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As
a boy growing up in Petoskey, Michigan, in the first decade
of the 20th century, Catton had listened to the stories of
old men who had actually fought in that bitter conflict. (His
engaging 1972 autobiography, Waiting for the Morning Train:
An American Boyhood, captures both the wonder and nostalgia
of those years, when vivid memories of a simpler and—more
heroic—time still lived lightly on the evening air in
an unbroken continuity with the past.) The accounts of those
desperate battles he was later to read as a student at Oberlin
College near Cleveland were pallid in comparison with those
gripping accounts. But it may have been his own stint in the
Navy during World War I, along with his own talent for storytelling,
that led him to seek out the more down-to-earth world of journalism.
In
1920 Catton got a job with the old Cleveland News,
and worked briefly for the Boston American before landing
a position with the Cleveland Plain Dealer, where his
first published work on the Civil War—a series on local
veterans who had fought in it—appeared in 1923. From
1925 to 1939, he worked for the Cleveland office of the Scripps-Howard
Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA), turning out news stories,
features, editorials, and book reviews for papers around the
U.S. before moving to NEA's Washington office.
He
was 50 when he began the first of his 13 books on the War
Between the States, winning both the National Book Award and
the Pulitzer Prize for the final volume of his great trilogy
on the Army of the Potomac, A Stillness at Appomattox
(1953), the story of the last cruel and desperate year of
America's most painful episode. For this book and the first
two parts of the series, Mr. Lincoln's Army (1951)
and Glory Road (1952), Catton drew on a wide range
of primary materials including the diaries, letters, and reports
filed by soldiers, which enabled him to reconstruct events
and their aftermath with telling detail and immediacy. The
New York Times praised his "rare gift." The Chicago
Tribune called it "military history...at its best."
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The young
Catton (left)
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Federals
await Grant’s spring offensive.
It
was the fourth of May, and beyond the dark river there
was a forest with the shadow of death under its low
branches, and the dogwood blossoms were floating in
the air like lost flecks of sunlight, as if life was
as important as death; and for the Army of the Potomac
this was the last bright morning, with youth and strength
and hope ranked under starred flags, bugle calls riding
down the wind, and invisible doors swinging open on
the other shore. The regiments fell into line, and the
great white-topped wagons creaked along the roads, and
spring sunlight glinted off the polished muskets and
the brass of the guns, and the young men came down to
the valley while the bands played. A German regiment
was singing “John Brown's Body."
—A Stillness at Appomattox
(New York: Doubleday, 1953)
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