DArk Indefinite Shore
WITH Never Call Retreat Bruce Catton has com- pleted his admirable three-volume Centennial History of the American Civil War. There is no need to repeat the many compliments and eulogies that have been paid Mr. Catton on his magnificent achievement. It is enough to say that his three volumes constitute the best single narrative of the war between the states that has yet been written (that is, of course, if one ex- cludes Grant's Personal Memoirs). Even those, if there are such, who know everything there is to know about that war could still read Mr. Catton with pleasure and profit; for those who know nothing, his history is the best possible introduction to the subject. As a feat of sus- tained narrative, I know of few books to equal it, and I hope it will soon be made available in a single-volume, paperback which should be made compulsory reading for every sixth-form pupil and university student in the country. For if one wishes to know what has made the world what it is today, an understanding of the American
Civil War is at least as necessary as of, say, the second law of thermodynamics.
For what Mr. Catton is writing about is the crucial period in the formation of the United States, and this is very near to saying the crucial period in the formation of the world we live in. From this point of view, of course, Mr. Catton's history provides fascinating historical perspec- tives and in no part of it more than this volume. Would the world have been what it is today if Stonewall Jackson had not been killed at Chan- cellorsville? Lee's victory there was one of the great classical masterpieces of military art; yet strategically it led to nothing, and Jackson's death was a greater and more fatal loss to the South than all the Federal dead were to the North. It is one of the great merits of Mr. Catton's book that he never lets us forget the importance of historical accidents of this kind.
This volume covers the period from Fredericks- burg (December 13, 1862) to Lee's surrender at Appomattox (April 9, 1865), which includes some of the bloodiest battles of the entire war. Any- one reading it will be left in no doubt that after the failure of Pickett's charge at Gettysburg, and Grant's victory at Vicksburg, the fate of the Confederacy was, or should have been, sealed. In fact it was not; one of the great mysteries of history, which Mr. Catton beauti- fully displays but cannot wholly penetrate, is how the Confederate armies, continuously out- numbered, inadequately supplied, often even out- generalled, succeeded in keeping the war going until Appomattox. Even more than that; Mr. Catton makes it plain that even by the end of 1864, one Confederate victory might have thrown Lincoln's re-election, and hence the outcome of the war, into the balance. In the end, that such a possibility existed seems to have been the work of what Allen Tate described last year in the pages of the SPECTATOR as the 'incredible valour of the Confederate infantry.' This is one of the factors, wholly indefinable, which both those who make and those who describe history are apt to overlook, but Mr. Catton does not.
Throughout his history Mr. Catton is excellent at giving the might-have-beens their full value; it is one of the threads of his narrative which 'provide its dramatic intensity. Another is his view of the war as an uncontrollable, autono- mous force, continuously escalating, which swept soldiers and politicians away so that at the end very few of them knew what they were fighting for. Some, however, did. One was Jefferson Davis, to whom, on the whole, history has done less than justice; to the end he clung stead- fastly to the idea that all the South wanted was to be left alone, even to the point at which he was willing to arm the slaves. The other was Lincoln, who, against his will, was forced to believe that to leave the South alone was the one thing that was impossible if the Union was to be preserved.
Mr. Catton is at his best in following the elaborate shifts, hesitations, ambiguities, even subterfuges, by which Lincoln finally arrived at the doctrine that the war could not be won without the emancipation of the Negro, and in showing how these were related to the actual events of the war. He leaves us in no doubt that, in Lincoln's mind, emancipation was sub- sidiary to, and a consequence of, prosecuting the war to a successful conclusion, and yet that it opened his mind to hitherto undreamed-of horizons. In his last chapter he recounts the dream of which Lincoln told his Cabinet on April 14, 1865; according to Gideon Welles, his Secretary of the Navy, Lincoln said that, in the dream, 'he seemed to be in a singular,-in- describable vessel . . . and that he was moving
with great rapidity towards a dark and indefinite shore.' Lincoln was sure that the dream was a happy augury. That night he was shot; but I think that after reading Mr. Catton most people will agree, in spite of James Baldwin, Malcolm X and Cassius Clay. that Lincoln was right.
Finally, Professor Boorstin's vast survey of the American experience from the Revolution to the Civil War tells us what kind of people they were who engaged in the struggle which ended in the total defeat of the South. and pro- vides an invaluable background to Mr. Catton's admirable narrative.
GORON WY REES
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