The peacemakers could not be heard until the terrible swift sword had been sheathed. Both sides had heard the trumpet that could never call retreat. Neither man could accept anything less than complete victory without admitting complete defeat. Neither one could describe a solution acceptable to him, without describing something wholly unacceptable to the other. Each man was fighting for a dreadful simplicity. Davis was going to assume anything of the kind. To restore the status quo would be to assume that either the North or the South had had a great change of heart, that the North would not again go Republican, or that the South would quietly acquiesce if it did. Secession had been a direct result of the outcome of the Election of 1860. By August of 1862, America's tragedy was that it was caught between the madness of going on with the war and the human impossibility of stopping it. That is exactly what it had become by the summer of 1862.Īnd here is Catton's description I can't do it any better: "There was nobility in the idea that there ought to be a peace without victory. The whole idea again, for Lincoln, was to keep this from becoming, as he put it, a remorseless revolutionary struggle. On the northern side, it was the stated policy of the Lincoln Administration to keep this a limited war and a great deal more on this next week when we deal with the emancipation story. They were out-manned, out-numbered, they had lesser resources, et cetera. The longer the thing went on, the more dangerous it was, of course, for the Confederacy. On the Confederate side they just wanted to fight long enough to make the North or the Federal Government acknowledge their independence. He's talking, though, essentially, about the most important argument I think we can make about that first year, year and a half, into the second year of the war. He's trying to capture the situation, the strategic situation, the emotional, sentimental situation, the mood of already war-weary America, a little more than a year into this thing which is where we're going to go, and a little bit further, in a moment. This is Catton from his book Terrible Swift Sword, which is 1862, the year of 1862 of the Civil War. He was not an academic historian, he was a journalist and a former war correspondent in the Second World War, and the man had a beautiful sense of narrative. He wrote them around the time of the Civil War centennial. He wrote some seven books or so, from the late 1950s through the 1960s into the '70s. But when I was growing up Bruce Catton was the great narrative, popular historian-or popular narrative historian-of the Civil War. It's a dwindling number in the twenty-first century. Have any of you ever read any of Bruce Catton? Ah. Professor David Blight: The person whose writing drew me into the Civil War-and I confess-was Bruce Catton. The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877: Lecture 14 Transcript
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