Mr Lincoln's Army
by Bruce Catton
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Book Summary Information
Author: Bruce CattonEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-11-04
ISBN: 1443726141
Number of pages: 388
Publisher: Smith Press
Book Reviews of Mr Lincoln's Army
Book Review: Even better the second time
Summary: 5 Stars
I first read Catton's trilogy at age 17, before I went to Vietnam. I enjoyed the books tremendously and Catton started a lifetime interest in the American Civil War. I thought he was an outstanding writer, but with the hubris of youth, I rated him as a bit of a lightweight, a fine storyteller and nothing more. In the past month, at age 60, I read Mr. Lincoln's Army again. I was amazed at how much wiser Catton has become. He is the still the best historian I've read at explaining the interplay between the political and military factors of the war. He also is phenomenal at capturing the experience and awakening of the common soldier, and by extension the forging of new American identity.
He deals fearlessly with many of the controversies that still trouble historians and Civil War buffs. For example, historians still argue the question of whether the outcome was foreordained, whether the advantages of the North in men and materiel were insuperable no matter what individuals did. This is a popular theory, comforting to those who like deterministic approaches as well as the "Lost Cause" partisans. I've always thought it was a load of bull, and Catton deals with it forcefully. He practically says that if the Indiana private hadn't found the Confederate battle plan before Antietam, the history of the United States would have been much different. And if McClellan had made full use of the information and destroyed Lee's army, the history of the United States would have been far different, not necessarily in the ways we might think.
Summary of Mr Lincoln's Army
Mr. Lincolns ARMY by Bruce Catton. Contents include: CHAPTER ONE PICTURE-BOOK WAR 1. There Was Talk of Treason 1 2. We Were Never Again Eager 14 3. You Must Never Be Frightened 27 4. Man on a Black Horse 43 CHAPTER TWO THE YOUNG GENERAL 1. A Great Work in My Hands 55 2. Aye, Deem Us Proud 70 3. I Do Not Intend to Be Sacrificed 83 CHAPTER THREE THE ERA OF SUSPICION 1. But You Must Act 99 2. The Voice of Caution 112 3. Tomorrow Never Comes 126 4. Pillar of Smoke 144 CHAPTER FOUR AN ARMY ON THE MARCH 1. Indian Summer 163 2. Crackers and Bullets 183 3. Generals on Trial 200 vi CONTENTS VtVf CHAPTER FIVE OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS THREE TIMES 1. At Daybreak in the Morning 217 2. Destroy the Rebel Army 236 3. Tenting Tonight 250 CHAPTER SIX NEVER CALL RETREAT 1. Toward the Dunker Church 269 2. The Heaviest Fire o the War 287 3. All the Landscape Was Red 305 4. The Romance of War Was Over 322 Bibliography 341 Notes 349 Index 364. CHAPTER ONE: Picture-Book War. I. There Was Talk of Treason. THE ROWBOAT slid out on the Potomac in the hazy light of a hot August morning, dropped down past the line of black ships near the Alexandria wharves, and bumped to a stop with its nose against the wooden side of a transport. Colonel Herman Haupt, superintendent of military railroads, a sheaf of telegrams crumpled in one hand, went up the Jacobs ladder to the deck clumsily, as was to be expected of a landsman, but rapidly, for he was an active man and disappeared into a cabin. A moment later he returned, and as he came down the ladder he was followed by a short, broad-shouldered, sandy-haired man, deeply tanned by the sun of the Virginia peninsula, with thin faint lines of worry between his eyes Major General George Brinton McClellan, commander of the Army of the Potomac, which had been com ing up from the south by water for a week and more and which at the moment was scattered all the way from Alexandria f o the upper Rappahannock, most of it well out of the generals reach and all of it, as he suspected, soon to be out from under his authority. There was an air about this youthful general an air of far-off bugles, and flags floating high, and troops cheering madly, as if the picture of him which one hundred thousand soldiers had created had somehow become real and was now an inseparable part of his actual appearance. He could look jaunty and dapper after a day in the saddle, on muddy roads, In a driving rainstorm like a successful politician, he lived Ms part, keeping himself close to the surface so that eveiy cry and every gesture of the men who adored him called him out to a quick response that was none the less genuine for being completely automatic. It was impossible to see him, in his uniform with the stars on his shoulders, without also seeing the army my army, he called it proudly, almost as if it were a personal possession, which was in a way the case he had made it, he had given it shape and color and spirit, and in his mind and in the minds of the men he commanded the identification was complete. He sat in the stern of the rowboat, beside the superintendent o military railroads, and he was silent as the boat went back upstream to the landing. The docks and the river front were a confusion of steamboats and barges and white-topped wagons and great stacks of boxed goods and equipment, and the quaint little town itself was lost in a restless, lounging concourse of soldiers loose fringes of a moving army, convalescents and strays and detailed men, and here and there a regiment moving off with cased flags at route step to ward some outlying camp...19th Century Books
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