Never Call Retreat

Bruce Catton's Civil War masterpiece is a must read

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The Library of America has just published in one handsome volume Bruce Catton’s Army of the Potomac Trilogy: Mr. Lincoln’s Army, Glory Road, and A Stillness at Appomattox. This classic of American military history was first published in 1951-53, at a time when memories of World War Two were still fresh and men yet lived who’d served in a war even more terrible—our Civil War. I first read it as a teenager In the Sixties, and as I reread it today (having just finished Mr. Lincoln’s Army), it seems to me that no other work in the vast catalogue of Civil War history and literature so well evokes the grandeur and pathos of the conflict that remade America.

The Army of the Potomac was America in microcosm, its troops drawn from cities, towns, farms, ranches, and remote places across the nation. Most of them served in the volunteer regiments that were organized and equipped by the states and then mustered into Federal service. In the beginning, this array was a formless mass: half trained, ill disciplined, many regiments clad in gaudy militia uniforms. The 11th New York Volunteer Infantry, formed with men drawn from the city’s volunteer fire companies, wore a showy and exotic Zouave-style uniform and was known as the New York Fire Zouaves. Regiments from New York and Massachusetts formed with Irish immigrants carried colors embroidered with golden harps and shamrocks. In one way and another, every volunteer regiment was unique.

The Army of the Potomac was not yet in being when this force was first committed to battle at Bull Run in northern Virginia (July 21, 1861). The memory of Fort Sumter was still fresh, the North’s blood was up, the popular clamor for action was strident, and against his better judgement the Federal commander, Brigadier General Erwin McDowell, was ordered to advance against the Confederates. The men were brave and willing enough, but they and their officers were green, and after hard fighting the army was routed.

It was Major General George B. McClellan, dubbed “the Young Napoleon,” who fashioned this raw military material into a true army. A West Point graduate who’d resigned from the Army to become a railway executive, he went back into uniform immediately after the bombardment of Fort Sumter and replaced McDowell in command five days after Bull Run. McClellan immediately set about forming the regiments into brigades, the brigades into divisions, the divisions into corps. He established discipline, restored morale, brought order and system to the administration of the army, in the process earning the undying respect and love of his soldiers.

And “Little Mac,” as they called him, returned that love. Indeed, McClellan loved his Army of the Potomac so much that he could not bear to use it with the ruthlessness necessary to procure victory. This fatal flaw in his makeup led to McClellan’s downfall after the Battle of Antietam (September 17, 1862), where he failed to capitalize on a great opportunity to destroy Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and end the war.

Catton tells this origin story in Mr. Lincoln’s Army, which though it offers incisive portraits of McClellan and other leaders and culminates in a brilliant account of the fight at Antietam, is most absorbing in its depiction of daily life in Army of the Potomac itself—in camp, on the march, on the eve and in the aftermath of battle. This is the biography of an army. The reader enters into the lives of these men as the war works its way with them, stripping away idealism and illusion, winnowing out the cowards and the shirkers, killing all too many of the brave, until what remains is a hard core of veteran soldiers. These men became, as Catton reminds us, the real saviors of the Union, the real liberators of the slaves. And the price they paid for those things was dreadfully high.

Daily life in the Army of the Potomac was spartan. The staples of the men’s rations were salt pork, bacon, beef, hardtack, and beans, plus whatever could be foraged on the march. There were few trained cooks; all too often mess duty was assigned to men considered unfit for anything else, who mostly knew nothing whatsoever about cooking. Tobacco and, especially, coffee, provided the soldiers with their greatest solace. In camp, they lived in small wooden and canvas huts or pup tents. In the field, they often had to sleep on the ground, under the stars, sometimes in the rain. Compounding the dismal toll of battle casualties, diseases like typhus and cholera carried off many of them.

On the battlefield, the great killers were the rifled musket and the artillery. The latter fired solid shot, explosive shell and, at close range, canister or grapeshot—which were murderous. When they failed to kill, musket and cannon inflicted gruesome wounds, many of which required limbs to be amputated.

For the soldiers in the ranks, the Civil War battlefield was a chaotic, terrifying hellscape of noise, confusion, fire, smoke, shouts, screams, and death. At Antietam—still the bloodiest single day in American military history—regiments went into action five hundred strong and came out with three or four dozen. A single, well-levelled volley of musketry could knock down fifty men. Reading Catton’s account of that battle, one can only marvel at the sacrificial courage shown by the soldiers of both sides.  

Glory Road carries the story forward from the Battle of Fredericksburg in late 1862 to the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1963. A Stillness at Appomattox (which won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize) completes the saga with an account of the Army of the Potomac’s final campaigns under the ruthless, driving command of Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, which brought the Civil War to its end.

When President Lincoln came to the Gettysburg battlefield, he spoke of “a new birth of freedom,” and this in a sense is the theme of Catton’s trilogy. He writes that though the soldiers of the Army of the Potomac did not realize it (but perhaps they sensed it), their trial by fire was the distilled essence of a national transformation. America in 1861 was still an association of states defined by their regional peculiarities, its national identity visible in outline only. The Civil War tore that America apart.

Much the same fate befell the Army of the Potomac during the war. In the spring and summer of 1861, it was the army of a dream, representative in its idealism and naive patriotism of an era whose last days were passing. Catton ended Mr. Lincoln’s Army with Antietam and McClellan’s dismissal because those things, he judged, marked the end of that era. McClellan himself stood for the preservation of the Union but he abhorred the abolitionists, whom he held responsible for succession and the war. And it was this, not just the disappointing results of his last battle, that cost him his command.

But Antietam was nevertheless a strategic victory: Lee’s invading Army of Northern Virginia was stopped in Maryland and compelled to retreat. On the strength of that victory, Abraham Lincoln decided that the time had come for the promulgation of his long-meditated Emancipation Proclamation. And with that the war was transformed.

The preservation of the Union and freedom for the slaves became the North’s twin war aims, indissolubly linked, with no possibility of compromise. The war would now be fought to a finish, and the Army of the Potomac, leaving the last of its springtime idealism behind, commenced the long, hard, sorrowful march down the road to Appomattox Court House. And at the end of that march Mr. Lincoln’s army awoke from the nightmare of war to find itself, like the nation, profoundly changed.

It was an American epic, and no one has told the tale of it better than Bruce Catton.