Mr. Lincoln's Army

Army of the Potomac #1

by Bruce Catton

A magnificent history of the opening years of the Civil War by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Bruce Catton

The first book in Bruce Catton’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Army of the Potomac Trilogy, Mr. Lincoln’s Army is a riveting history of the early years of the Civil War, when a fledgling Union Army took its stumbling first steps under the command of the controversial general George McClellan. Following the secession of the Southern states, a beleaguered President Abraham Lincoln entrusted the dashing, charismatic McClellan with the creation of the Union’s Army of the Potomac and the responsibility of leading it to a swift and decisive victory against Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Although a brilliant tactician who was beloved by his troops and embraced by the hero-hungry North, McClellan’s ego and ambition ultimately put him at loggerheads with his commander in chief—a man McClellan considered unworthy of the presidency.

McClellan’s weaknesses were exposed during the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day in American military history, which ended in a stalemate even though the Confederate troops were greatly outnumbered. After Antietam, Lincoln ordered McClellan’s removal from command, and the Union entered the war’s next chapter having suffered thousands of casualties and with great uncertainty ahead.

America’s premier chronicler of the nation’s brutal internecine conflict, Bruce Catton is renowned for his unparalleled ability to bring a detailed and vivid immediacy to Civil War battlefields and military strategy sessions. With tremendous depth and insight, he presents legendary commanders and common soldiers in all their complex and heartbreaking humanity.

Genres: History, Civil War, Nonfiction, American Civil War, American History, War, Military History

387 pages, ebook

First published December 1, 1951

About the author

Bruce Catton was a distinguished American historian and journalist, best known for his influential writings on the American Civil War. Renowned for his narrative style, Catton brought history to life through richly drawn characters, vivid battlefield descriptions, and a deep understanding of the political and emotional forces that shaped the era. His accessible yet meticulously researched books made him one of the most popular historians of the twentieth century.
Born in Petoskey, Michigan, and raised in the small town of Benzonia, Catton grew up surrounded by Civil War veterans whose personal stories sparked a lifelong fascination with the conflict. Though he briefly attended Oberlin College, Catton left during World War I and served in the U.S. Navy. He later began a career in journalism, working as a reporter, editor, and Washington correspondent. His experience in government service during World War II inspired his first book, The War Lords of Washington (1948).
Catton achieved national acclaim with his Army of the Potomac trilogy—Mr. Lincoln’s Army (1951), Glory Road (1952), and A Stillness at Appomattox (1953)—the last of which earned him the Pulitzer Prize for History and the National Book Award. He went on to publish a second trilogy, The Centennial History of the Civil War, and contributed two volumes to a biography of Ulysses S. Grant, begun by Lloyd Lewis. His other notable works include This Hallowed Ground, The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War, and Waiting for the Morning Train, a memoir of his Michigan boyhood.
In 1954, Catton became the founding editor of American Heritage magazine, further shaping the public’s understanding of U.S. history. In 1977, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Catton’s legacy endures through his vivid portrayals of America’s most defining conflict and his enduring influence on historical writing.

Reviews

[Paul Haspel · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Mr. Lincoln’s army” was the Army of the Potomac – the main Union Army in the Eastern Theatre throughout most of the American Civil War. It is an epic history, and historian Bruce Catton recounts that history with a fitting sense of its grand scale, in his three-volume history The Army of the Potomac – the first volume of which, when it was first published in 1951, bore the title Mr. Lincoln’s Army.

The soldiers of the Army of the Potomac were brave soldiers who fought well in every battle, even if the generalship of their commanding officers through much of the early part of the war was not equal to the courage of the army’s ordinary combat soldiers. Catton sums up their experience in this manner:

From first to last, the Army of the Potomac was unlucky. It fought for four years, and it took more killing, proportionately, than any army in American history, and its luck was always out; it did its level best and lost; when it won, the victory was always clouded by a might-have-been; and when at last the triumph came at Appomattox, there were so very, very many of its men who weren’t there to see it. (p. 45).

Bruce Catton may have born to write histories like this one. As a child in Petoskey, Michigan, he saw aged Union veterans, and found himself reflecting that these particular old men impressed him as being somehow special, unique: “[O]nce, ages ago, they had been everywhere and seen everything, and nothing that happened to them thereafter meant anything much” (p. 9). He was a diligent researcher and a mellifluous writer; and long before the Civil War Centennial of 1961-65 came round, he had established himself as the premier Civil War historian for that era. Mr. Lincoln’s Army provides a clear sense of what caused Catton’s work to gain such a large and appreciative audience.

In a manner that is appropriate to the Homeric dimensions of the saga of the Army of the Potomac, Catton provides an in medias res treatment of the army’s disastrous defeat at the Second Battle of Bull Run, or Second Battle of Manassas, in the summer of 1862. The AOP’s commander at the time, General John Pope, had been thoroughly out-thought and outmaneuvered by Confederate General Robert E. Lee, and Catton emphasizes the depth of the disillusionment of the AOP’s soldiers when they realized how the army’s leadership had failed them – “Young men then went to war believing all of the fine stories they had grown up with; and if, in the end, their disillusion was quite as deep and profound as that of the modern soldier, they had to fall farther to reach it” (p. 28).

On their retreat from Bull Run, Catton suggests, the soldiers of the AOP “were learning the reality of war, these youngsters, getting face to face with the sickening realization that men get killed uselessly because their generals are stupid, so that desperate encounters where the last drop of courage has been given serve the country not at all and make the patriot look a fool” (p. 61).

From that in medias res introduction, Catton takes the reader back to the beginnings of the Army of the Potomac – a process that began when the United States of America was reeling from the Union Army’s disastrous defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run or Manassas in July of 1861. The army was in complete disarray, and a talented young general named George B. McClellan, who had enjoyed some military success in what is now West Virginia, came to Washington and was given command of the Union army in the east. He gave the army its new name of “Army of the Potomac,” restored discipline, trained the soldiers thoroughly, and instilled in them a degree of esprit de corps that had never existed in the army before; and the soldiers loved him for it.

McClellan excelled as an organizer, but suffered from two besetting defects. The first was that he possessed an intractable tendency to want to interfere in politics; he wanted to restore the status quo ante bellum under which Union and slavery existed side by side, and actively opposed any possible move toward abolition and emancipation. And the second was that he showed in battle a degree of hesitation and irresolution that stood in stark contrast with his force and energy as an organizer. He could forge a sword of sharp and tempered steel; he simply couldn’t wield it very well.

Focusing on the difficult relationship between President Lincoln and General McClellan gives Catton a suitable way of commenting on how the American Civil War put unique pressures on American democracy itself: “Nobody had yet discovered how a democracy puts all its power and spirit under the discipline of an all-consuming war and at the same time continues to be a democracy” (p. 94). Catton adds that “Of necessity, a democracy deeply distrusts its army, and in all ordinary times it wears its distrust openly on its sleeve – especially a democracy like that of 1861, which was still brash and crude and wore its hat in the parlor” (p. 107).

Catton also places due emphasis on how the war era was a period of distrust, where Union-loyal people might be called “traitor” or accused of “treason” simply because of political differences, meaning that the Civil War generation “was deprived of the one element that is essential to the operation of a free society – the ability to assume, in the absence of good proof to the contrary, that men in public life are generally decent, honorable, and loyal” (p. 110). Few readers, I think, would disagree with Catton’s grim statement that “Sunlight and death were upon the earth in the spring of 1862, and no one was wholly rational” (p. 111).

It was against this strange background that McClellan lost command of the army he had created. His Peninsula Campaign, aimed as it was at taking Richmond from the east, came to naught in the “Seven Days’ Battles” around the rebel capital; Robert E. Lee’s aggressive attacks forced McClellan into a retreat that was euphemistically called a “change of base.” The AOP was withdrawn from that area, and command of the AOP was given to General Pope, who, as mentioned above, came to grief at Second Bull Run/Second Manassas.

War has been called “politics by other means,” and the all-consuming nature of the American Civil War meant that any sort of possible political change in American life would be inextricably linked with the battlefield fortunes of the Union Army. In those early days of the war, Catton notes, there was an important difference between the men who commanded the Union Army in the East, on the one hand, and Confederate generals like “Stonewall” Jackson, James Longstreet, and D.H. Hill, on the other. Catton says of these rebel officers that “The least common denominator of those men was that they fought all-out. If they hit at all, they hit with everything there was. They had an exultant acceptance for the chances of war. They fought as if they enjoyed it, and they probably did. The Army of the Potomac just was not getting that kind of leadership. [General Phil] Kearny had had it, but he was dead [killed at Chantilly, Virginia, in early September of 1862]. Most of the other generals seemed uninspired” (p. 217).

Lee followed his success at Second Manassas/Second Bull Run by invading the slaveholding but Union-loyal border state of Maryland; and President Lincoln, with few other options available to him, restored McClellan to command. Meanwhile, Lincoln’s deliberations during the early days of Lee’s invasion of Maryland took a decisive new turn: “There was but one step possible: the war had to become a war for human freedom, a war to end slavery. Otherwise, it was lost. So he had in his desk the draft of the Emancipation Proclamation – that amazing document which is at once the weakest and the strongest of all America’s state papers” (p. 225).

Mr. Lincoln’s Army reaches its climax at the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862. Antietam was the bloodiest single day of the Civil War, and it remains the bloodiest single day in American history. Catton’s criticism of McClellan’s generalship at Antietam is appropriately severe – in his judgment, McClellan completely failed to take tactical command of the engagement, and instead simply let the battle fight itself out across three distinct combat zones, from north to south, over the course of the day – but when the day was over, the Army of the Potomac had forced Lee to take his battered Army of Northern Virginia back across the Potomac, back into Virginia. And the Union victory at Antietam, although bloody and incomplete, was enough of a victory for President Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation – forever changing the moral ground on which the war was being fought.

Mr. Lincoln’s Army ends with General McClellan’s removal from command of the Army of the Potomac; the ever-irresolute general had been so slow in following Lee across the Potomac that Lincoln’s renowned patience finally ran out. The soldiers of the Army of the Potomac cheered McClellan lustily as he left the army; they knew what he had done to make them an army. At the same time, however, more than a few of those soldiers seem to have realized that McClellan had done all that he could do to help that army. McClellan had forged the sword that was the Army of the Potomac. It would be left to other generals to wield that sword more aggressively and more successfully than McClellan had – as Catton chronicles in his remaining two volumes of The Army of the Potomac.

[Eric Byrd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cyril Connolly noted the depressive effect of numerous and exhaustive biographies of hard-luck poets—reading yet another life of Baudelaire “we know, with each move into a cheap hotel, exactly how many cheap hotels lie ahead of him.” Mr. Lincoln’s Army makes me feel that way. Catton’s masterly narration envelopes you—

the skirmish lines went down the slope, each man in the line separated from his fellows by half a dozen paces, holding his musket as if he were a quail hunter with a shotgun, moving ahead step by step, dropping to one knee to shoot when he found a target, pausing to reload, and then moving on again, feeling the army’s way into the danger zone

—while never allowing you to forget that Malvern Hill and Second Bull Run and Antietam—perfect apocalypses while you’re reading—are but the first clashes of a very long war. There is still more dying. This battle will decide nothing; that general will blunder; these men will die in vain. Mr. Lincoln’s Army ends in November 1862. A year and a half later, in spring 1864, Sherman correctly prophesied that “the worst of the war is not yet begun.”

~

Petomek, Algonquian, means “trading place.” Patawomeke on Capt. John Smith’s 1612 map. Patowmack in the correspondence of the Founding Fathers, as they discuss the location of the Federal seat. Potomac by 1861, when in camps along its banks the tens of thousands of volunteers who had flocked to defend the nation’s capital and smite the rebellion were drilled into a real army, blue and brass. “The manhood of the eastern states,” a southern officer called this army, though there were Hoosiers and Badgers and Minnesotans among its Boston Brahmins and Maine lumberjacks, its Pennsylvania Germans and Connecticut farmhands, its colorful New York levee of Brooklyn firemen, well-heeled Whartonians in tailored tunics, and French immigrants who sang the Marseillaise on parade and relished the giant bullfrogs found in the Virginia swamps. The Army of the Potomac—“an army of legend,” Catton calls it; “with a great name that still clangs when you touch it.”

~

Rummaging in the attics of national memory you come across tokens of George B. McClellan, the Army’s first and beloved commander. McClellan was yet another Man of Destiny who popped and fizzled out. Walt Whitman called him the idol of an alternate universe. In 1861, when he took command (aged thirty-four), the northern press proclaimed him “Savior of the Republic” and, in the same breath, “Young Napoleon”—completely antithetical titles. The power brokers who whispered in his ear that the times called for a military dictator at least understood what Napoleon had been about.



McClellan didn’t simply train the Army; he made its men “feel like soldiers”—a much more mysterious, and ultimately histrionic, process. The men were rewarded for long weeks on the parade ground under the drillmaster’s abuse with elaborate brigade and division reviews, at the end of which their young commander, astride a massive black charger, and followed by an entourage as splendidly mounted and uniformed as himself, went galloping down the lines of hurrahing troops, turning to acknowledge their cheers with a gesture one witness described as going beyond a formal salute—a courtly twirl of his cap “which with his bow and smile seemed to carry a little of good personal fellowship even to the humblest private soldier.”


From McClellan’s performance of the Dashing Young General I step back and note the innocence of the audience that applauds him, tears in their eyes and cheers on their lips. I usually cringe and snarl when any generation of Americans gets called “innocent”—this has been a hard-souled country from the very start, we started out as Indiankillers and slaverapers—but “innocent” must be my word for the ecstatic faith, shared by both sides, that the war would be a brief, flashing, grandly decisive “affair of esprit de corps and hero worship and the élan of highhearted volunteer fighters.” McClellan’s superb martial airs and stagy proclamations—

Soldiers of the Army of the Potomac! I have fulfilled at least part of my promise to you. You are now face to face with the Rebels, who are held at bay in front of their capital. The final and decisive battle is at hand. Unless you belie your past history, the result cannot for a moment be doubtful.

—are mementos of a society that paraded gaily, pleased with its fine uniform, toward an abyss. Think of McClellan as a dealer in Napoleonic goods, at the time a sort of luxury brand promoted by Bonaparte’s nephew and emulator, France’s emperor Napoleon III. French Army fashions were the must-haves of martial ardor. Numerous regiments, especially those made up of New York and Philadelphia firemen, joined the Army of the Potomac costumed in the fezzes and baggy red pantaloons made famous by the Zouaves, France’s North African light infantry. McClellan made his redesign of the French Army’s kepi the standard headgear. He’s wearing one in the studio portrait below, which looks like the carte de viste of a matinee idol.




The cruel irony is that McClellan was, as a battlefield general, a failure. Too good to be true. Bella figura, beau ideal, bust. “The final and decisive battle”—just big talk. Lee swatted McClellan back from the doorstep of Richmond not by winning victories or inflicting massive casualties or menacing the supply lines, but simply by showing a ballsy daring, a relentless passion for the attack, which left McClellan completely cowed, psyched-out, mindfucked. (Lee assumed that McClellan’s men were as hollow as their commander—a mistake he didn’t really have to pay for until Gettysburg.) When the order to retreat from the Rebel capital came through, the fiery one-armed general Phil Kearny went to McClellan’s tent and cussed him to his face, said withdrawal in the face of a numerically inferior, winded and barefoot enemy was evidence of “cowardice or treason.” Plenty of people at the time thought treason—Whitman, for one, always maintained McClellan “straddled”—but the panicky pants-wetting cables to Lincoln scream cowardice. As do McClellan’s letters to his wife, in which Catton finds “too much lingering on the adoration other man feel for him, on the wild enthusiasm he arouses, on the limitless power and responsibility that are his.” “What buried sense of personal inadequacy,” Catton asks, “was gnawing at this man that he had to see himself so constantly through the eyes of men and women who looked upon him as a hero out of legend and myth”?


Whatever the precise nature of his demons, McClellan’s first campaign set the pattern of clumsiness and deadly ineffectuality that would haunt the Army of the Potomac until Grant came along and started swinging it like a sledgehammer. It was a hard-luck army, an immensely powerful industrial juggernaut steered, in its early years, by bumblers and sleepwalkers and lightweight braggarts; baffled on the road to victory, constantly running off into the ditch. I’m deep into Glory Road, the second volume of the trilogy, and there are more fumbled battles, more cheap hotels—les poètes maudits, les soldats maudits. Catton quotes countless letters home that describe the army’s malaise, but none of their writers, eloquent as they so often are, captures the mood of helpless nightmare quite like the German soldier turned anarchist playwright Ernst Toller, who recalled World War One thus: “We were all of us cogs in a great machine which sometimes rolled forward, nobody knew where, sometimes backwards, nobody knew why.”

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book paints a magnificent word-picture of the combatants from just after the Second Bull Run until the end of the Battle at Sharpsburg (Confederate)/Antietam (Union). The story centers on the Army of the Potomac and its leadership, as well as the various parts of the army and the opposing Confederate forces. Great vignettes at all levels, from the lowly private to Lincoln and his generals. 5 Stars

I always enjoy the little back and forth between the Rebs and the Yanks, the little jabs and jokes. Also Catton manages to generate some early sympathy for “Little Mac” as he is thrust into a job he will fail at. But George B. McClellan also had a knack for relating to his soldiers. The action as the Army of the Potomac moves toward Richmond:
…the 5th New York went up to the front through a little cemetery where were buried Confederate soldiers who had died during the preceding winter. The little burying ground was full of graves, but over the gate someone had tacked a sign: “Come along, Yank, there’s room outside to bury you.”

The firing at last died down and the Rebels drew off. It was only a rear-guard action, after all, and Joe Johnston had no intention of keeping his men there to make a finish fight of it. Then the Federals at the front heard a great cheering behind them, and they knew what caused it and joined in it lustily; and there, spattering across the damp fields, came General McClellan, blue coat all stained with mud, a glazed covering over his cap, his staff riding furiously in a vain effort to keep up with him. McClellan rode all along the lines, each regiment got a chance to cheer, and night came down on the army’s first battlefield.

A different kind of civil war. Is there any other civil war that features this kind of interaction?

North and South, the armies sang Stephen Foster—“My Old Kentucky Home,” “Old Folks at Home,” “Old Black Joe,” and “Nellie Gray,” especially the latter. Ranking close to “Tenting Tonight” was “The Vacant Chair” We shall meet, but we shall miss him: There will be one vacant chair and they liked old favorites such as “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes” and “Auld Lang Syne” and—deeply, tearfully—“Home, Sweet Home,” It is recorded that during the long winter after the battle of Fredericksburg, when the two rival armies were camped on opposite sides of the Rappahannock, with the boys on the opposing picket posts daily swapping coffee for tobacco and comparing notes on their generals, their rations, and other matters, and with each camp in full sight and hearing of the other, one evening massed Union bands came down to the riverbank to play all of those songs, plus the more rousing tunes like “John Brown’s Body,” “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” and “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp the Boys are Marching” Northerners and Southerners, the soldiers sang those songs or sat and listened to them, massed in their thousands on the hillsides, while the darkness came down to fill the river valley and the light of the campfires glinted off the black water. Finally, the Southerners called across, “Now play some of ours,” so without pause the Yankee bands swung into “Dixie” and “The Bonnie Blue Flag” and “Maryland, My Maryland.” And then at last the massed bands played “Home, Sweet Home,” and 150,000 fighting men tried to sing it and choked up and just sat there, silent, staring off into the darkness; and at last, the music died away and the bandsmen put up their instruments and both armies went to bed. A few weeks later they were tearing each other apart in the lonely thickets around Chancellorsville.

Not every battle has to be waged to the bitter end for every soldier:

A private from a Vermont regiment, scrambling up the mountainside, slipped and fell, and went sliding off downhill to land, all in a heap, in a little hollow among the rocks, face to face with a Confederate private who somehow hadn’t retreated when the others had. The two soldiers glared at each other for a moment, gripping their rifles; then they agreed that it would be foolish for them to carry on a personal, two-man extension of the war there in the hollow. They would wait where they were, suspending hostilities while everybody else fought, and at the end of the day they would see how the battle had gone. If the Federals got licked and retreated, then the Vermonter was a prisoner, but if the Confederates retreated, then the Reb was a prisoner. So they laid their rifles down and shared tobacco, leaning back among the rocks, and waited for the two armies to settle their fate for them.

Catton’s narrative on the Battle of Sharpsburg/Antietam is riveting. He takes you through the battle in all its confusion, mistakes, serendipity and lost opportunities. I found his analysis of the impact of the battle on the rest of the war and the nation’s future to be incredibly enlightening. The intro to the battle:

… McClellan’s long-range rifles came into action, hammering hard at the Rebel guns by the Dunker church and reaching out to plow the cornfield with a terrible cross fire of shell and solid shot; and the waiting Federal infantry hugged the ground, half dazed by the tremendous waves of noise. Hooker exaggerated a little, but only a little, when he wrote afterward that “every stalk in the northern and greater part of the field was cut as closely as could have been done with a knife”; and he exaggerated not at all when he wrote that in all the war he never looked upon “a more bloody, dismal battlefield.” The Confederates in the northern part of the cornfield went down in rows, scores at a time. Then after a while the great thunder of the guns died down a little and the Yankee infantry went forward.

It all looks very simple and orderly on the map, where the advance of the I Corps is represented by a straight line following neat little arrows, three divisions moving snugly abreast and everyone present presumably knowing at all times just what was going on and what the score was. But in reality, there was nothing simple or orderly about any part of it. Instead, there was an appalling confusion of shattering sound, an unending chaos of violence and heat and intense combat, with fields and thickets wrapped in shifting layers of blinding smoke so that no man could know and understand any more of what was happening than the part he could see immediately around him. There was no solid connected battle line neatly ranked in clear light; there was a whole series of battle lines swaying haphazardly in an infernal choking fog, with brigades and regiments standing by themselves and fighting their enemies where they found them, attack and counterattack taking place in every conceivable direction and in no recognizable time sequence, Northerners and Southerners wrestling back and forth in the cornfield in one tremendous free-for-all. The black powder used in those days left heavy masses of smoke which stayed on the ground or hung at waist level in long tattered sheets until the wind blew it away, and this smoke deposited a black, greasy film on sweaty skins, so that men who had been fighting hard looked grotesque, as if they had been ineptly made up for a minstrel show.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first of about thirteen books which Bruce Catton wrote about the Civil War, during the 1950's and 1960's. Don't let their original publishing dates bias your opinion of the worth of Catton's books. Surely, much more scholarship has been conducted on the subject since then, and a tsunami of Civil War books continues to be published each year. However, no one has ever written with more economy of prose or clearness of thought on the subject than Catton. His writing is that good. "Mr. Lincoln's Army" is the first title of Catton's "The Army of the Potomac Trilogy." It was followed by "Glory Road" and "A Stillness at Appomattox." The latter volume was awarded the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, placing Catton among the elite Civil War historical writers.

Catton (1899 to 1978) was not a professional historian. He quit college before graduation in order to join the Navy in World War I. Between the World Wars, he worked as a newspaper journalist and editor in Ohio, where he no doubt put the polish on his writing skills. He worked for the U.S. government in World War II. His experiences provided the material for him to write of wartime Washington D.C. in his first book, in 1949. He had the book writing bug and decided to write about the subject that fascinated him since his boyhood.

The preface of "Mr. Lincoln's Army" explains why he chose its subject. He talks about his boyhood in rural Michigan, when he knew a number of old, dignified men with long white beards and the appearance of being pillars of the community. They had been born in the pre-automobile age; their world-experiences would not have normally extended more than fifty miles from where they were raised. Yet, as Catton explains, they had been everywhere and had seen everything ages ago, and nothing that happened since meant as much.

Catton's adolescent mind couldn't comprehend what these old gentlemen had seen in their youth, but he grew to realize this group of people had been lifted by an experience shared by only a small, dwindling number of survivors. By their very presence, they embodied meaning to the term "patriotism", but they never discussed their most terrible wartime feelings of "war-weariness and ... soul-numbing disillusionment" (p. xii) felt in places like the Wilderness and Petersburg, to young listeners. Catton's objective was to shed light on the war which was the biggest experience of our nation's life, as it was of the lives of the veterans he knew way back then, and to honor them by writing about what they did.

The resulting series of books contain outstanding narrative history, being based on diaries, letters and field reports from contemporaneous sources. "Mr. Lincoln's Army" aptly describes the focus of Catton's research. The beginning of the Civil War found the new President desperately trying to find leaders to build an army from scratch to fight to preserve the Union. What started as a call for states to supply a finite number of volunteer regiments for limited enlistment periods grew very rapidly to the need to field a huge military. Readers of Civil War history are aware of Lincoln's trials and tribulations, which lasted for several years as he placed a succession of commanding generals in charge, only to be fired for timidness or catastrophically poor judgement. This book focuses on the events from the beginning of the war until the late fall of 1862, a period of time marked for its long series of Union reverses and missed opportunities.

General George McClellan is the dominant figure on either side of the war at this time, except for Abraham Lincoln. This book is a superb recounting of the elevation of this promising officer by Lincoln; how he fulfilled his promise by using his unmatched organizational skills to build the Army of the Potomac, the armed force intended to carry the burden of defending the nation's capitol and defeat the main Virginia-based Southern army; and how he lost the confidence of the President and the government twice, through his arrogance, belly-aching over support for his army when it was much better equipped than its foe, inability to pursue and destroy his enemy, and bring the war to an early conclusion, even though he always had more forces at his disposal than his enemy.

A succession of commanding generals would audition for President Lincoln in the course of the war. They would usually fail miserably, then be replaced. Thus, Burnside had his Fredericksburg, Hooker had his Chancellorsville, Meade had his Gettysburg, etc. At least Gettysburg was considered to be a Union victory, but Meade showed himself to be a very good defensive general, if not an offensive general. All of the above were preceded by McClellan, who had two shots to become the Union's savior. Catton combines his storytelling skill with a solid grasp of the historical facts to present two of the best descriptions you will ever read of the Peninsula Campaign and Antietam. He shows how McClennan's excellent planning allowed the Union forces to acquit themselves against the Confederate forces, led in the latter case by the formidable Robert E. Lee, without the usual resort to detailed regimental dispositions and maps with arrows moving every which way. Catton paints a historical picture and lets the reader appreciate the gravity of the events portrayed.

This is the first of the works made in the Catton style, which provides both satisfying reading and a thirst for more of the same.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's not until the concluding chapters of "Mr. Lincoln's Army", Bruce Catton's first entry into his "Army of the Potomac" series, that one realises the breadth of Catton's accomplishment in portraying the first two years in the life of the famous army. In the wake of the Battle of Antietam, his narrative comes dazzlingly full-circle. The men and boys who entered into the war imagining it would be almost a lark have been humbled, mismanaged and traumatized. The determination of Rebel and Unionist alike to win out has been brutally, irrevocably established. The debatable Union victory has given Lincoln the opening he needs to slot his Emancipation Proclamation into, thus changing the stakes of the war. And what was General George McClellan's army has become (for a time at least) President Lincoln's.

Before the finale, Catton has charted the progress of the Army of the Potomac both as a fighting army and a wide cast of characters, chief among them the unfailingly conceited and fatally reserved George McClellan -- the closest thing the book has to a protagonist. We see them in battle and see them in camp. By the time the book has finished, Catton has portrayed them so vividly that even a newcomer to Civil War history will feel they know them. When Antietam rolls around, Catton has the reader so emotionally invested in the outcome that it scarcely feels like you're reading history. Yet the book still holds up as a classic history of the American Civil War in its Eastern Theater.

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mr. Lincoln's Army is the first entry in Bruce Catton's Army of the Potomac trilogy, one of the classic entries in American popular history. Catton dramatizes the frantic first year of the Civil War in the East, as a ragtag collection of green volunteers is slowly, painfully molded into the veteran Army of the Potomac. The book, inevitably, focuses heavily on the Army's commander, George B. McClellan, long a watchword for military incompetence and inflated ego. Catton is more sympathetic to McClellan than many writers, pointing to his sincere affection for his men (which was returned in spades by his soldiers who never again loved a general as much as "Little Mac") and the logistical difficulties of forging, and wielding, a hodgepodge army in the war's early days. But it's hard to overlook his chronic insubordination, caution and delusions of grandeur, which made him mincemeat for the aggressive Robert E. Lee and political enemies alike. Catton describes the ebb and flow of battles with his use verve, including a long-form recollection of the "bloodiest single day" at Antietam. A poorly managed battle on all accounts, that the Union could even claim a partial "victory" at all was due to the determination of the foot soldiers who managed, despite their commanders' best efforts, to change the course of the war. The contrast between the Army's gallantry and the bungling of their commander never ceases to amaze, or frustrate the casual reader; and unfortunately, it took several more years for the Army of the Potomac to find a commander who knew how to use them.

[Nick Borrelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Didn't like this one as much as Shelby Foote's epic trilogy but still very good.

[Brian Eshleman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Close to five stars, which, for a book of this length on a topic with which I’m already pretty familiar is thinking something.

His sauce is something like organizational psychology: here’s how the culture of the army developed, and here is how it corroded. Here’s how it reflected, the strength and weaknesses of its early leader. I lap stuff up, especially when Bruce Ketten is exceptionally evenhanded toward George McClellan.

[Lani]

I am, admittedly, a Civil War nerd. But I also have little patience for the lists of regiments and commanders with confusing battle maps that I can never understand. Thank you Bruce Catton for educating me without frustrating me...

Most of the interesting Civil War books that I have read - most of them reasonably accurate historical fiction - have been focussed more on the Southern generals. Much of this is because the Southern Cause was just generally more romantic with more personality from their gentlemen generals, and living in Virginia tends to put a definitively Lee/Jackson focus on history. Considering my previous knowledge, reading a book about the Army of the Potomac was pretty eye-opening.

In school I always had the impression that McClellan was a bit of a bumbling idiot, and I assumed he was more of a political appointment than anything else. I had no idea that he was a beloved figure for the troops, and had no sense of any romance and glory associated with him. I also had never heard just how close to winning the Union came early on in the war - it's a little distressing to read some of the obvious mistakes made by the Federal generals. Hindsight is surely 20/20, but it's upsetting to recognize how a decisive victory could have caused the entire war to crumble.

Generally the book was more about the people than the troop movements, and I appreciate Catton's heavy use of journals and regimental histories. The analysis of Antietam got a little too detail-oriented for me, but I recognize that many people want the history of a battle like that. Catton didn't fail to make the battle a human one however, and the first-hand descriptions of Bloody Lane and the battlefield were chilling.

Many of the bibliographical notes were informative and interesting. I definitely want to learn more about the Federal intelligence department that so grossly misinformed McClellan despite their modern infiltration tactics. I also love hearing about Lincoln, and am always thrilled when Sandburg's books are mentioned.

If you're looking to learn about the Civil War, I'm not sure that you can get more enjoyable than Catton's writing. It's informative without being overly dry, and covers the broader scope - examining not just tactics, but also the political atmosphere and the personal impact of the events.

[Aaron Crofut · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Civil War is simply too grand for the field of history and too god awful for the romantic. One needs an epic storyteller to truly convey the essence of that conflict. Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote were such storytellers, our Homer and Virgil. These authors saw and were puzzled by the aged veterans they knew as youths, living relics of a holy war who seemed to walk in the glory of that conflict, men who knew better than anyone else the sheer misery of being there but who also knew that conflict was the greatest achievement of their lives.

I loved this book. I've been a Civil War buff for going on thirty years now, so there wasn't much new to me outside of some stories (those damn bees at Antietam), but I still found myself engrossed in this work. Catton brings the war in all of its contradictions, the great moral effort and the hell of combat, the brave soldiers and second rate generals, right before the reader's face, but his real talent is in simultaneously explaining to the reader what objectively happened while immersing us in the fog of war that generals and soldiers actually had to contend with.

This book was a treat for me and I highly recommend it!

[Casey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well-written, amazing, hard to put down. Catton's ongoing commentary enhances the drama and provides some profound insights. After all the other Civil War books I've read, I finally understand why Antietam (the most chaotic and deadly battle) was a turning point in the war, and why.

Despite loving history, I've never been drawn to battle scenes till now. Catton makes them come alive and adds emotional drama and meaning. And grief. These "boys," as he calls them, have certainly lost their innocence, and their excitement about marching to war. After the battle, thousands upon thousands on both sides lay wounded in the fields all night, crying in pain and calling for help that never came. Very poignant.

This is book #1 in Catton's trilogy "Army of the Potomac." Now on to the next: "Glory Road" and, finally, "A Stillness at Appomattox."

Highly recommended if you want a detailed history of the Civil War.

[Bob Mayer · Rating 5 out of 5]

First book in a Pulitzer winning trilogy. Highly recommended— the eastern theater through Antietam. While I prefer focusing on the west with Grant in the early years, it's important to understand what happened with the Army of the Potomac. While McClellan was a terrible combat commander and completely outclassed by Lee, he shaped, organized and trained that Army with the spine that would later make it the most powerful Army in the world.

[Bill Rogers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many years ago my mother belonged to a monthly book club of some kind. Among the other cheap, pulp-paper editions she got were a complete Sherlock Holmes and Bruce Catton's Army of the Potomac , consisting of Mr. Lincoln's Army, Glory Road, and A Stillness at Appomattox. I think she got them because she thought they would interest me. These books have almost obsessed me ever since.

As its name suggests, this trilogy follows the fortunes and (mostly) misfortunes of the Union's Army of the Potomac, the main Union army that slogged it out with the South's Army of Northern Virginia in most of the famous battles of the Civil War. Mr. Lincoln's Army covers the early months of the war, when the Army was under the command of the heartbreaking General George McClellan, a brilliant soldier, trainer, and tactician. McClellan came so close, but in the end he lacked that killer instinct that would let him push just a little harder and go forward to victory. Because he didn't have that killer streak, the war went on for years more.

He made the raw recruits under his command into a great and professional army. His soldiers loved him for it, but in the end they outgrew him. This is the story of how they did it.

[Peter Schmeltzer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent

[Blake Baehner · Rating 4 out of 5]

"All in all, it was as if a clean wind from the blue mountains had blown through this army, sweeping away weariness and doubt and restoring the spirit with which the men had first started out; restoring for the last time in this war-perhaps the last time anywhere-that strange, magical light which rested once upon the landscape of a young and totally unsophisticated country, whose perfect embodiment the army was."

Bruce Catton was a poet and an artist more than a historian. I don't mean that in the Shelby Foote way; most of his work has aged like fine wine from a historiographical perspective. No, Catton and this book are much more than that. This isn't a recitation of things or events. Its an epitaph, its an illiad, it is an ellegy, it is a feeling. Everything that war was and everything that army was in its own majestic but unlucky way is so wonderfully, heartbreakingly captured by Catton that it is hard to even put into words.

Mr. Lincoln's Army is the first volume of Catton's acclaimed trilogy about the Army of the Potomac. In many ways, this is not the typical work of Civil War history. There are no real battle maps to speak of, much less talk of generals than is usual, minor battles are skipped or only obliquely referred to, the story is told non-linearly, and life in camp is given as many pages as the fighting. Very little space is given to the Confederates; this is a Union show from start to finish. There is no mediating on the brilliance of the Southern cause but plenty of celebration of the brave Union army whose sacrifices made us, as a nation, much more than what we were. What this brilliant trilogy is, is a character study.

In all of American history, no army has bled more proportionally or suffered more defeat on the road to final victory as the Army of the Potomac. It is a tragic, funny, exciting, disgusting, delirious story and Catton captures it perfectly. From the first pages, you are thrown into the confusing debacle that was the Second Battle of Bull Run and made to realize what a catastrophe had befallen this brave army. Then you are taken back to its formation by General George McClellan through the Peninsula Campaign, and finally to that fatal little field along a meandering Maryland Creek.

This is narrative history at its finest. Catton brings everything together beautifully in the final pages. As the war takes its fateful turn to be about something more than just Union, the old ways have to be left behind. There can be no more McClellan or mercy for the South. Human dignity was now at stake and if a battle as fearsome as Antietam could not break the Confederacy than there truly was much more hard fighting to be done.

All that being said, this is Catton's first book and while I think this is a fine first effort, its not perfect. Those beautiful, poetic sections of prose are fewer in this volume than the later ones and it occasionally feels like Catton is just listing all of the cool stories he found while reading regimental histories. They are entertaining enough but it can make the middle of the book drag a bit.

That's really no matter though. At any rate, its unfair for me to compare this to the books that came after it. This book is about the army itself, after all, and developing the character of that army is important. I actually think this is a great first book for anyone interested in the war because Catton gives some good info on tactics, camp life, and politics.

This book must be read. The trilogy as a whole, really, is one of the most moving sagas in our long history. Even all these years later, the old tale of that long-suffering army echoes through the years. Catton somehow captured that echo and turned it into a choir of voices, singing a great melodious tune.
Original Review
With this, I have finished Catton’s magnificent trilogy on the Army of the Potomac. His first book in the series (and his first Civil War book in general I believe) definitely shows Catton’s relative inexperience but this is still a masterpiece. His language is utterly poetic and heartbreaking. Battles are colorfully told but his descriptions of life as a soldier are even more vivid. This book is more than about understanding the generals and battles. It’s about the character of the army itself and of the common enlisted man that fought in it. In that regard, this book is a timeless classic and an important work for anyone wanting to understand the Union perspective.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I am familiar with novels and even biographies beginning in media res in order to keep interest up on the part of the reader, I must admit I was thrown a bit for a loop when Catton did so at the beginning of this book.  After all, this volume is the first of a trilogy that the author wrote on the Union Army of the Potomac from its beginnings in late 1861 with the efforts of McClellan to train an army in the aftermath of First Bull Run.  Yet for some time the book spends a great deal of time in those dramatic days in late August and early September 1862 with Second Bull Run and its aftermath, leading to a sort of strange time shift that the reader should probably be prepared for.  Given the general familiarity of the course of the Civil War to many readers, perhaps it is a good thing that Catton throws the reader for a loop here, because it provides at least something that is out of the ordinary, something that does not follow the relentless chronological sweep of a war where the course of battle is generally known and followed to a slavish degree.

This volume of more than 300 pages is divided into six different parts and focuses on the Virginia front of the Civil War between late 1861 and fall 1862.  We begin with the picture-book war of the Second Bull Run Campaign, where Pope found himself in trouble and where it was whispered that there was treason, and where generals encouraged soldiers never to be frightened (I).  After that we return to 1861 when, in the aftermath of a brief and successful campaign in West Virginia, McClellan is promoted to be in charge of the Union armies and seeks to raise an army while simultaneously failing to understand the political demands of his office and finds himself unable to graciously deal with Lincoln and civilian oversight (II).  After that comes a discussion of Balls Bluff and the irrational but persistent suspicion that was to fall on the Army of the Potomac during its entire time, something that destroyed most of the men who were called upon to lead it in battle over the course of the Civil War, including the Peninsula Campaign (III).  After this comes a look at Lee's march and the trial of various generals after campaign failures (IV).  McClellan's massive opportunity to defeat in detail the fragments of Lee's army then follows, a story of futility because of McClellan's inability to move with alacrity (V) before the book ends with a discussion of the bloody day at Antietam and its aftermath with McClellan's dismissal in the face of his slow pursuit of Lee's mangled army (VI).

Catton certainly manages to show his strengths as a historian here.  If he is not a scholarly historian of the kind that would be most regarded now, he is a narrative historian of the first order, well acquainted with regimental histories and casualty lists and the stories of those men who survived war, often not fully intact.  Moreover, the author manages to demonstrate the strain that the Union was under and the way in which the relationship between the civil and military aspects of the Union were often greatly in tension, and where there were simply far too many leaders in the Union army at the beginning of the war that were not committed to fighting with everything that they had, something that would only happen as the war progressed and as the logistical advantages the North faced became more and more decisive.  Sadly, a great many men died because their leaders were too timid and too lacking in judgment.

[Ken Peters · Rating 4 out of 5]

There were evenings when I’d put this book down, unable to read any further after reading only 5-10 pages, because the angst I felt was too great. It just seemed like too much pain and suffering due to too much pride and stupidity. And yet Catton’s reflective and perceptive narration kept drawing me back again and again to learn more from his helpful interpretations of these early battles of the Civil War.

The climax of the book is the Battle of Antietam, said by many to be “the worst single day of the entire war.” The many heart-rending “what ifs” in a battle that could have truly resulted in a war-ending victory for the Union have long left me inexpressibly exasperated with General McClellan’s inept leadership of so many thousands of men whose lives seemed lost for absolutely no reason.

But then Bruce Catton suddenly opened my eyes at the end of the book to what I’d never seen before. He explains that a decisive and complete war-ending Union victory at Antietam would not have been “an abolitionist’s peace” — the kind that was eventually achieved at the end of the war. The very fact that Antietam was only a “tactical” Union victory — and an incomplete victory — allowed Lincoln to immediately follow it up with his Emancipation Proclamation, making this bloody, horrific battle actually the most decisive battle of the war, “affecting the whole course of American history ever since.” Which meant the lives lost in it did have meaning, however horrible the battle truly was.

Mr. Catton, you have my attention, and I certainly want to continue reading this trilogy.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well i just loved this book, not because it seems to be the definitive work on the civil war, a great bibliography, superb footnotes and fantastic anecdotes, but this kind of stuff is just really fascinating to me. I think for its time (1950's), it is very well researched and just really compacted with relevant data and story lines. Caton follows the Army of the potomac from the end of the first battle at Manasses to the end of Antietem and McClellans end.

"Antietem was just a disparaging succession of missed opportunities". Catton has a flair for understatement. I did have to read this book with an Atlas, but that's the way it is.

I can't wait for Volumes II and III to find out who wins.

[Melinda Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nobody comes close to Bruce Catton when it comes to writing Civil War history. This book is the first in a trilogy about the Army of the Potomac, lead until late 1862 by General George McClellan. He was given the command because he was a West Point graduate with handsome, dashing good looks, so he looked the part. McClellan was very young, inexperienced, and tasked with the near impossible task of quickly raising and training an enormous army from scratch. He has been rightfully criticized for his reluctance to commit his troops to battle, but in this book, we learn the reasons; among them being that the intelligence he habitually received was disastrously wrong. In addition, he was continuously criticized by politicians who weren't on the field.
The book is a dream for Civil War enthusiasts who love minutiae, but it was a bit too much for me so I deducted a star for parts I skipped over. However, Catton's account of the Battle of Antietam in Maryland was absolutely first rate. It put you right there on the battlefield, dodging bullets. That description alone is worth reading the book. It reminded me of the D-Day scene in "Saving Private Ryan."

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 * rounded up. This trilogy, of which this is Vol. 1, is quite different from other Civil War histories I have read. (I did read this trilogy decades ago and have had it on my shelves through numerous moves.) This volume focuses on the Army of the Potomac, which was based out of Washington, DC, up until the conclusion of McClellan's second stint as the Commanding General. Both of his times leading the biggest Army in the Civil War were both fraught with an inability to move the army until all t's have been crossed, and all i's dotted. McClellan would continually find more things he needed to address before he could issues orders for the troops, even with Lincoln virtually haranguing him to do anything.

I plan to read the other two volumes but am reading something else before Vol 2.

[Larry Ramsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bruce Catton is simply the best Civil War historian/author of all. His description here, particularly of the battle of Antietam, gives a sense of the horror of battle so much more than histories that are little more than high-level summaries and lines/arrows on maps. Highly recommended!

[Becky Loader · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ah, Mr. President.

[Jack Kralik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well written, lost me in the beginning with the time jumps before and after Bull Run

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first part of Catton’s trilogy about the Union Army of the Potomac—a classic of Civil War history for a general audience. This volume covers the start of the war through the battle of Antietam.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

The 1st of Catton’s trilogy that focuses on the Civil War’s Eastern Theater of operations from Bull Run to Antietam and the resultant issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation…Timeless!

[Tyler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unbelievable writing. The war comes alive with the density of primary source material. Highly recommend to any GWOT veteran as well. You realize bureaucracy is timeless just as much as soldiers being soldiers.

Despite being written 60 years ago about a war 160 years ago - this reads modern, the stupidity reads modern, the bravado reads modern.

[Darcy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was my treadmill book for the last few weeks. Catton did a good job describing the battles and the generals and the opportunities missed and bungled for the northern army. He seems to have great insight (or should we say hindsight) into what “could have been.” Its’ narrative style high points came when he offered his own insights to the war and the hearts of the men who fought it.

[Vincent Waldron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mr. Lincoln's Army is the first in Bruce Catton's brilliant series about the Army of the Potomac. This book begins with the period leading up to General George McClellan's appointment as leader of the Army of the Potomac and ends with General Burnside replacing him in the time after Antietam.

In the end it would become an army of legend, with a great name that still clangs when you touch it. The orations, the brass bands, and the faded flags of innumerable Decoration Day observances, waiting for it in the years ahead, would at last create a haze of romance, deepening spring by spring until the regiments and brigades became unreal -- colored-lithographic figures out of a picture-book war, with dignified graybeards, bemuse3d by their own fogged memories of a great day when all the world was young and all the comrades were valiant.

The book is well -- I would say brilliantly written. Catton views this early time of the war as a time when the nature of war was changing. Weapons had advanced and old tactics no longer worked. Yet, these men who signed up and came and fought were new recruits -- some so new that they hardly knew enough to load and fire their weapons, much less perform battlefield maneuvers while taking heavy fire from enemy positions.

McClellan took over in the aftermath of the First Battle of Bull Run (a Union defeat) and found the army to be in disastrous shape. Men had not been trained at all before being thrown into battle by McDowell and the tendency for the politicians in Washington was to believe that if the federal troops were green, so were the Confederates and so it was a wash.

McClellan made it his goal to train the troops into a viable army and make sure they were well supplied before he launched his first campaign. While this was wise on his part, it frustrated the politicians no end. At the same time, the men in the army seem to have loved him.

It seems that this man, with his yellow sash and his great black horse and his unforgettable air of parade-ground trimness and dash, somehow was in his own person the soldier every soldier had longed to be, the embodiment of the gaiety that had been lost and the hope that had been given up. He was what the army and the impossible, picture-book war itself had meant back in the army's youth, when innocence had not yet died. And when he came back men split their throats with cheering, and tilted their battle flags proudly forward, and forgot that they had been starved and misused and became a great army once more and went off to define the shape and purport of the war on the sunlit fields and glades that were waiting for them around a little Dunker church in the Maryland hills.

McClellan comes off somewhat poorly in this history -- as I suppose he does in many books on the subject. He was brash, egotistical and disagreed with Lincoln on the war (McClellan felt that the goal should simply be saving the Union and not an end to slavery). He was cautious, believed that Lee's men outnumbered his two to one, and was constantly asking for more supplies and reinforcements.

He detested, he said, both South Carolina and Massachusetts, and should rejoice to see both states extinguished. Both were and always had been ultra and mischievous, and he could not tell which he hated most. These were the remarks of the general-in-chief at the head of our armies then in the field, and when as large a proportion of his troops were from Massachusetts as from any state in the Union, while as large a proportion of those who were opposed, who were fighting the Union, were from South Carolina as from any state. He was leading the men of Massachusetts against the men of South Carolina, yet he, the general detests them both alike.

I will say that I find myself sympathetic to McClellan. In the Campaign in the Peninsula, it seems clear that Lincoln refused to let McClellan have all the forces he wanted because Lincoln thought that it would leave D.C. unprotected. McClellan advanced to only a few miles from Richmond but ended up abandoning the campaign when his request for reinforcements was declined and Washington called a general retreat.

McClellan was briefly removed from command and General Pope placed in charge where he lost the disastrous Second Battle of Bull Run. On September 2nd, 1862, Lincoln placed McClellan back in charge of the Army of the Potomac. At this point, Lee had decided to invade Maryland and McClellan had no time to rest on his accolades. He moved into Maryland to counter Lee's move and had a stroke of luck when some of his men discovered a copy of Lee's orders, only four days old, dividing his troops.

“It is recorded that during the long winter after the Battle of Fredericksburg, when the two rival armies were camped on opposite sides of the Rappahannock, with the boys on the opposing picket posts daily swapping coffee for tobacco and comparing notes on their generals, their rations, and other matters, and with each camp in full sight and hearing of the other, one evening massed Union bands came down to the river bank to play all of the old songs, plus the more rousing tunes like "John Brown's Body," "The Battle Cry of Freedom," and "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys Are Marching." Northerners and Southerners, the soldiers sang those songs or sat and listened to them, massed in their thousands on the hillsides, while the darkness came down to fill the river valley and the light of the campfires glinted off the black water. Finally the Southerners called across, "Now play some of ours," so without pause the Yankee bands swung into "Dixie" and "The Bonnie Blue Flag" and "Maryland, My Maryland," and then at last the massed bands played "Home, Sweet Home," and 150,000 fighting men tried to sing it and choked up and just sat there, silent, staring off into the darkness; and at last the music died away and the bandsmen put up their instruments and both armies went to bed. A few weeks later they were tearing each other apart in the lonely thickets around Chancellorsville.”

Catton writes of the terrible battle at Antietam in a way that is devastating. The horrors of the Cornfield, the raw recruits being mowed down on what became known as the Burnside Bridge, and the lack of coordination between the attacks that allowed Lee to shift his forces around to answer them. Catton believed that if McClellan had simply pressed forward and thrown all of his reinforcements into the fray, Lee's army would have folded and been smashed beyond recovery.

Of course, hindsight is twenty-twenty. McClellan didn't know the true strength of Lee's forces, he only knew his own strength and what percent of them were brand new recruits with little to no training (about 25 percent). The end result was that the battle ended up a stalemate and McClellan let Lee retreat after the battle to fight another day.

Lincoln chose this "victory" as the time to release the Emancipation Proclamation and only a few weeks later, McClellan was replaced by General Burnside. Truly the nature of the war was changing.

McClellan had a desire to avoid damage to civilian lives and property. He seems to have believed that through strategic movement, proper training and reinforcements, and adequate equipment, he could win battles with less loss of life. Later on, Grant and Sherman would change all that and go scorched earth -- grinding farmers down, burning barns and destroying whatever they needed to in order to gain victory.

More than that, Grant had the advantage of realizing that he had more resources than the army he was facing. In his Overland Campaign, he lost roughly 55,000 men to Lee's 30,000 and yet, these were considered strategic victories, culminating in the siege of Petersburg. This was victory, but it came at great cost -- a cost that McClellan wasn't really willing to pay or have his men pay.

Catton is wonderful at humanizing the war and putting faces on the men who history has forgotten. Much of the book is focused on things other than the actual battles and those little anecdotes are quite interesting. It is no wonder that the third book in this series, A Stillness at Appomattox, won the Pulitzer Prize.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bruce Catton is one of my favorite Civil War authors - along with Shelby Foote - and thankfully I don't have to make the choice between the two. Catton's books are labeled "narrative" history - combining history, battle scenes, anecdotes, first-person descriptions, analysis and mini-bios of the historical figures involved - all tied together in great narratives with excellent writing and compelling "story telling". Reading a book by Catton is similar to reading a novel in the best sense - never boring, always engaging and difficult to put down. And regardless if you are a Civil War `novice" or "expert" - Catton does not disappoint.

Mr. Lincoln's Army is the first book of the author's trilogy chronicling The Army of the Potomac, covering the first 14 months or so of its existence. General George McClellan is the focus, but by no means the "star" in this saga, for The Army of the Potomac has that role. The book opens with the Second Battle of Bull Run, (August 1862) - during which time McClellan was somewhat on the sidelines - and John Pope was on the losing end of a military "encounter" with Robert E. Lee and his Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.

The story then jumps back in time, (June 1862), tracking McClellan's meteoric rise to the head of the army and then his less than successful Peninsula Campaign. The conclusion of this first volume is the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day in U.S. military history. The First Battle of Bull Run, also part of this Army's early days is here, but not covered in detail.

The book's theme, told from countless perspectives, is that during these early months of the war this Union Army of brave and courageous men was ill-used, time and time again, by its commanders, who were either unwilling or unable - or both - to lead them to the victory it deserved. Just the description/analysis of McClellan's personality/mind-set, his effect on the Army of the Potomac and Catton's narrative of the Battle of Antietam make this book well worth the read, but that's only part of the story you will find here.

Mr. Lincoln's Army was published 60 years ago, but the book is still available, though you may have to do a little looking around for it. Trust me it's worth the effort to secure this book and the two that follow it for your bookshelf.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

I understand the high regard that Bruce Catton commands. A nearly perfect history: the prose and voice were polished and interesting, high-toned while still being colloquial and folksy; the panoramic view represented at the same time as the anecdotes of at the level of individual soldiers to give a sense of the nature of the action; and a light-hand on the analysis, but willing to give opinions and unifying conclusions from hindsight.

Told almost entirely from the perspective of the Union, and the Army of the Potomac specifically, Catton takes us from shortly after First Manassas to the immediate aftermath of the battle of Antietam. I'd read McPherson's book whose only subject was Antietam, and I was left with a muddled impression of the battle, as apparently the Federal high command had on that day. By contrast, Bruce Catton's recitation of the battle was a model of clarity with both light-hearted anecdotes (the civilian delivering baskets of biscuits and ham in the middle of the action), and also with moments of pathos and gravity.

If you are interested in the eastern theater of war, you owe it to yourself to read this masterpiece of historiography. I'm looking forward to the next two volumes later this year.