Today, April 12, 2011, marks the 150th anniversary of the start of the American Civil War. Below are some random excerpts from the book 'Reflections on the Civil War' by Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Bruce Catton.
"We tend today to write the Civil War off rather blithely as the great war to end slavery. It was, of course, the war that did end slavery, but it did not begin that way at all. It began on a very different basis and, as a matter of fact, in the month of July 1861, after the war had gotten well started and both sides were nerving themselves for a long fight, the Congress of the United States, with Abraham Lincoln's approval, passed a Resolution saying flatly that the war was not being fought to interfere with slavery in any way at all. It was being fought, said this Resolution, solely to restore the Union, and it would cease when the people who were trying to break up the Union stopped fighting." - Bruce Catton, 'Reflections on the Civil War'; pg. 4.
"Training camp, in the days of Julius Caesar and at the present moment, is a place where raw recruits are worked over until they are fit to go out and be killed with proper military formality. At certain times and places it is done much better than at others, but the story is more or less the same everywhere. You learn to do things by the numbers, you keep your mouth shut because you get into trouble if you don't, and before the business is over, you are thoroughly indoctrinated in the army's way of doing things. It is extremely important that you get thus indoctrinated because if you don't, you will probably behave disgracefully when it is time to go out and get killed. And as a matter of fact, you are much more likely to survive that dreadful day if you have had the army way drilled into you. There is no more vulnerable creature on earth than the untaught innocent on a battlefield." - Bruce Catton, 'Reflections on the Civil War'; pg. 48-49.
"The prison camps in the Civil War were inhuman. They killed a great many young men, and yet the trouble was not the malevolence of the people who ran the camps at all. With very few exceptions, like perhaps Wirz at Andersonville, the men in charge of the camps did the best they could. They tried to take care of the men who were sent to them. The big trouble was that in North and South alike, as far as the authorities were concerned, the prison camps came last. They got what was left over when all of the other needs had been met. They were last on the line for food supplies, for medical supplies, for doctors, for housing, for clothing, for guards, for all of the things that are needed to run a prison camp. It was a matter of inattention, inefficiency, and apparently an inability on the part of either government to understand that these prison camps really made a serious demand on their energies and their resources. The prisoner of war got the dirty end of the stick not because anybody wanted to mistreat him, but simply because it worked out that way. As a matter of fact, even Wirz himself probably got a much sharper punishment that he deserved. He had been wounded in action, soldiering. His wound apparently never healed; it tormented him a great deal. His health was generally bad, and he was not the kind of man to administer a large place like Andersonville Prison. The guards they gave him were home-guard types who simply weren't up to service in the regular Confederate army. Wirz was worse than most, but I think that even he was punished unduly. For the rest, it was not a question of punishing anybody. It just worked that way. It was that kind of war." - Bruce Catton, 'Reflections on the Civil War'; pg. 69-70.
"In any war, the armies and navies are only part of it. The people back home finally decide what is going to happen. In the Civil War, in the summer of 1862, the prospects in the North did not look very good. There had been tremendous losses both in the East and in the West. There had been staggering defeats. The cost of the war looked unendurable, and it was getting higher every day.
A great many people in the North were beginning to question the wisdom of going on with this fight. There was a school of thought, to which many Northerners subscribed, that the South would be glad to make peace if the North would stop using aggression; that somehow it would be possible to cement the country together again if only the people in the North would stop fighting and would curb the Abolitionists. Actually, in the Congressional elections in the fall of 1862, a great many Republicans were defeated, and while the Lincoln administration retained control of Congress, its majority was greatly reduced. Whether the people of the North would continue to carry the load that the war placed upon them seemed a question open to debate.
It was probably that fact, as much as anything, which led Lincoln more and more to the conviction that this would have to be an antislavery war. He needed to harness some new source of enthusiasm; he needed a new moral issue; he needed the immense vitality and vigor that the Abolitionists had displayed, and he needed all of these energies firmly harnessed in support of the Union war effort. If he could not find some new source of determination and enthusiasm, the war was very likely to be lost." - Bruce Catton, 'Reflections on the Civil War'; pg. 84-85.
"One of the oddest things about the American Civil War was the fact that the two countries that were trying their best to destroy each other--the Southern Confederacy and the Federal Union--discovered very soon that they couldn't possibly get along without each other. They were bound together by economic ties that were too strong to be broken even by the stress of war. This showed itself most visibly in the matter of trading with the enemy, as we would now call it, and the war probably would have ended a year or two sooner if there had been no mutual trade with the enemy on either side.
Even while trying to suppress the Confederacy, the people of the North still needed some of the products the Confederacy supplied: cotton, chiefly, but also sugar, rice, and tobacco. The Confederacy, trying to pull away and prove its own independence, found itself entirely unable to do that without the help of things it could get from the North; all kinds of manufactured goods, and above all, machinery, leather goods, clothing, medicines, surgical instruments, pork, and corn." - Bruce Catton, 'Reflections on the Civil War'; pg. 143.
"I began my work on the Civil War by trying to figure out what made the old veterans tick when they were young men. It was as simple as that. I was trying to turn the old men I had known into vigorous, young soldiers. That carried me quite a distance, but it could not have taken me through years of endeavor because, after all, that feeling you could satisfy quite easily.
The trouble is, as I got deeper and deeper into the war, there were more things I wanted to know. I wanted to know what motivated people on both sides; why both North and South carried such terribly heavy burdens throughout the war, with really a minimum of complaining. When you read about a battle like Spotsylvania Court House, for instance, with its perfectly appalling tales of suffering, bloodshed, and death on both sides, all concentrated into one rainy summer morning along the edge of a second-growth forest, you are bound to be stirred by certain questions: What motivated the men on both sides? What drove them into that? What kept them at it? What prevented them from running away? I'm not sure that I know the answers yet, but have come to the conclusion that the American man is a pretty good man, no matter what part of the country he comes from. When he sets himself to do something, he will stick with it as long as he can stand on his feet and breathe." - Bruce Catton, 'Reflections on the Civil War'; pg. 225.
