As The 150th Anniversary
Of The American Civil War-Bruce Catton’s Terrible Swift Sword- A Book Review
Book Review
By Frank Jackman
Terrible Swift Sword, by Bruce
Catton, Washington Square press, New York, 1963
Old time friends from the 1960s
anti-Vietnam War struggles Ralph Morris and Sam Eaton had a common interest in
the American Civil War since they were kids in the early 1960s and in their
respective home towns got caught up in the centennial events celebrated back
then. Sam who grew up in cranberry bog country down in Carver in Southeastern
Massachusetts used to collect the stamps and first day covers of the series
that the United State Post Office put out commemorating various battles,
important events and personalities from that bloody conflict (first day covers
were issued and cancelled on the day that the stamp was issued and from the
place where it had been issued which represented in those less video-filled
days a hobby which many kids got into as an inexpensive way to keep in time
with the world around them-hell most of that time a stamp was only three or
four cents). Ralph, not usually much of a reader, made an exception for Civil
War history and literature since coming from Troy in upstate New York he had
had many distant relatives who had some connection with that war and were commemorated
on the huge Civil War Memorial in the downtown area.
Of course Ralph and Sam did not know
each other in the early 1960s but had met in 1971 down in Washington, D.C. on
May Day when Ralph, a Vietnam veteran who had turned against the war with a
vengeance along with his Albany area contingent of Vietnam Veterans Against The
War (VVAW) and Ralph, not a veteran but an anti-war convert after his best
friend from high school had been killed in the Central Highlands of Vietnam and
had urged him if he did not get back alive to tell anybody who would listen to
stop the war, with a Cambridge radical collective had tried to stop the war by
stopping the government, or some such idea. All the thousands who came out that
day and a few days following got for their efforts were police sticks, tear gas,
and a trip to the bastinado. The bastinado for the two of them was a football
stadium, the home of the Washington Redskins, ironically Robert F. Kennedy
Stadium, being used as a temporary holding pen for most of those arrested.
Ralph had sought Sam out when he noticed as he walked along the football field that
he was wearing a VVAW button and had asked if Sam was a veteran. Sam told him
the story of his friend and over the next several days before they were
released (and the next forty some years) they would talk incessantly about
everything under the sun including their mutual interest in the American Civil
War. Both had agreed that the war to preserve the Union (Ralph’s position then)
and to abolition slavery (Sam’s) would have found them as soldiers in some
Union army, probably some brigade of the Army of the Potomac the way troops
from the North were distributed then from the levies their respective governors
sent down.
Although their personal perspectives
are not germane to this book review even one hundred plus years later when
discussion of the Civil War comes up Northern aficionados will gravitate toward
one or the other reason, or in some cases both, for why they would have
supported the Northern side in the bloody dispute. Ralph and Sam’s respective
takes on their reasons for support are almost chemically pure examples of what
drove our forebears toward support for the war.
Ralph born in upstate New York very
close to many of the key battles of the American Revolution at Saratoga Springs
and its environs was driven by the idea of the need to save the union intact in
order for it as Lincoln so eloquently stated to remain the “last, best hope for
democracy” on the planet. He was in those days, in his youth totally out of
sympathy with the idea of emancipating the slaves as the main reason for
fighting. Those early 1960s found Ralph standing side by side with his father
in the fight against attempts by blacks from CORE to move into their section of
Troy, the Tappan Street section, to live side by side with what Ralph, Senior
called “nigras” just like Governor George Wallace down in Alabama was calling
them. Ralph, later after having his “ass” saved more than once by a couple of
“brothers” and after getting “religion” on the war issue and who was fighting
the damn thing like him and those brothers had a sea-change in attitude and
wound up doing plenty of defense work for the besieged Black Panthers (along
with Sam and other VVAWers) when they were under frontal attack by every police
agency in the country. But in the early 1960s he was strictly a “save the
union” man.
Sam on the other had come from a
strain of Puritan stock on his mother’s side who had back in the 1850s when
they first settled in Carver and its environs been rabid abolitionists, had
been at Temple Church in Boston when all the great abolitionist orators would
speak against the “abomination of slavery” and that background would be
sprinkled generally and gently in the household although his father was nothing
but a swamp Yankee cranberry bogger who didn’t give a rat’s ass (an expression
used by Sam and his growing up corner boys when they, well, didn’t give a rat’s
ass about something). Moreover when Sidney Stein and Ethel Rogers started
putting together collections of books to be sent to the poor black kids down in
Mississippi after being called on to do so by the NAACP in Boston he
volunteered to help although it cost him a lot of grief from his corner boys
and others who had about the same attitudes as Ralph and his father. As already
mentioned as part of Sam’s radicalization after the death of his friend he also
dived right in on the Black Panther defense work, especially the New Haven case
where he (and Ralph) stayed for several weeks while the trial was going on.
Like I said Ralph and Sam, although
both working class kids came at their interests from different perspectives.
Moreover, when they began discussing their mutual interests back in the
bastinado in 1971 there was also a difference in emphasis of interest, which
has lasted until this day. Ralph was, is always much more interested in the
various battles, the strategies, and the military personalities of both side
and Sam was, is, more interested in the political conditions which Lincoln and
the other Union leaders encountered which determined their strategy for
preserving the union (clearly early in the war the sole aim of Lincoln and the
great majority in the North) and ultimately by the logic of the fight the
struggle for total emancipation of and citizen for the slaves.
So it was no accident that once the
150th anniversary of the war began being commemorated in 2011 that
Sam and Ralph would take note, take to reconvening their arguments about
military versus political strategy as they liked to call it. They were aware
since Sam many years before had begun subscribing to the New York Review Of Books that there would be another onslaught of
books covering every aspect of the war, from battles and personalities to
sanitary conditions and firearms and everything in between. Sam had made Ralph
laugh one time when he had read a review of a book, a whole book for Christ
sake, about the role of “shoddy,” inferior clothing, shoes and supplies produce
by unscrupulous manufacturers on the outcome of the war. This time out there would
be the same, maybe more. Of course Sam and Ralph both had small collections of
Civil War books gathered over time so they one night at Jack’s Grille in
Cambridge, a town where Sam had been living with his wife Lana once the kids
were out of the house they decided to “down-size” to a condo from their leafy
suburban house in Avon, they decided to dust off some of the old books first
and begin their old “wars” once again. Of course one of the great summaries of
the military and political events driving the action on both sides in the Civil
War was Bruce Catton’s prize-winning trilogy. The first volume concerning the
events that led up to the war and the beginning of the bloodshed at that point somewhat
amateurish and make-shift The Coming Fury has been reviewed (and disputed by them)
elsewhere. The review here of Terrible
Swift Sword, the middle years of the war where the fighting turned
large-scale, turned furious, turned more merciless and began to clarify the
issue of the initial objectives of the war for the preservation of the union
(or preservation of the Confederacy) and the remorseless fight for the
abolition of slavery is what Ralph and Sam continued their disputes about.
On the union side once the rout of
first Bull Run put the fear of God into the North, made certain forward looking
elements on the Union side and not just the abolitionists, civilian and
military, realize that a remorseless struggle lie ahead (and the same in the
Confederacy particularly Jefferson Davis and once he took charge of the Army of
Northern Virginia Robert E. Lee) the military build-up went full steam ahead.
Military strategies to strangle the Confederacy, the Anaconda strategy and on
the Southern side to decisively defeat the Union Armies and gain recognition as
a separate state particularly by France and England mingled in with political
objectives. Of course in a book of four hundred dense pages there were too many
battles won and lost on both sides for Sam and Ralph to argue about separately
not unless they planned to live at Jack’s Grille and drink the place dry. So
they decided to concentrate one night on two of the great events of the middle
years of the war on the Union side- to satisfy Ralph the role of General
McClellan in unnecessarily lengthening the war and to satisfy Sam Lincoln’s
decision, kicking and screaming at times, to call for emancipation of the
slaves (in reality in stages depending on Union victories since it would take
that to get freedom for the slaves in areas where there was no Union armed mandate
for such action).
Ralph although he had always been a
partisan of General McClellan for his ability to put together a ragtag semi-army
and make it a disciplined force which everybody in authority in the North knew had
to be done if the advantage that the North in the mass production of war materials
was to lead to victory. But his attitude shifted somewhat once he himself had
become more interested in the fight for abolition as the motivating force necessary
to spur the armies on once the he realized that the South had an overall military
leadership advantage. His initial respect for McClellan had centered on his limited
goals for the army, to shore up the Union positions, alleviate the threat to
Washington and keep pressure on the Confederate armies getting them bottled up
defending Richmond (in any case a mistake in choice for the capital so close to
Washington and roaming Union armies).
When he had first met Sam he had argued
(rather surreally since they had been in the bastinado for four days by that
time and had gotten a little stir crazy) that McClellan represented just the
right sense of what was to be done, essentially telegraphing by his sedentary
position in front of Washington for great lengths of time, the South to “go in
peace.” After re-reading the Catton material about McClellan’s fears of being swamped
by non-existent overwhelming Confederate numbers and then allowing a cabal of
his own design to form among his staff which threw about thoughts of some kind
of military dictatorship for him (with the assumed proviso that he would indeed
let the South go in peace) he got most agitated. What made Sam laugh at their recent
Jack’s Grille meeting was how irate Ralph had become about McClellan’s “slows”
in getting his ass out before the enemy. Here’s the kicker, Ralph blurted out “why
didn’t that damn Lincoln boot his ass out after the failed Peninsula campaign.”
Sam smirked.
Ralph got his chance to smirk a bit
when Sam started talking about all the new scholarship, or rather commentary since
the facts have not changed much in the last hundred and fifty years, about
Lincoln’s racial attitudes which colored his attitude toward emancipation as a military
necessity rather than a political objective. Of course Lincoln was a man of his
time, of his not inconsequential southern roots and of his societal racial attitudes.
Many “political correct” commentators these days have cut their teeth on the idea
that Lincoln should have had today’s more advanced sensibilities about race and
supported the idea of total emancipation earlier on. Sam had been surprised on
re-reading the parts about Lincoln’s conversion to partial emancipation as a military
necessity since he had remembered differently back in the 1960s and though that
Lincoln had been whole-heartedly for emancipation on its own merits. Ralph got to
laugh when he said hell “Massa Lincoln” was no better on the race issue than
Ralph, Senior was in the early 1960s, and him too.
But some people can change else history
would be nothing but a jigsaw puzzle list of names and dates. There is plenty
of this in Catton’s books but good solid analysis of the major issues as well. Particularly
how the events unfolded militarily and politically so that that merciless struggle
against slavery was placed on the historical agenda. Everybody should read the later
stuff (maybe not that book on “shoddy” though) but for a great still relevant
overview of the big issues Catton still speaks to the amateur and aficionado alike
of the Civil War.
