4.49 stars. Enjoyable read. Catton made it clear the north was fighting to maintain the Union, not end slavery. Would have liked to hear more on the slavery position.

The parallels between this time period and today are chilling. Catton writes about the turmoil following John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry to the first battle of Manassas (Bull Run). It details the process in which Americans fought each other because of greed and a lack of understanding of the other side. To be sure, slavery was THE reason for the civil war. Some doubters or southern apologists will consistently mention States Rights as the cause, but THE state right the south was so upset about was slavery, pure and simple. As slavery was slowly dying as an institution in all but a few states and its expansion west was totally unpractical, those planters in the rich south attempted to turn the debate into one about southern pride and an agrarian, pure way of life. For the most part this strategy worked. "Enslaved, the Negro was under control and so was the race problem. But if he should be freed, en masse, all across America, he would have to be dealt with as a human being, and a nation whose declaration of independence began by asserting that all men were created equal would have to make up its mind whether those words were to be taken seriously." p. 86.

Some of the things that continue to surprise me is how reluctantly many states in the south seceded. Huge numbers of counties in Virginia almost immediately seceded from Virginia to form WV (somehow now a place where the confederacy is glorified with mythology). Eastern Tenn consistently go word to DC that they wanted armed federal troops so they could do the same. In March, Arkansas rejected secession 39-35. It wasn't until the firing on Ft. Sumter that Lincoln's actions were twisted to show him as the aggressor that they voted to secede. However, Baltimore had to be invaded and held so secessionists there didn't feel emboldened.

South Carolina and the other deep south cotton states were paranoid of Lincoln's election to office. They completely misunderstood Lincoln's philosophy and view of slavery. He continued to be willing to negotiate slavery's continued existence well into the war if only it would preserve the union and prevent war. Lincoln believed slavery should not move above the Missouri compromise line of 1854 (I believe). He was willing to follow laws, upheld by the Supreme Court, that forced northern states to return runaway slaves when found above that line. The charges that Lincoln was a "Black Republican" (regardless of what kind of fear this term was designed to plant) and an abolitionist are simply not true. A more mythologized version of Lincoln would be that he had designs to "subjugate" the south, push for abolishing slavery, and racial equality. This type of southern paranoia is fairly common today surrounding different issues, an actual "black" president trying to end America as we know it by extending health care to its poorest citizens is just one example. Is it "Obamacare" or the Affordable Care Act? That depends who's speaking about it. Here's the chilling part, "Politics had lost its flexibility, and the loss reflected grass roots sentiment. Too many leaders had dug in for a last ditch stand, whether for principle or political profit and although it was increasingly clear that the result was likely to be disastrous, everybody felt that the necessary concessions ought to be made by someone else." Is this 2013 or 1860?

Once war got rolling many of his Union generals used labor of former slaves behind Union lines. These were escaped slaves that the south demanded they be returned. However, in times of war, if they were to be considered "property", then slaves could legally be seized as contraband. Most runaway slaves were more than pleased to be considered such if it meant not being returned to a life in the south.
Also, the run up to the war showed that an extreme wing of a political party can hijack the country over a single issue and force those with more moderate views to acquiesce due to pressures from emotionally charged constituencies. (shutting the federal government?)
It is driven home with this book, in addition to others, that the Confederate states had really zero chance of gaining the independence that they wanted. Once the extreme faction of the party won out in each state and the demands became so absurd (the handover of all federal possessions: guns, forts, land, shipyards), the federal government wasn't going to give in. They knew they had the machinery in place for a long protracted war if that's what it came down to. Over and over through the book it shows that the industrial might the south needed was nonexistent and that all the tools, machines, wagons, and weapons needed to sustain a rebellion were made in the North.

The hypocrisy for the south knew no bounds. Even after the war started they demanded that the Federal constitution be followed in regards to their treatment from the north (mostly in retrieval of slaves and blockades of the coast). How could states declare independence and then have the gall to demand equal treatment under the constitution they just dismantled? After all there were no provisions in the constitution given any state the right to secede.

It was also ironic that almost the first military move the south made was the taking of Harper's Ferry, a federal arsenal when a few years prior it was taken and the perpetrators were hung in the south for treason against the state of Virginia.

I really did not know much of the lead up to the Civil War. I knew most of it had to do with the slavery issue but Catton does a good job explaining some of the other tensions and how and where things had begun to come to a head. I find it interesting that all three places I have lived (Pensacola, FL; Charleston, SC; and Mobile, AL) had either key forts or key locations to hold in the Civil War.

I love Bruce Catton's writing. In this history, he spends much time exploring the many actions and reasons that led to the civil war. He makes each historical character come alive. Fort Sumter and First Bull Run are discussed, but this book's focus is on the social, economic, and political events of 1860-1861, and the persons who helped shaped their times through their words and actions. Helps to answer the question, "Why was the US Civil War fought?"

A few years back I re-read Bruce Catton’s 1953 book Stillness at Appomattox. I had read it as a boy, but the new reading left me with sense that I was, given Catton’s masterly voice, something that had the force and power of an American Iliad. The battering battle between Lee and Grant was epic, grim, and timeless. Catton, always excellent with his battle prose, saw the curtain fall, and gave us, even though it’s prose, history, an enduring National war poetry of the darkest kind.

Interestingly, for whatever reasons, I never got around to reading The Coming Fury, Catton’s history of the year preceding the Civil War. It is a monumental book, that on book jacket surface, with its attention to day to day and week to week minutiae between North and South, seems to lack the compelling endgame of Appomattox. Wrong. If anything, the books belong together as tragic bookends for those years of crisis.

Catton starts things off with the 1860 Democratic presidential convention in Charleston, South Carolina. The convention was initially spiked by the states’ rights “Fire-Eaters” (whose rhetoric and over-the-cliff thinking bears an eerie resemblance to today’s Tea Partiers and Freedom Caucus). Led by Congressman William Yancey, of South Carolina, the fire-eaters were determined to deny the less-than-pure states’ righter, Stephen Douglas the nomination. There was no real way to stop Douglas, unless you fractured the party, which is what happened – and it happened by deliberate design. The day-to-day account is both riveting and sad. Delegate R.T. Merrick of Illinois, in a late speech, accurately sensing the damage about to be done, probably spoke for many when he said:

“I find sir, star after star madly shooting from the great Democratic galaxy. Why is it, and what is to come of it? Does it presage that, hereafter, that star after star will shoot from the galaxy of the Republic, and the American Union become a fragment, and a parcel of sectional republics?”

Merrick is not mentioned again, but his speech, his little moment in history, is a fine example of Catton’s discerning eye and his overall grasp of his topic. Such moments abound in The Coming Fury, as both sides begin their tragic gravitation toward conflict. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the inexorable momentum toward war that Barbara Tuchman captures in Guns of August . It’s as if, despite the desires of so many, History nevertheless moves to that dark place.

As I noted before, this book recounts the year that led to war. Catton does get down into the weeds, but it’s never boring. You find out why and how West Virginia became West Virginia (and how it pave the way for McClellan). You will see a fairly (if aged) General Scott trying to mobilize the slowly awakening North . And then there’s the complicated grasp for control in Missouri, and Lincoln’s political juggling act to keep the Border States in the Northern column. (He was generally successful, excepting the one state that guaranteed total war: Virginia.) The genuine anguish of many Confederate leaders (Lee, Davis, both Johnson generals, others) over the leaving of the Union, for what was essentially the upholding of an institution (slavery) that was already dying due to the Industrial Revolution. In the end they were lemmings, one and all.

A classic history of the Civil War holds up well decades later under modern scholarship. Covers more political and economic aspects building up to the war than typical in other histories. Includes many unique anecdotes. Eminently readable.

This is the first book in Bruce Catton’s trilogy that he wrote for the centennial of the Civil War.

I tend to read books about individual battles or campaigns. This is different in that it is a comprehensive series on the war. The first book starts with the conventions of 1860 and ends with Bull Run. The shooting doesn’t really commence until the artillery duel at Fort Sumpter, about ~300 pages in.

This book provides a very detailed countdown to the shooting war. The causes of the War are complex. If there is any fault, the book looks no further back than 1860. No matter what your preconceived notion is you will probably find a kernel or two of truth in this book to support it. According to Catton, the major issue at the Democratic and Republican conventions was extending slavery into the Western Territories. This issue or maybe I should say these conventions, destroyed two candidates' chances to be President: The Democratic Senator Steven Douglas of Illinois and Republican New York Senator William Seward. Out of the fray of the Republican convention, elevated to the head of the ticket was Abraham Lincoln, because he was “the least prominent” and therefore, all the various factions could rally around him as a compromise candidate. Meanwhile, Douglas sealed his fate by warning the Southern Democrats that slavery must not extend into the territories and that “…I would hang every man higher than Hamen who would attempt to force to resist the execution of any provision of the Constitution which our fathers made and bequeathed to us….” The Democratic Party was split and guaranteed the election of Republican nominee, Abraham Lincoln.

Catton explains that the war was really unnecessary. Seward was trying to negotiate through justice John A Campbell, an Alabama-Georgian, to stop the war. On page 242, the Justice said it was silly to fight over slavery in the territories because it didn’t make sense. He pointed out that New Mexico, south of the Missouri Comprimise line, “had been open to slave immigration for a full decade and only 29 slaves had been carried there.” The two men agreed that Slavery was on the way out and only made sense in cotton States in the Mississippi delta region and they gave it 25-50 years anyway. After a series of compromises went awry (one by Campbell/Seward and another by Crittenden) the Confederates had their war which ironically sealed the fate of what Lincoln called “the peculiar institution.”

This book contains a blow-by-blow of the political maneuvers in the border states and the devastating loss of Virginia and creation of West Virginia. It is hard to imagine the war lasting more than a few months without Virginia in the Confederacy.

The author, Bruce Catton is a boyhood hero of mine. My interest in the war was forged during my first visit to Gettysburg as a boy and upon the subsequent reading of his trilogy of the Army of the Potomac that was recommended by the park ranger we met. Catton and I are from the same state, he was given an honorary doctorate from the University where I graduated by a board containing my history professor. A historical marker at the old veteran's home in Benzonia, Michigan commemorates Catton. As a boy he was mesmerized by the war stories of members of the Grand Army of the Republic. Bruce Catton and Edwin Bearss are probably the two most trusted resources on the Civil War. In your thirst for knowledge and truth, my advice is to start here.

On to book two: The Terrible Swift Sword.

I thought this book, the first in a trilogy, was well written. I enjoyed it and starting the second one!

I enjoyed the author's narrative writing style, but at times he got bogged down in too much detail.
3.5

An excellent portrayal of the eve of the Civil War, with many rich details and insightful comments by the author. And very chilling, since we know what's coming.

A few passages that caught my attention:

Page 12: "...politics in America could no longer be wholly sane. ...the mounting threat ... made the debaters shout more loudly and appeal more directly to emotions that made reasonable debate impossible. Men put special meaning on words and phrases, so that what sounded good to one sounded evil to another ... and even the voices that called for moderation became immoderate. American politics in 1860 could do almost anything ... except sit down and take a reasoned and dispassionate view of their situation."

Page 203: A letter from a North Carolina mountaineer to the governor that expressed a non-slaveholder's point of view perfectly: "We have but little interest in the value of slaves. But there is one matter ... of which we have a deep interest. We are opposed to Negro equality. To prevent this, we are willing to spare the last man, ... to the point where women and children begin to suffer for food and clothing ... to suffer and die [;] rather than see them equalized with an inferior race we will die with them.

Page 224: "Just before Lincoln left Springfield, a citizen visited [a general] ... to ask whether precautions had been taken to make sure that Congress could formally count the electoral vote; it was being rumored that a mob would rise and prevent it, thus (presumably) making it impossible for Lincoln to take office."

Page 435: For the Confederacy: "These problems [of transportation, technology, etc.] ... were so grave and pointed so surely to final defeat that one is forced to wonder how the founding fathers of the Confederacy could possibly have overlooked them. ...these were Yankee problems, concerns of the broker, the money changer, the trader, the mechanic, the grasping men of business ... not matters that would command the attention of aristocrats who were familiar with valor, the classics, and heroic attitudes. Secession itself had involved a flight from reality rather than an approach to it.

No need to comment. The quotes tell it all.

This one is about the complex legal issues that led to the Civil War and to the most momentous decision in U. S. history: how should President Lincoln respond to the secessions and the seizures of federal property in the South? It raises many interesting questions, not the least of which is, did he make the right decision? Was the bloodbath worth it? If Lincoln had known the consequences, would he have made the same decision? If he had let the South go, would it have brought peace? How long would slavery have continued?

Was secession a Constitutional right, as the Confederates claimed? If not, why did Lincoln recognize West Virginia’s right to secede from Virginia? Was this a hypocritical double standard? Private property was protected by the Constitution; did that include private property in slaves? Lincoln thought it did. Was he justified in suspending habeas corpus in Maryland? What is a nation? Is it a compact among sovereign states? Or is it a sovereignty over constituent states? When federals violated the Fugitive Slave Law, did that constitute recognition that the South was an independent country?

It was a complicated war by the legal standards of the time. This book is about more than battles and military strategy—the fighting does not even start until page 452.

First in a great classic trilogy.