As The 150^th Anniversary Of The American Civil War-Bruce Catton’s Terrible Swift Sword- A Book Review

 

 

 

 

Book Review

By Frank Jackman

Terrible Swift Sword, by Bruce Catton, Washington Square press, New York, 1963

Old time friends from the 1960s anti-Vietnam War struggles Ralph Morris and Sam Eaton had a common interest in the American Civil War since they were kids in the early 1960s and in their respective home towns got caught up in the centennial events celebrated back then. Sam who grew up in cranberry bog country down in Carver in Southeastern Massachusetts used to collect the stamps and first day covers of the series that the United State Post Office put out commemorating various battles, important events and personalities from that bloody conflict (first day covers were issued and cancelled on the day that the stamp was issued and from the place where it had been issued which represented in those less video-filled days a hobby which many kids got into as an inexpensive way to keep in time with the world around them-hell most of that time a stamp was only three or four cents). Ralph, not usually much of a reader, made an exception for Civil War history and literature since coming from Troy in upstate New York he had had many distant relatives who had some connection with that war and were commemorated on the huge Civil War Memorial in the downtown area.      

Of course Ralph and Sam did not know each other in the early 1960s but had met in 1971 down in Washington, D.C. on May Day when Ralph, a Vietnam veteran who had turned against the war with a vengeance along with his Albany area contingent of Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) and Ralph, not a veteran but an anti-war convert after his best friend from high school had been killed in the Central Highlands of Vietnam and had urged him if he did not get back alive to tell anybody who would listen to stop the war, with a Cambridge radical collective had tried to stop the war by stopping the government, or some such idea. All the thousands who came out that day and a few days following got for their efforts were police sticks, tear gas, and a trip to the bastinado. The bastinado for the two of them was a football stadium, the home of the Washington Redskins, ironically Robert F. Kennedy Stadium, being used as a temporary holding pen for most of those arrested. Ralph had sought Sam out when he noticed as he walked along the football field that he was wearing a VVAW button and had asked if Sam was a veteran. Sam told him the story of his friend and over the next several days before they were released (and the next forty some years) they would talk incessantly about everything under the sun including their mutual interest in the American Civil War. Both had agreed that the war to preserve the Union (Ralph’s position then) and to abolition slavery (Sam’s) would have found them as soldiers in some Union army, probably some brigade of the Army of the Potomac the way troops from the North were distributed then from the levies their respective governors sent down.       

Although their personal perspectives are not germane to this book review even one hundred plus years later when discussion of the Civil War comes up Northern aficionados will gravitate toward one or the other reason, or in some cases both, for why they would have supported the Northern side in the bloody dispute. Ralph and Sam’s respective takes on their reasons for support are almost chemically pure examples of what drove our forebears toward support for the war.

Ralph born in upstate New York very close to many of the key battles of the American Revolution at Saratoga Springs and its environs was driven by the idea of the need to save the union intact in order for it as Lincoln so eloquently stated to remain the “last, best hope for democracy” on the planet. He was in those days, in his youth totally out of sympathy with the idea of emancipating the slaves as the main reason for fighting. Those early 1960s found Ralph standing side by side with his father in the fight against attempts by blacks from CORE to move into their section of Troy, the Tappan Street section, to live side by side with what Ralph, Senior called “nigras” just like Governor George Wallace down in Alabama was calling them. Ralph, later after having his “ass” saved more than once by a couple of “brothers” and after getting “religion” on the war issue and who was fighting the damn thing like him and those brothers had a sea-change in attitude and wound up doing plenty of defense work for the besieged Black Panthers (along with Sam and other VVAWers) when they were under frontal attack by every police agency in the country. But in the early 1960s he was strictly a “save the union” man.    

Sam on the other had come from a strain of Puritan stock on his mother’s side who had back in the 1850s when they first settled in Carver and its environs been rabid abolitionists, had been at Temple Church in Boston when all the great abolitionist orators would speak against the “abomination of slavery” and that background would be sprinkled generally and gently in the household although his father was nothing but a swamp Yankee cranberry bogger who didn’t give a rat’s ass (an expression used by Sam and his growing up corner boys when they, well, didn’t give a rat’s ass about something). Moreover when Sidney Stein and Ethel Rogers started putting together collections of books to be sent to the poor black kids down in Mississippi after being called on to do so by the NAACP in Boston he volunteered to help although it cost him a lot of grief from his corner boys and others who had about the same attitudes as Ralph and his father. As already mentioned as part of Sam’s radicalization after the death of his friend he also dived right in on the Black Panther defense work, especially the New Haven case where he (and Ralph) stayed for several weeks while the trial was going on.

Like I said Ralph and Sam, although both working class kids came at their interests from different perspectives. Moreover, when they began discussing their mutual interests back in the bastinado in 1971 there was also a difference in emphasis of interest, which has lasted until this day. Ralph was, is always much more interested in the various battles, the strategies, and the military personalities of both side and Sam was, is, more interested in the political conditions which Lincoln and the other Union leaders encountered which determined their strategy for preserving the union (clearly early in the war the sole aim of Lincoln and the great majority in the North) and ultimately by the logic of the fight the struggle for total emancipation of and citizen for the slaves.          

So it was no accident that once the 150^th anniversary of the war began being commemorated in 2011 that Sam and Ralph would take note, take to reconvening their arguments about military versus political strategy as they liked to call it. They were aware since Sam many years before had begun subscribing to the New York Review Of Books that there would be another onslaught of books covering every aspect of the war, from battles and personalities to sanitary conditions and firearms and everything in between. Sam had made Ralph laugh one time when he had read a review of a book, a whole book for Christ sake, about the role of “shoddy,” inferior clothing, shoes and supplies produce by unscrupulous manufacturers on the outcome of the war. This time out there would be the same, maybe more. Of course Sam and Ralph both had small collections of Civil War books gathered over time so they one night at Jack’s Grille in Cambridge, a town where Sam had been living with his wife Lana once the kids were out of the house they decided to “down-size” to a condo from their leafy suburban house in Avon, they decided to dust off some of the old books first and begin their old “wars” once again. Of course one of the great summaries of the military and political events driving the action on both sides in the Civil War was Bruce Catton’s prize-winning trilogy. The first volume concerning the events that led up to the war and the beginning of the bloodshed at that point somewhat amateurish and make-shift The Coming Fury has been reviewed (and disputed by them) elsewhere. The review here of Terrible Swift Sword, the middle years of the war where the fighting turned large-scale, turned furious, turned more merciless and began to clarify the issue of the initial objectives of the war for the preservation of the union (or preservation of the Confederacy) and the remorseless fight for the abolition of slavery is what Ralph and Sam continued their disputes about.            

On the union side once the rout of first Bull Run put the fear of God into the North, made certain forward looking elements on the Union side and not just the abolitionists, civilian and military, realize that a remorseless struggle lie ahead (and the same in the Confederacy particularly Jefferson Davis and once he took charge of the Army of Northern Virginia Robert E. Lee) the military build-up went full steam ahead. Military strategies to strangle the Confederacy, the Anaconda strategy and on the Southern side to decisively defeat the Union Armies and gain recognition as a separate state particularly by France and England mingled in with political objectives. Of course in a book of four hundred dense pages there were too many battles won and lost on both sides for Sam and Ralph to argue about separately not unless they planned to live at Jack’s Grille and drink the place dry. So they decided to concentrate one night on two of the great events of the middle years of the war on the Union side- to satisfy Ralph the role of General McClellan in unnecessarily lengthening the war and to satisfy Sam Lincoln’s decision, kicking and screaming at times, to call for emancipation of the slaves (in reality in stages depending on Union victories since it would take that to get freedom for the slaves in areas where there was no Union armed mandate for such action).           

Ralph although he had always been a partisan of General McClellan for his ability to put together a ragtag semi-army and make it a disciplined force which everybody in authority in the North knew had to be done if the advantage that the North in the mass production of war materials was to lead to victory. But his attitude shifted somewhat once he himself had become more interested in the fight for abolition as the motivating force necessary to spur the armies on once the he realized that the South had an overall military leadership advantage. His initial respect for McClellan had centered on his limited goals for the army, to shore up the Union positions, alleviate the threat to Washington and keep pressure on the Confederate armies getting them bottled up defending Richmond (in any case a mistake in choice for the capital so close to Washington and roaming Union armies).

When he had first met Sam he had argued (rather surreally since they had been in the bastinado for four days by that time and had gotten a little stir crazy) that McClellan represented just the right sense of what was to be done, essentially telegraphing by his sedentary position in front of Washington for great lengths of time, the South to “go in peace.” After re-reading the Catton material about McClellan’s fears of being swamped by non-existent overwhelming Confederate numbers and then allowing a cabal of his own design to form among his staff which threw about thoughts of some kind of military dictatorship for him (with the assumed proviso that he would indeed let the South go in peace) he got most agitated. What made Sam laugh at their recent Jack’s Grille meeting was how irate Ralph had become about McClellan’s “slows” in getting his ass out before the enemy. Here’s the kicker, Ralph blurted out “why didn’t that damn Lincoln boot his ass out after the failed Peninsula campaign.” Sam smirked.        

Ralph got his chance to smirk a bit when Sam started talking about all the new scholarship, or rather commentary since the facts have not changed much in the last hundred and fifty years, about Lincoln’s racial attitudes which colored his attitude toward emancipation as a military necessity rather than a political objective. Of course Lincoln was a man of his time, of his not inconsequential southern roots and of his societal racial attitudes. Many “political correct” commentators these days have cut their teeth on the idea that Lincoln should have had today’s more advanced sensibilities about race and supported the idea of total emancipation earlier on. Sam had been surprised on re-reading the parts about Lincoln’s conversion to partial emancipation as a military necessity since he had remembered differently back in the 1960s and though that Lincoln had been whole-heartedly for emancipation on its own merits. Ralph got to laugh when he said hell “Massa Lincoln” was no better on the race issue than Ralph, Senior was in the early 1960s, and him too.

But some people can change else history would be nothing but a jigsaw puzzle list of names and dates. There is plenty of this in Catton’s books but good solid analysis of the major issues as well. Particularly how the events unfolded militarily and politically so that that merciless struggle against slavery was placed on the historical agenda. Everybody should read the later stuff (maybe not that book on “shoddy” though) but for a great still relevant overview of the big issues Catton still speaks to the amateur and aficionado alike of the Civil War.