But otherwise this major history is up there alongside Shelby Foote’s brilliant 3-volume effort - touching the roof of the mind, yet accessible to all. Like many other histories from sixty years ago, there is a tendency to talk hopefully to the effect that ‘mankind is learning its lesson’, which would earn a hollow laugh today. Inevitably these later campaigns portray the slow, inexorable tilt against the Confederates, increasingly barefoot and starving (as southerners still like to boast defiantly), but also deserting en masse (as they don’t). It seemed to be something to do with personal politics between Grant, Lincoln and Halleck, also touched with the traditional mistrust between New Englanders and the Northwestern ascendancy (Ohio and Indiana), but it managed to miss me anyway. Also the question of why McClernand’s private army on the Mississippi had to be kept secret from Grant, in whose area it was operating. It is well-known that Sherman was incommunicado for six weeks in Georgia because the telegraph wires had been cut, but we aren’t told whether they’d been cut by the enemy to isolate him, or by Sherman as part of his scorched-earth policy. (I had always assumed it was Halleck’s fault, knowing how smoothly he always managed to deflect blame, but now we find that Banks was a master of the same dubious military art). Also that the disastrous Red River campaign had been urged by Banks, as he denied furiously afterwards. It was most instructive to learn that Sherman’s March to the Sea had originally been proposed by George Thomas, adding yet more lustre to the record of that modest and under-rated general.

It is great editing as much as great writing, but the elegant, rhythmic prose does carry us along most effortlessly. He has done his homework by researching many letters and published works on Stanton, Lincoln and. Bruce Catton approaches this more from the political side and only briefly summerizes the actual battles. 1 The Coming Fury, 2 Terrible Swift Sword, 3 Never Call Retreat. Triumphant finale of Catton’s Civil War centennial trilogy, condensing the huge mass of history that happened between Fredericksburg and Appomattox into one manageable volume.Īs with the earlier parts, the author manages to weave together complex political arguments, vivid action scenes, acute personal insights and a few of his own reflections about a war still much misunderstood to this day. This is the third and final in the series.

Never Call Retreat by Bruce Catton