BOOKS
The Birth of a Nation
By D. W. BROGAN Trr HE last New Yorker to reach me shows an 'exurbanite' waiting for the latest issue of the `Civil War Book Club,' dressed like a Union soldier. And President Eisenhower is as busy ex- plaining away what he said to Lord Montgomery about Lee's tactics at Gettysburg as in defending his Budget. For the American, the Civil War is still the war. It has provided the background for What are the two most famous American films, The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind. It provoked the best American elegiac poetry, Whitman's, and at least one admirable epigram, Timrod's 'Magnolia Cemetery,' and it was illus- trated by the two greatest of American orations, the Gettysburg address and the Second Inaugural. `Civil War buffs' are numbered by the hundred thousand; as a business, writing about the war rivals religion. Of all the great American shrines, Mount Vernon, Monticello, even the but where Lincoln's predecessor, James Buchanan, was born (which now oddly adorns the campus of Mercers- burg Academy), the one with the biggest emo- tional punch is the Lincoln home in Springfield, Illinois.
Knowing all this, knowing, too, that Mr. Catton is one of the most indefatigable tellers of the oft-told tale, one is tempted to approach this new version with some of the boredom with which reviewers take up the latest 'Berry' book or with the irritation with which, I notice, they take up the latest James Bond. If such precon- ceptions put off readers, they impose a very serious loss, for Mr. Catton seems to me to have done a very remarkable thing. He has produced a moving, living, exciting book that is yet worthy of serious attention. This is vulgarisation, but high vulgarisation. The reader who thinks he knows too much about the Civil War to waste time reading this, shows, in my opinion, that he doesn't know enough. Of its kind, this is a masterly job.
It is as well to get out of the way certain biases provoked by Mr. Catton's literary methods, methods that have provoked a very de haul en bas review from the New Yorker. It is a long time since James Russell Lowell damned Augustin Thierry for introducing the picturesque style into history. Mr. Catton is a faithful disciple of Thierry; he has never heard of or disregards Ver- laine's counsel to take eloquence and wring its neck. This book is held up, from time to time, by almost comic outbursts of spread-eagle oratory, what used to be called in Ireland 'sun- burstery.' But we should remember that the Attic simplicity of Lincoln was not much to the taste of his times. Mr. Catton writes as the orators of the age wrote and his clotted metaphors and inky- THIS .HALLOWED GROUND: THE STORY OF THE UNION SIDE IN '11-1E CIVIL WAR. By Bruce Cation. (Gollancz, 16s.) white chiaroscuro would have been much to the taste of admirers of Edward Everett, George Bancroft and Henry Ward Beecher, He writes as Charles Sumner spouted.
But Mr. Catton has more than a style, he has a point of view. This is the story from the Union side. England, not merely Oxford, is the home of safely lost causes and the average English- man is all for the South, all for Lec, magnolias, mint juleps, crinolines, 'gone with the windery,' no more serious than that bogus but admirable Jacobite song 'Over the Sea to Skye'—which I have just heard a ticket collector on the Under- ground whistling with great skill. None of this for Mr. Catton. The right side won. As Augustine Birrell put it, for once 'the great twin brethren, Right and Might,' were on the same side. He has no sympathy or understanding of Unionist `copperheads' like the Captain Abbott of the 20th Massachusetts whom the younger Holmes so much admired. There is a streak of Jacobin justice in him. He does not admire the military politicians of `the Committee on the Conduct of the War,' but they were on the whole right against McClellan and if Fitz-John Porter got rough injustice—well, there was a war on.
This candid partisanship does not seriously distort Mr. Catton's narrative. We can feel why the Army of the Potomac worshipped McClellan as they never did Grant. We can feel why and how McClellan rallied the shattered wrecks of an army after Second Manassas till they were ready, at Antietam, to halt the Army of Northern Virginia at the real high tide of the Confederacy, the fall of 1862—and to justify Lincoln's issuing that revolutionary document, the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared (some of) the slaves 'forever free.' Mr. Catton is mainly a mili- tary historian, but he is a political historian, too. Or rather he is the historian of the politics of the army. He tells us, again and again, how the mere duration of the war changed its temper and objects, how the Northern soldiers got tired of fighting a war and dodging its basic issue, slavery. The 'rights' of the slaveholders could no more be preserved in 1862 than the rights of Louis XVI could be preserved in 1792.
It is not only the politics of the army, but the life of the army that we are made to understand. This was the most amateur of great wars, yet it ended as the most professional of great wars, for the Union Army, in 1865, was in all but one thing the most modern, as it was certainly the most powerful, in the world. What it was not modern in, oddly enough, was its equipment. Even then, the United States was the home of know-how. The war produced the first submarines, the first effective naval mines (the `torpedoes' that Admiral David Glasgow Farragut damned); Wilson's cavalry in 1865 had repeating breech-loading rifles; Monitor and Merrimac had made all navies obsolete in a day. Yet the mass of the infantry had only muzzle-loading rifles; neither side had breech-loading cannon. The tactics of Gettys- burg, of Cold Harbor, of Chattanooga, can only be understood if this is remembered. They were more like the tactics of Waterloo or Wagram than of Sadowa or Gravelotte. True, the Prussians did not see or utilise all the possibilities of the new weapons—that was not done until the Turks put on a preview of modern war with their Krupp guns and Remington rifles at Plevna in 1877. But within these serious limitations, both armies worked wonders. At Shiloh, the first desperate battle of the war, both sides were full of troops who had never fired a shot except at game. Being Western armies, they were full of men used to hunting (in the American non-U sense of the word). As some raw troops were told, it was like squirrel shooting—except that the squirrels would shoot back. Some Confederate batteries had never heard their guns fired; ammunition was too scarce for practice! Yet 'both these raw armies fought with ferocious courage in defiance of desperate losses as if they had been veterans animated with the highest Roman discipline or Spanish ferocity. Of course, as the Prussian general said to General Sheridan before Metz, all raw troops 'need to be a little shooted,' but what rhw troops have fought so well!
The army was raw in other ways. Discipline was `democratic,' uniform almost optional. There was plundering (as the soldier said to Sherman, 'You can't expect all the cardinal vir- tues, Uncle Billy, for thirteen dollars a month'). But, pace Mr. Catton, this was a very humane war, the worst 'bummers' among Sherman's men were angels by recent European standards (or the standards of contemporary Indian war. The Sand Creek massacre was worse than anything done even in South Carolina, but, then, the vic- tims were Indians).
And there were the leaders : Grant, whose stock steadily rises; Lee, more a virtuoso of battle than a great commander-in-chief. For Lee asked of his raw troops complicated combinations that would have been a good deal to ask of the Prus- sian army of Leuthen or the French army of Austerlitz. He was, too, a gambler, as bold in 1862-65 as Bonaparte was in 1796 or the Em- peror in 1814. And like the Emperor he failed. But it is not only the great chiefs who are illuminated for us. There is Nathan Bedford Forrest, the untutored genius of the South; there is McPherson, the Gaston de Foix of the North. There is Sheridan, with his whisky flask in his hand, taking the insolent batteries that had fired on him. But, and this is the true American note (not ,struck by Mr. Catton), the Sheridan who destroyed Early and drove Lee to surrender was not, in daily practice, a beau sabreur. 'He goes about it like a businessman,' said that Boston 'In- heritor of unfulfilled renown,' Colonel Charles Lowell, who knew what a businessman was. In this way and in this war was made the nation that the Germans twice and the Japanese once wrote off as unmilitary, unwarlike, too slow. They were wrong and the history of the war is there to show how and why they were wrong. Sic fortis Etruria crevit. This is a lay of Ancient Rome,' but all the better for that.
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