, but thousands of men were growling and cursing without realizing it as they fought to the utmost limit of primal savagery."
\Painting by Peter E. Rothermel from https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/battle-of-gettysburg-no-picnic-at-culps-hill/

When the battle was over, General Meade was harshly criticized for not attacking a retreating Lee. But from Catton’s description, the Army of the Potomac was in no shape to take any offensive action.

Usually, middle volumes in famous trilogies are the books that matter most in the remembering. So it is here. Mr. Lincoln’s Army, the first volume of the trilogy,  begins with a sprawling look at Union logistical issues and doles out a lot of charm before we ever see battle firsthand. Glory Road is chock-a-bloc with battles first to last.

It opens with a portrait of a green regiment from Michigan brought into the ranks of the Iron Brigade, which greet them coldly. There was a gulf between the soldiers who had already seen the war and those on the field for the first time. Catton returns to the 24^th Michigan several times in Glory Road, from their baptism of fire to their final stand at Gettysburg’s Cemetery Hill, where 399 of its 496 men were shot.

Glory Road ends hauntingly, a few months after that battle, when we return to Gettysburg for a grand ceremony. As a few scarred survivors walk away from the pageantry, Catton remarks dryly: “Perhaps there was a meaning to all of it somewhere.”

Then Lincoln rises to deliver his most famous speech, the Gettysburg Address. What does Catton do? He writes: “…and he looked out over the valley and began to speak.” Then Catton ends his book.

President Lincoln spoke for about five minutes at Gettysburg, November 19, 1863. Gettysburg, and another Union victory at Vicksburg completed the next day, put the war firmly in Union hands. "History does not have to go logically, and its inevitables are never really inevitable until after they have happened," Catton writes.
Image from https://web.nmsu.edu/~stephenj/ICT460/lesson/gettysburg.php

Of course Catton didn’t need to quote the President. Nearly every schoolchild in the country could recite the Gettysburg Address back in 1952. But that sharp cutoff grabs your attention, and makes clear how the battle itself, and not just Gettysburg but the ones before it, too, were the events that gave bloody meaning to Lincoln’s simple, profound words, and how also the final meaning of those words would only come long after they were spoken.

After that ride, it seems almost a shame Catton still had to write that third book! Glory Road is a magnificent middle, yet the Civil War was far from over. There are still events to come and characters to introduce who will play a major role in the final outcome.

In that way, Glory Road is an effective thematic and narrative bridge. It deepens the experience of having met Mr. Lincoln’s Army and prepares you for A Stillness At Appomattox, the concluding volume to come.

Catton clearly enjoyed writing trilogies. He wrote a second Civil War trilogy the next decade, commemorating the centennial of the conflict. “The Army Of The Potomac” trilogy differs from that by focusing on the war in the East, where most (but not all) of the most important battles were fought. It also draws on the experiences of the common Union soldier.

A Colt dragoon pistol of the type issued to Union cavalry troops during the war. Catton writes: "It kicked so hard that the man using it was in nearly as much danger as the man he was shooting at."
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colt_Dragoon_Revolver

Time and again, Catton examines the character of the fighting soldier, noting that most were neither hero nor shirker but ready enough to face the challenge when it was presented:

“By turns the truth was greed, and coarseness, and pain, and shining incredible heroism; and somehow, because the war was made-up of people and of what people thought and felt and did, the whole of it was mysteriously greater than the sum of its parts.”

Among the corps that comprised the Army of the Potomac, there was a pecking order. At the bottom of it was the XI Corps, which had a large number of German-born recruits, radical refugees from the old country known unaffectionately as “Dutchmen” by the other Yankee soldiers. Catton writes about how they chafed at the Christian instruction of their commander, Oliver Otis Howard, and how they were matched only by some of the New Englanders in their zeal to end slavery.

They were blamed for the loss at Chancellorsville because they were the first unit to be hit by Stonewall Jackson’s attack and fell apart quickly. Yet disaster might have been averted had their superior officers listened when the soldiers of the XI Corps gave warning of an approaching foe.

The hunt for scapegoats in the Union Army claimed many in 1863, including Major General Fitz John Porter, spuriously court-martialed for disobedience despite a career of success on the field. "Ordinarily the government would not need to ruin a general in order to establish its control, but these times were far from ordinary," Catton writes.
Image from https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/fitz-john-porter  

Catton spends a lot of time analyzing what went wrong at Chancellorsville. Unlike Fredericksburg, a wanton, piecemeal frontal assault against a strong, entrenched foe, the strategy at Chancellorsville was sound, brilliant even. Hooker’s forces outnumbered Lee’s by more than two-to-one and gained the early initiative.

But something in the surprise attack on XI Corps seemed to destroy Hooker’s confidence in himself. Catton writes:

Jackson had broken Hooker’s right wing into fragments, but the Union army still had a perfectly good position, and if Hooker had only realized it he was standing squarely between the two disconnected pieces of Lee’s army, with a tremendous advantage of numbers on his side. But Hooker just was not realizing things at Chancellorsville.

Two positive things did come out of the battle for the Federals: Stonewall Jackson was accidentally shot by his own picket and died, robbing the Confederacy of its best field commander; and the Union troops retained a fierce fighting spirit despite their defeat.

Catton writes of this exchange between pickets:

One Confederate, asking loudly, “Where’s Joe Hooker now?” was tartly informed: “He’s gone to Stonewall Jackson’s funeral.”

The final test of Northern mettle would come at Gettysburg, an epic tale of savagery Catton relates so well that it is easy to overlook the debacles that came before. But Glory Road is a complete book, a microcosm of the Catton treatment and a template for war historians to follow when relating the personal side of conflict.