Snag Mr. Lincoln's Army Authored By Bruce Catton Print

book took a bit to read, Due to life, I had to put it down here and there, I was captivated by the authors style of writing and he clearly painted the picture with his words, He brought history to life and that is important, The context of the book was solid and the facts delivered were outstanding, While I am familiar with novels and even biographies beginning in media res in order to keep interest up on the part of the reader, I must admit I was thrown a bit for a loop when Catton did so at the beginning of this book.
  After all, this volume is the first of a trilogy that the author wrote on the Union Army of the Potomac from its beginnings in latewith the efforts of McClellan to train an army in the aftermath of First Bull Run.
  Yet for some time the book spends a great deal of time in those dramatic days in late August and early Septemberwith Second Bull Run and its aftermath, leading to a sort of strange time shift that the reader should probably be prepared for.
  Given the general familiarity of the course of the Civil War to many readers, perhaps it is a good thing that Catton throws the reader for a loop here, because it provides at least something that is out of the ordinary, something that does not follow the relentless chronological sweep of a war where the course of battle is generally known and followed to a slavish degree.


This volume of more thanpages is divided into six different parts and focuses on the Virginia front of the Civil War between lateand fall.
  We begin with the picturebook war of the Second Bull Run Campaign, where Pope found himself in trouble and where it was whispered that there was treason, and where generals encouraged soldiers never to be frightened I.
  After that we return towhen, in the aftermath of a brief and successful campaign in West Virginia, McClellan is promoted to be in charge of the Union armies and seeks to raise an army while simultaneously failing to understand the political demands of his office and finds himself unable to graciously deal with Lincoln and civilian oversight II.
  After that comes a discussion of Balls Bluff and the irrational but persistent suspicion that was to fall on the Army of the Potomac during its entire time, something that destroyed most of the men who were called upon to lead it in battle over the course of the Civil War, including the Peninsula Campaign III.
  After this comes a look at Lee's march and the trial of various generals after campaign failures IV,   McClellan's massive opportunity to defeat in detail the fragments of Lee's army then follows, a story of futility because of McClellan's inability to move with alacrity V before the book ends with a discussion of the bloody day at Antietam and its aftermath with McClellan's dismissal in the face of his slow pursuit of Lee's mangled army VI.


Catton certainly manages to show his strengths as a historian here,   If he is not a scholarly historian of the kind that would be most regarded now, he is a narrative historian of the first order, well acquainted with regimental histories and casualty lists and the stories of those men who survived war, often not fully intact.
  Moreover, the author manages to demonstrate the strain that the Union was under and the way in which the relationship between the civil and military aspects of the Union were often greatly in tension, and where there were simply far too many leaders in the Union army at the beginning of the war that were not committed to fighting with everything that they had, something that would only happen as the war progressed and as the logistical advantages the North faced became more and more decisive.
  Sadly, a great many men died because their leaders were too timid and too lacking in judgment, This book paints a magnificent wordpicture of the combatants from just after the Second Bull Run until the end of the Battle at Sharpsburg Confederate/Antietam Union.
The story centers on the Army of the Potomac and its leadership, as well as the various parts of the army and the opposing Confederate forces.
Great vignettes at all levels, from the lowly private to Lincoln and his generals, Stars

I always enjoy the little back and forth between the Rebs and the Yanks, the little jabs and jokes.
Also Catton manages to generate some early sympathy for “Little Mac” as he is thrust into a job he will fail at, But George B. McClellan also had a knack for relating to his soldiers, The action as the Army of the Potomac moves toward Richmond:
theth New York went up to the front through a little cemetery where were buried Confederate soldiers who had died during the preceding winter.
The little burying ground was full of graves, but over the gate someone had tacked a sign: “Come along, Yank, theres room outside to bury you.
”

The firing at last died down and the Rebels drew off, It was only a rearguard action, after all, and Joe Johnston had no intention of keeping his men there to make a finish fight of it.
Then the Federals at the front heard a great cheering behind them, and they knew what caused it and joined in it lustily and there, spattering across the damp fields, came General McClellan, blue coat all stained with mud, a glazed covering over his cap, his staff riding furiously in a vain effort to keep up with him.
McClellan rode all along the lines, each regiment got a chance to cheer, and night came down on the armys first battlefield,

A different kind of civil war, Is there any other civil war that features this kind of interaction

North and South, the armies sang Stephen Foster“My Old Kentucky Home,” “Old Folks at Home,” “Old Black Joe,” and “Nellie Gray,” especially the latter.
Ranking close to “Tenting Tonight” was “The Vacant Chair” We shall meet, but we shall miss him: There will be one vacant chair and they liked old favorites such as “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes” and “Auld Lang Syne” anddeeply, tearfully“Home, Sweet Home,” It is recorded that during the long winter after the battle of Fredericksburg, when the two rival armies were camped on opposite sides of the Rappahannock, with the boys on the opposing picket posts daily swapping coffee for tobacco and comparing notes on their generals, their rations, and other matters, and with each camp in full sight and hearing of the other, one evening massed Union bands came down to the riverbank to play all of those songs, plus the more rousing tunes like “John Browns Body,” “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” and “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp the Boys are Marching” Northerners and Southerners, the soldiers sang those songs or sat and listened to them, massed in their thousands on the hillsides, while the darkness came down to fill the river valley and the light of the campfires glinted off the black water.
Finally, the Southerners called across, “Now play some of ours,” so without pause the Yankee bands swung into “Dixie” and “The Bonnie Blue Flag” and “Maryland, My Maryland.
” And then at last the massed bands played “Home, Sweet Home,” and,fighting men tried to sing it and choked up and just sat there, silent, staring off into the darkness and at last, the music died away and the bandsmen put up their instruments and both armies went to bed.
A few weeks later they were tearing each other apart in the lonely thickets around Chancellorsville,

Not every battle has to be waged to the bitter end for every soldier:

A private from a Vermont regiment, scrambling up the mountainside, slipped and fell, and went sliding off downhill to land, all in a heap, in a little hollow among the rocks, face to face with a Confederate private who somehow hadnt retreated when the others had.
The two soldiers glared at each other for a moment, gripping their rifles then they agreed that it would be foolish for them to carry on a personal, twoman extension of the war there in the hollow.
They would wait where they were, suspending hostilities while everybody else fought, and at the end of the day they would see how the battle had gone.
If the Federals got licked and retreated, then the Vermonter was a prisoner, but if the Confederates retreated, then the Reb was a prisoner.
So they laid their rifles down and shared tobacco, leaning back among the rocks, and waited for the two armies to settle their fate for them.


Cattons narrative on the Battle of Sharpsburg/Antietam is riveting, He takes you through the battle in all its confusion, mistakes, serendipity and lost opportunities, I found his analysis of the impact of the battle on the rest of the war and the nations future to be incredibly enlightening.
The intro to the battle:

McClellans longrange rifles came into action, hammering hard at the Rebel guns by the Dunker church and reaching out to plow the cornfield with a terrible cross fire of shell and solid shot and the waiting Federal infantry hugged the ground, half dazed by the tremendous waves of noise.
Hooker exaggerated a little, but only a little, when he wrote afterward that “every stalk in the northern and greater part of the field was cut as closely as could have been done with a knife” and he exaggerated not at all when he wrote that in all the war he never looked upon “a more bloody, dismal battlefield.
” The Confederates in the northern part of the cornfield went down in rows, scores at a time, Then after a while the great thunder of the guns died down a little and the Yankee infantry went forward,

It all looks very simple and orderly on the map, where the advance of the I Corps is represented by a straight line following neat little arrows, three divisions moving snugly abreast and everyone present presumably knowing at all times just what was going on and what the score was.
But in reality, there was nothing simple or orderly about any part of it, Instead, there was an appalling confusion of shattering sound, an unending chaos of violence and heat and intense combat, with fields and thickets wrapped in shifting layers of blinding smoke so that no man could know and understand any more of what was happening than the part he could see immediately around him.
There was no solid connected battle line neatly ranked in clear light there was a whole series of battle lines swaying haphazardly in an infernal choking fog, with brigades and regiments standing by themselves and fighting their enemies where they found them, attack and counterattack taking place in every conceivable direction and in no recognizable time sequence, Northerners and Southerners wrestling back and forth in the cornfield in one tremendous freeforall.
The black powder used in those days left heavy masses of smoke which stayed on the ground or hung at waist level in long tattered sheets until the wind

blew it away, and this smoke deposited a black, greasy film on sweaty skins, so that men who had been fighting hard looked grotesque, as if they had been ineptly made up for a minstrel show.
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