Never Call Retreat

The third volume in Bruce Catton's Centennial History of the Civil War may be the best of the three. Although there is plenty of action and the major battles are properly recounted, Catton does not engage in in-depth military analysis and detailed examination of battle plans and tactics. This is not his primary focus. More than any other historian I've read, Catton covers exhaustively the social and political happenings throughout all of America, North and South, throughout the different phases of the Civil War. It is this aspect which makes this master work so meaningful and insightful to read. This volume begins with the Emancipation Proclamation and takes us through the end of the War. Many unsettled questions remain at the close, with the country at large feeling carried along by events and not quite understanding what is to come next. I am inspired to study Reconstruction, because the ending of this book makes clear that the entire nation, not just the South, will undergo a vast social and political reconstruction over the years to follow. Lincoln, during his Gettysburg address, had spoken of a new birth of freedom for all, for generations to come. He was taken from us before he could finish developing, articulating, and applying this grand notion...and a lot of pain followed for a lot of people for a lot of years. I highly recommend this three volume history of the Civil War. Although all three volumes together total somewhere around 1,500 pages, it doesn't seem long at all.

This book is the final installment of Bruce Catton's Centennial History of the Civil War trilogy. It covered the period from late 1862 to the surrender of Lee's army and Lincoln's assassination in April 1865 to the end of the Confederacy in May 1865 with the surrender of the last rebel army.
Ten years of research and writing went into this project and the end result is evident. This book and the trilogy as a whole give a comprehensive account of all aspects of the Civil War down to minute details such as the use of trip wires during combat which I found quite interesting.
This was a very readable and educational experience for me. Highly recommended to new and experienced Civil War buffs alike.

No one will ever know what Abraham Lincoln would have ever done...because it was at this delicate moment...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 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 made without malice and with charity for all. Over the years, many people paid a high price for this violence.

Lincoln evolves as the ultimate hero in this series of books by Bruce Catton, the greatest American Civil War author in our nation's history. This was the third installment of Catton's brilliant history of the Civil War written for our nation's Centennial of that event. This book begins with Fredericksburg and ends with the surrender of Lee and Johnson and the capture of Jefferson Davis (a man who Lincoln would have rather let escape, never to be heard from again in exile).

The series begins roughly in 1860, covering the conventions of the Republican and Democratic parties. Lincoln is introduced as a compromise candidate at the Republican convention. He is nominated because of his obscurity and, as his campaign manager says, "the least prominent" of all candidates. He takes office, starting with a whistle stop tour where he makes a series of awkward speeches and is referred to as the "original gorilla" by members of his cabinet and by his most important General officer. However, we begin to see the growth of the man, with his brilliant Emancipation Proclamation etc. and as he begins to grasp all things political and military. When Lee commences to invade the Union a second time, to initiate the Gettysburg Campaign, Catton describes the ultimate showdown:

Although Lee did not know it and could not have been expected to know it, his real opponent now was Abraham Lincoln, a man not trained for command, but none the less, commanding. No one on either side saw Lee's advance into Pennsylvania quite as Mr. Lincoln did. He recognized it, of course, as a dire threat, but he also saw it as a limitless opportunity for the Union cause. He had grasped a strategic point of importance: When a Confederate Army left its own territory and went north it exposed itself to outright destruction. It could be cut off, forced to fight its way out of a trap, and in the end removed from the board; by the mere act of invasion it risked its very existence, and the chief responsibility of the Federal commander was to ensure that what was risked was lost.

Catton goes on to explain that Lincoln couldn't get Generals to see it this way. He couldn't get McClellan in Maryland or Buell in Kentucky to recognize this, and two Confederate armies had escaped. As a civilian and not a trained military man, Lincoln couldn't be sure he was right, and the military men were wrong, but the thought grew on him. Upon the conclusion at Gettysburg, The President was frustrated by another Union General. This time it was George Gordon Meade:

The Presidents feeling of frustration began when he read a congratulatory order Meade issued after Gettysburg, inviting the army to keep up the good work and to "drive the invader from our soil." To Secretary John Hay Mr. Lincoln exploded angrily: "Will our generals never get that idea out of their heads? The whole country is our soil." (The Union was endangered, not because Lee's army was in Pennsylvania, but because Lee's army existed at all.)

Finally, Lincoln appoints Grant to Lieutenant General. Grant employs a strategy of a coordinated total war that Lincoln has been pushing for since shortly after First Bull Run. As Lincoln would say to Grant just prior to Appomattox, "Let the thing be pressed." Lincoln evolves before the readers eyes from country bumpkin to master Statesmen, grand-strategist, and visionary for a modern Union.

The war finally ends. The author points out that that many Civil Wars have ended far worse. There was no guillotine for the defeated. It is a tribute to both Lee and Johnson that they forbid their men from fighting a guerilla campaign that would have prolonged the suffering. It is too bad that Lincoln was killed in his hour of triumph, because I think that reconstruction could have been implemented more effectively.

I've went on way to long, but I'd like to say in closing that this series of books was an excellent account of our nation's Civil War. In it, you can understand how war aims and goals evolved. You can see how emancipation evolved as an idea to something that could be implemented and became the ultimate goal (along with reunification) and requirement of the successful conclusion of the war. This book organizes all the military campaigns, politics, and supporting events, in chronological order, in a readable, quotable, and very entertaining, three volume set. It is a great book for students of military history, that need a broader understanding of the years 1860-1865. I find myself reading too many books about a certain campaign or even one day of a certain battle (my next book on the docket is "Picket's Charge" by Tucker for example). You need to read a comprehensive book or series of books like this series in order to tie all events together. It is also a great read for students of the history of Civil Rights and would be a very good selection for Black History Month.

This is the third book in Bruce Catton's trilogy "The Centennial History of the Civil War," after (1) "The Coming Fury," and (2) "Terrible Swift Sword." Like the others, it is well-written and full of rich details. And not just facts, but the author's commentary with interesting insights.

The surrender at Appomattox is a super-famous historical event that is covered in many other books. But I never understood the immediate lead-up to that event till now. Catton covers how Lee's dwindling army was trapped near the Appomattox River by Sheridan, whose troops arrived in the nick of time and blocked Lee's only hope -- the supply train coming from Lynchburg--as his army was starving and deserting. This scene produced a whole range of emotions -- elation at the Union victory, yet also a sense of pain, tragedy, suffering.

This is history at its best. You can't find fiction any better.

I'd intended to start Catton's other trilogy, "Army of the Potomac," and got sidetracked. Now I will start that trilogy. If there's any repetition between the two, that's fine, as my bad memory needs repetition!

This trilogy is highly recommended, if you want to delve deep into the Civil War!

Anyone who has been reading Civil War history for years becomes disillusioned and dismayed, like the combatants themselves, charging when fresh but plodding when weary, yet somehow always renewed for the next battle just over the hill: further explanation. No book, no set of books, no lifetime of books will ever serve to encompass the Civil War. There is no way to contain the understanding and let it be. Bruce Catton's trilogy reads like the mighty campaign it must have been at the time--launched in 1955, in the shadow of Brown vs. Board of Education, and consummated in 1965, the year after the Civil Rights Act--and if none of it goes to waste, all of it is still not enough.

Catton is of the highly readable strain. He also is a writer of battles, generals and strategies, with some wonderful insights about history as well as some silences that, to a 21st-century reader, seem odd. He is Southern-flavored, not grossly but consistently, and the reader will hear stirring music when Catton writes about Lee, Forrest, Stuart and the rest of the gray knights (Union generals, even Grant, are only grudgingly praised, and their achievements are usually attributed to luck where the Confederates are cited for skill). There are magnolias and a coda to the Lost Cause. Sherman is brutal and sinister, but the brutality of the slave system is never raised.

Catton is good at many of the ironies; Robert E. Lee kept the Confederacy alive and fighting much longer than otherwise; is he honorable for his fatal fidelity? Would the South have kept its slaves and its defiance indefinitely if it had quit sooner, on better terms, without Lee's leadership? Was Lee's generalship, which led to hundreds of thousands more lost lives on both sides, a sacrifice that helped pay for the slaves' freedom?

He is not good at some other ironies. He mentions several times the multimillion-dollar schemes to repay the South for its lost slaves, never once raising the idea that the slaves themselves might have been due something for their stolen lives.

A book like "Battle Cry of Freedom" will give you more of the sinews of wartime, and less of the romance. "Lincoln at Gettysburg" is a much better explanation of the ideology and political transformation, and the power of Lincoln's words and ideas. Catton's trilogy, by contrast, gives pride of place to the fighting, and the back-and-fro surges of both sides' military fortunes.

It might be unfair to point out, given the universe of books purely about Lincoln, that Lincoln is barely visible in Catton's history. But honestly, at times he seems like a bit player. When he does appear, he seems venal, semi-competent, driven by events. (And yes, Lincoln did confess that he was driven by events more than he drove them, but he doesn't deserve to be as peripheral and unsubtle as he appears here.) Yes, Jefferson Davis also comes off poorly, but still it's true that the Confederates with their unrebutted claims to being the true guardians of constitutional liberty seem to get the best soundtrack from Catton.

Lee's surrender ... Catton does it extraordinarily well. Even if Lee were to be bumped off his pedestal, as Catton does not, this is a powerful, eerie moment. The gray soldiers marching out of camp, vanishing like ghosts into an undreamed-of country. The author's point that if Lee had not delivered an almost godlike capitulation the nation could have dissolved into decades of freelance butchery and division ... The breach closed, in the end, bloodlessly ... except that the 21st-century reader thinks of something, and someone, else.

The blacks. They are most absent from Catton's story. They never speak (one or two "Glory!"s when Lincoln visits fallen Richmond). They never act, except to drift and wait. They are "the Negro," enlisted in the Federal forces, dragooned in the end into the Confederate ... and left sitting, passively, by the wayside, as the book concludes. No violence visits them, no lynchings await, no poll taxes, in Catton's telling; all is blank. There is no Underground Railroad, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," Juneteenth, or Harriet Tubman. Surely Catton would have made this right had he written a decade or two later.

And now on to the Reconstruction ...

Excellent read - as always the narrative is most interesting when involving Grant or Sherman.

I felt this ending to the Centennial Trilogy was just a notch below any of the volumes in the Army of Potomac trilogy.

4 to 4.5 stars

Volume 1: The Coming Fury
Volume 2: Terrible Swift Sword
Volume 3: Never Call Retreat

This is a comprehensive overview of the American Civil War, written by a man with a gorgeous prose style who did his research. I don't agree with him everywhere---he's far more enamored of Robert E. Lee than I am, and he hasn't entirely let go of the idea that the American Civil War had a shred of romance in it, although for the most part he is very good on the terrible cost of the war on both sides---but I love his writing and I love the control he has over his material: he goes back and forth from theater to theater, and from North to South, and I don't think I was ever confused. He does a great job with Mr. Lincoln's progress from "I will never interfere with slavery in states where it is already established" through the Emancipation Proclamation to "no, really, all men are created equal, how about that Thirteenth Amendment?" tracing the change step by step. This is a military and political history written in the 60s, so it's almost all about the viewpoints of white men (he quotes Mary Boykin Chesnut a couple of times, Frederick Douglass I think once), but you know how the train is going to roll when you buy your ticket.

Given that it's sixty years old and concomitantly dated, I do think this is a good place to start if you want to know more about the American Civil War.

It would have been difficult for Bruce Catton to top the first two books of his Civil War trilogy, but he manages to put out yet another piece of high quality writing. Never Call Retreat, the concluding chapter of this nuanced look at a war which ran up a butcher's bill north of 600,000 Americans, is nothing short of outstanding.

Never Call Retreat starts out telling the story of the Army of the Potomac's defeat at the Battle of Fredericksburg. Any loss for the North was bad for morale, but this defeat was particularly gut wrenching when Fredericksurg's proximity to Washington is taken into account. Desperate for good news from the battle front, President Lincoln once again was given the opposite of positivity.

Following on the heels of this was yet another Virginian debacle for the Union, this time delivered at the Battle of Chancellorsville. This Confederate victory, however, was quite costly for their own side's morale: Stonewall Jackson would be unintentionally shot and killed by one of his own men during the fury of battle. These wins were among the top moments for Robert E. Lee as head of the Confederate army; Southern military dominance would not long endure.

The bumbling nature of the Army of the Potomac prior to the arrival of Ulysses S. Grant was underscored throughout numerous defeats/failures to follow up on victories; General Joseph Hooker's at times dysfunctional relationship with General Henry Halleck only compounded the frustrations that began with George McClellan's failure to win a swift victory at the war's outset.

Once again, Catton does not overlook the importance of western operations to the Civil War's ultimate outcome. Based in the Tennessee theater, General William Rosecrans's troops were in a critical position to hold off the South's efforts, led in that arena by General Braxton Bragg, to gain a lasting foothold.

Interestingly, one of the generals underneath Bragg was John C. Breckinridge, the former U.S. vice-president-turned-rebel-turncoat. New Year's Day 1863 in the Western theater began with the back and forth between these men's Southern and Federal troops during the Battle of Stone's River, a conflict which turned from a surefire Confederate victory into what was considered to ultimately be a technical loss. Despite the stealth attacks of Confederate cavalry leader Joe Wheeler, Rosecrans stared defeat in the face and, according to Lincoln, gave the Federals a "hard-earned victory which, had there been a defeat instead, the nation could scarcely have lived over."

This western theater "W" was followed up by possibly the biggest one of all: Grant's siege and taking over of the Southern fort at Vicksburg. The trouble he went through to force General Pemberton to surrender it was monstrous; utilizing William Sherman's troops, the Union forces slowly worked their way west through Mississippi, facing tough fighting against the rebel army as they made progress toward Vicksburg. Despite setbacks, the effort to take over the fort on the Mississippi River was ultimately a success. It represented the only portion of the Mississippi River still controlled by the Confederacy; once this fell to Grant in July 1863, the South was cut in half.

Vicksburg was joined on nearly the same day that July by the Union's victory at the Battle of Gettysburg, a bloody clash in southern Pennsylvania which served as the costliest battle (in terms of casualties) of the war.

Always willing to roll the dice and wanting to follow up on victories at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, Robert E. Lee felt that a rebel presence in an undeniably Union state would cause a fearful Northern public to beg for terms of surrender. The battle-culminating in George Pickett's suicidal charge on a position staked out by Union troops-was part of a one-two gut punch (alongside Pemberton's surrender of Vicksburg) that turned the tide of the war.

True to form in the eastern theater, the Union Army (this time under George Meade) failed to follow up on Gettysburg by trapping Lee's army on its way out of Pennsylvania and back through Maryland, leaving a knockout follow-up to the big win sitting on the table. Despite this, the remainder of the war would steadily turn in the North's direction. Boasting superior numbers, a better industrial base, and finally some momentum, the South would slowly be ground down by the better-positioned federals. Despite scoring a victories Chickamauga, Cold Harbor, and some lesser battles, the war after mid-1863 would turn in the North's direction.

Wanting to ensure that his Emancipation Proclamation, issued as a war measure and made public after the Battle of Antietam, was set in stone, Lincoln pushed for a constitutional amendment banning slavery as the war wound down. This would go on to become the thirteenth amendment.

He also tried an experiment, unpopular with the Radical Republicans, at reconstructing the Southern states in a not-excessively-vengeful manner. Federally occupied portions of Louisiana would be a guinea pig for Lincoln's ten percent plan, whereby a state could rejoin the Union if they outlawed the practice of slavery and ten percent of their electorate pledged support for the Union. Looking toward the rebuilding of the south after the war and the remade country that would inevitably come out of the ashes of it, Lincoln wanted to reconcile with the South instead of brutally punishing it for secession. It was too bad no one told John Wilkes Boothe this, as his killing of Lincoln actually moved the balance of power away from Lincoln's more moderate postwar approach and into the hands of the Radicals.

Little anecdotes here and there keep the narrative moving, and the story of Clement Vallandigham makes for a fascinating tale. Vallandingham was an Ohio lawmaker furious with what he perceived to be the stomping on the Constitution engaged in by Lincoln and the Republicans; a war they claimed was being waged to save the Constitution was, through habeus corpus suspension and suppression of free speech, ruining it according to the judgment of Vallandigham and the Copperheads he represented. The authorities did little to erase his fears; General Ambrose Burnside, commander in the theater that encompassed Vallandigham's state of Ohio, jailed Congressman Vallandingham for "discouraging the war effort." Lincoln would eventually intervene to ensure he was not imprisoned as a martyr, but he spoke for a portion of the Northern electorate unhappy with a war they felt was being waged by inappropriate means.

Copperheads like Vallandigham would ultimately nominate George McClellan as their candidate in the 1864 presidential election. Running as a War Democrat willing to compromise with the South, the demoted Army of the Potomac commander (and fierce Lincoln critical all the while) was unenthusiastic about freedom for African-Americans, while at the same time unwilling to see secession used as a tool to settle disagreements. He would be willing to reach a deal to prevent the former while punishing the latter.

McClellan would be crushed by Lincoln at the ballot box, delivering a verdict in the negative on their anxiousness to settle with the Confederacy. This defeat, however, was probably not the low moment for their movement; furious over how the draft was set up, a number of New Yorkers would riot during the summer of 1863, targeting African-Americans (people they partly blamed for the draft's necessity following Lincoln's announcement of emancipation as a primary war aim) and those they associated with aiding the Northern war effort. The rioters would even burn down a black orphanage in their fury; the violence would be quelled by Union Army members on their way back from the Gettysburg battlefield.

In addition to those of the North, Southern leaders are given ample coverage by Catton as well. Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens is painted as a unique man, constantly digressing from Jefferson Davis's decisions and rarely holding back when it came to voicing his strong opinions. Davis himself comes across as too inflexible to be a successful wartime leader, demonstrating flashes of leadership but in the end unable to do the near impossible of rallying the South to victory. At the conclusion, the willingness of men like Robert E. Lee to surrender and not allow the war to continue as sporadic guerrilla warfare after Appomattox preserves some semblance of statesmanship on the part of men engaged in treason against their country's government.

Grant's willingness to not be petty at Appomattox, allowing Lee to surrender with some form of dignity, mirrored the treatment of Joe Johnston's men after his surrender to William Sherman in North Carolina a little later in April 1865. Sherman would actually be criticized in the northern press for being too lenient on Johnston's men, an interesting side note considering few Georgians would have considered him too kindly toward the South after his March to the Sea.

The final quarter of the book details the Confederacy's downward trajectory. With Ulysses S. Grant brought east to oversee the Army of the Potomac's operations, the North finally has an aggressive leader in place who will do what it takes to gain an all-out victory (the nickname Unconditional Surrender Grant did not exist out of whole cloth). The horrible fighting at the Battle of the Wilderness, part of Grant's campaign toward Richmond, was written about in captivating detail by Catton; fighting in the densely forested portion of Virginia gave the Confederates an advantage, as it would any military fighting essentially a defensive war on their own ground. Despite this, Grant's men are able to overcome setbacks on their way to a bruising victory over the Army of Northern Virginia.

The strong leadership Grant gave the Army of the Potomac was juxtaposed against the reaction some had when they first saw him; expecting a brawny, brash general, many were surprised when they first met Grant to see him as an unassuming, no-airs man. Ultimately he would lead the capture of Petersburg, then Richmond, causing the Confederacy to see the writing on the wall. Phil Sheridan's cavalry raids into the Shenandoah Valley had left the South's valuable supply lines in shambles, and William Sherman's sacking of Georgia demoralized the South even more. Secretive peace talks between Lincoln and agents from the South reach full force as Grant moved in on the Confederate capital, and things would be all but official when Lee and Grant came face-to-face at Appomattox.

Catton wrote this trilogy to enlighten his readers on the horrors of the Civil War, and he maintained a larger view of the conflict aside from just battle movements and casualty totals. The larger meaning of the war-a remaking of the country and a change in the war Americans viewed the meaning of freedom-was never lost sight of. This trilogy earned its place in the upper echelon of Civil War historical narratives.

Andrew Canfield Denver, Colorado