Never Call Retreat

My husband received Bruce Catton's American Civil War Trilogy as a gift and he said that he didn't want to see it end. After finishing Volume 3, Never Call Retreat, I agree with him completely. I can understand why it remains so popular almost 50 years from when it was first published. The Civil War trilogy is a scholarly work, but reads more like a novel. Never Call Retreat starts after the Battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg) and the author will take us through some of the most momentous events to take place during the Civil War including the Emancipation Proclamation, the Battle of Gettysburg, the fall of Vicksburg, the siege of Charleston, the presidential election of 1864, Sherman's March to the Sea, the surrender at Appomattox, and Lincoln's death. He also shows how even before the war was over, Lincoln was debating reconstruction and how the Confederate states could best be reunited with the Union. But it's the additional information that Catton provides that makes these books so interesting. He tells us about the deficiencies of the southern railroads and how that handicapped the Confederacy. He relates how the Union and the Confederates still traded goods (especially cotton) despite being at war. He gives examples of how military technology was more advanced than the soldiers using it. All of these different facets provide a more in-depth understanding of the war. Where Catton is especially talented is in analyzing the characters he writes about. In book one, Lincoln begins to stumble through his presidency. By book three, his genius shows through and he is in commanded of everything from his cabinet to the military. Catton also is a good judge of military leadership. Lee and Grant were brilliant, but many of the officers on both sides were uninspired, reticent and lacking in military skills. In Never Call Retreat, the Confederates are especially plagued by poor leadership in the Western Campaign. "John B. Hood was uncomplicated, and when they gave him Joe Johnston's army, he assumed that he was expected to go out and fight. This he did, and as a result the South lost 20,000 good soldiers, Atlanta, the presidential election and most of what remained of the war." Catton also has a special skill in taking complicated situations and describing them with simple eloquence. In talking about the Gettysburg Address, he writes that Lincoln "spoke of liberty and equality instead of victory, as if these words alone could give meaning to what had been done here, and instead of dedicating the ground he called upon those who stood there to dedicate themselves to something that might justify all that Gettysburg had cost them." In describing the end of the war, he writes that after Appomattox, Lee "rode straight into legend and took his people with him...The cause that failed became The Lost Cause, larger than life, taking on color and romance as the years passed, remembered with pride and heart-ache but never again leading to bloods

"Never Call Retreat" is the third and final volume of Bruce Catton's classic Centennial History of the Civil War. This volume was published in 1965. Although the details may have been improved upon by later scholarship, "Never Call Retreat" endures as a superb reading experience based on Catton's matchless presentation of history as dramatic literature. Catton picks up the narrative in December of 1862, with the bloody slaughter of Burnside's failed assault at Fredericksburg. Whatever chance for moderation might have ever been possible, the Emancipation Proclamation and the rising casualties create an remorseless tide toward total war. In the West, Grant will grapple with the Confederate Fortress of Vicksburg, enduring a series of failures before finally and dramatically laying successful siege to that city. In the wake of Vicksburg, Grant will be directed to retrieve the failure of Chickamauga by breaking the Siege of Chattanooga. His success there will cause Lincoln to summon him to command of the Union Armies. Sherman will be left in the West to take Atlanta before marching to the sea through Georgia. In the East, Burnside and Hooker will each have a turn as commander of the Union Army of the Potomac, and each will be badly beaten by Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. George Meade, summoned to the command of the Army of the Potomac as Lee invades the North, will be just good enough to hang on and win at the three day trial of Gettysburg. The arrival of Grant as supreme commander will presage a bloody year long struggle between the two great Eastern armies, ending in the Siege of Petersburg, where Lee's Army will slowly bleed nearly to death before finally surrendering at Appomattox in April 1865. Catton does not neglect the politics, North and South, behind the fighting. In the South, Jefferson Davis struggles to forge a unified war effort with a Confederate Government too decentralized to marshal the necessary resources. Abraham Lincoln, his Union counterpart, struggles to bring the Union's superior resources to bear while maintaining a democracy and holding off a defeatist opposition. Linconl will win reelection in 1864 after surviving the darkest hours of the nation's will to reunite the country. Catton's narrative moves easily between theaters of war, detailing the struggles of very human leaders in the face of great challenges while placing those struggles in the context of the great themes of the war. Catton's superb narrative captures the uniqueness of an American Civil War. This book is highly recommended to the student of the Civil War and to the casual reader, both of whom will enjoy this volume and series.

Catton's trilogy is excellent at delivering an overview of the Civil War to you. His narrative is descriptive and flowing. He is accurate and provides the general and the anecdotal. Because of the scope of this trilogy, it is necessarily broad. So, you won't get a detailed, blow by blow account of incidents or battle order. What you will get is dynamic, moving history. Your interest for further study will be picqued.

In "Never Call Retreat", the third volume of his Centennial History of the Civil War, Bruce Catton writes of the last two years of that horrendous conflict. As he did in his first two volumes in the Centennial triology, Catton effectively covers the social and political aspects of the war, as well as the military. A work of this scope is, of necessity, a top-down view of the Civil War, focussing on the principal commanders and their subordinates. Yet, Catton is able to impart to his readers the confusion of battle; we can almost smell the powder smoke and hear the racket of musketry. As always, he writes with an elegance and an eloquence that many historians aspire to, but most cannot hope to match. Catton never loses sight of the war's ultimate, and higher, purpose and he poignantly brings home to us the human cost of our bloodiest conflict. Perhaps nowhere is this sense of loss brought home more forcefully than in this passage about Lincoln's assassination:"No one will ever know what Abraham Lincoln would have done--with Stanton's scheme for military government, with radicals like Wade and Sumner and Stevens, with any of the separate aspects of the intricate problem that lay ahead--because it was at this delicate moment (about half-past ten on the night of April 14) that Booth came on stage with his derringer. Booth pulled the trigger, and the mind that held somewhere in cloudy solution the elements that might some day have crystallized into an answer for the nation's most profound riddle disintegrated under the impact of a one-ounce pellet of lead: the heaviest bullet, all things considered, ever fired in America. Thinking to destroy a tyrant, Booth managed to destroy a man who was trying to create a broader freedom for all men; with him, he destroyed also the chance for a transcendent peace without malice and with charity for all. Over the years, many people paid a high price for this moment of violence".Four decades after its publication, this book, and the two that precede it, still stands as one of the best introductions to the war that defines us to this day.