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f804c6f
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In the 1860s the leaders of the cotton belt made one of the most prodigious miscalculations in recorded history. On the eve of the era of applied technologies, in which more and more work is done with fewer people and less effort, they made war to preserve the day of chattel slavery - the era of gang labor, with its reliance on the same use of human muscles that built the pyramids. The lost cause was lost before it started to fight. Inabili..
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Bruce Catton |
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ec331cc
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Go up along the eastern side of Lake Michigan, steer northeast when the land bends away at Point Betsie, and you come before long to Sleeping Bear Point-an incredible flat-topped sand dune rising five hundred feet above the level of the lake and going north for two miles or more. It looks out over the dark water and the islands that lie just offshore, and in the late afternoon the sunlight strikes it and the golden sand turns white, with a ..
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history
michigan
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Bruce Catton |
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20fdbaa
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Early youth is a baffling time. The present moment is nice but it does not last. Living in it is like waiting in a junction town for the morning limited; the junction may be interesting but some day you will have to leave it and you do not know where the limited will take you. Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made. In this res..
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youth
trains
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Bruce Catton |
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9793c49
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In the four years of its existence the Army of the Potomac had to atone for the errors of its generals on many a bitter field. This happened so many times--it was so normal, so much the regular order of things for this unlucky army--that it is hardly possible to take the blunders which marred its various battles and rank them in the order of magnitude of their calamitous stupidity.
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Bruce Catton |
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73ad591
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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.
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Bruce Catton |
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2fcafb2
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His soldiers and the country might have been better off if Burnside had been more of a quitter, but that was one defect which he lacked.
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Bruce Catton |
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3ebc62b
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You were apt to go from one extreme to the other, in a truly pious environment; which is why ministers' sons in that day were more less expected to become loose livers when they grew up.
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Bruce Catton |
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3b48d10
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They 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 a patriot look a fool.
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Bruce Catton |
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b56b098
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There is a rowdy strain in American life, living close to the surface but running very deep. Like an ape behind a mask, it can display itself suddenly with terrifying effect. It is slack-jawed, with leering eyes and loose wet lips, with heavy feet and ponderous cunning hands; now and then, when something tickles it, it guffaws, and when it is made angry it snarls; and it can be aroused much more easily than it can be quieted. Mike
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Bruce Catton |
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18f0fbc
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Nashville was a prize. Johnston had left in a hurry, abandoning huge quantities of supplies -- half a million pounds of bacon, much bread and flour, and bales of new tents, the latter greatly welcomed by the Federals, who had left their own tents far behind them. The Federals were having their first experience in occupying a Confederate capital, and they found numerous timid citizens who were ready to turn their coats and cuddle up to the i..
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Bruce Catton |
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9d12af5
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For untaught soldiers it was rough, and men fought blindly, not knowing what they were doing; an officer came on one man who was loading his musket feverishly, firing straight up into the air, reloading and firing again, an automaton acting entirely by blind instinct.
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Bruce Catton |
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9635463
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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 o..
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Bruce Catton |
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6cbc3a2
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The end of the war was like the beginning, with the army marching down the open road under the spring sky, seeing a far light on the horizon. Many lights had died in the windy dark but far down the road there was always a gleam, and it was as if a legend had been created to express some obscure truth that could not otherwise be stated. Everything had changed, the war and the men and the land they fought for, but the road ahead had not chang..
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Bruce Catton |
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3ffa634
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The whole brigade took a queer, perverse pride in the regimental band of the 6th Wisconsin--not because it was so good, but because it was so terrible. It was able to play only one selection, something called "The Village Quickstep," and its dreadful inefficiency (the colonel referred to it in his memoirs as "that execrable band") might have been due to the colonel's quaint habit of assigning men to the band not for musical ability but as p..
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Bruce Catton |
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f8341d6
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If the hardtack got moldy it was usually thrown away as inedible, but if it just got weevily it was issued anyway. Heating it at the fire would drive the weevils out; more impatient soldiers simply ate it in the dark and tried not to think about it.
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Bruce Catton |
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3af7482
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they put a special meaning on such a word as "patriotism"; it was not something you talked about very much, just a living force that you instinctively responded to."
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Bruce Catton |
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1fdbb61
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Be brave, be orderly, and if any man or woman stand in your way, blow them to hell with a chunk of cold lead." The sheriff then led the posse into town and the fun began."
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Bruce Catton |
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04b2f86
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Nobody was ready for it, and nobody could quite understand it now that it was happening. But somehow it was being determined that democracy henceforth, perhaps for some centuries to come, would operate through a new instrument. Sovereignty of the states was dying, North as well as South, and going with it was the ancient belief that the government which governs least is the government which governs best.
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Bruce Catton |
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1c172bb
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If the essence of successful strategy is the ability to compel one's opponents to accept one's own appraisal of a situation,
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Bruce Catton |
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883b7ad
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Out of Bull Run would come an effort so prodigious that simply to make it would change America forever. In the dust and smoke along the Warrenton Road an era had come to an end.
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Bruce Catton |
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22cbfbf
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Kearny had probably seen more fighting than any man on the field. He had served in Mexico as a cavalry captain; had remarked, in youthful enthusiasm, that he would give an arm to lead a cavalry charge against the foe. He got his wish, at the exact price offered, a few days later, leading a wild gallop with flashing sabers and losing his left arm. He once told his servant: "Never lose an arm; it makes it too hard to put on a glove."
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Bruce Catton |
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f110fc1
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It would slowly become evident that when they committed themselves at last to secession, not as a threat but as an accomplished fact armed for violence, the devoted men who wanted to preserve the Southern way of life had made a tactical error. The ultimate fate of their cause would be largely determined by what was done in Washington. Leaving Washington forever, they had fatally surrendered the initiative. Now their enemies would seize it.
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Bruce Catton |
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043c4e9
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The land was used to peace, and in the ordinary way its experience with military matters was confined to the militia muster -- awkward men parading with heavy-footed informality in the public square, jugs circulating up and down the rear rank, fires lit for the barbecue feast, small boys clustering around, half derisive and half admiring -- and if war came the soldier was a minuteman who went to a bloodless field where it was always the oth..
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Bruce Catton |
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d47e1c9
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On the contrary, I thought he was rather lucky. He carried with him forever the visible sign that he had fought for his country and had been wounded in its service. Probably only a very backward boy could have thought anything of the kind.
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Bruce Catton |
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8644ff3
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So had the eminent clergyman, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, who had told the world that a Sharps rifle was a greater moral agency than a Bible, as far as Kansas was concerned.
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Bruce Catton |
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d4fef78
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The barn by the Roulette house was jammed with wounded men. Screams, prayers, and curses made it a horrible place, with hundreds of anguished men packed together on the straw begging the surgeons to attend to them--surgeons bare-armed and fearsomely streaked and spattered with blood, piles of severed arms and legs lying by the slippery operating tables, the uproar of the battle beating in through the thin walls.
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Bruce Catton |
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dd62e69
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such manner as shall seem most likely to conduce to the furtherance of the interests of the Confederate States of
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Bruce Catton |
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6f46597
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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.
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Bruce Catton |
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6d6f779
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was the Civil War term for rookie. The idea was that some of the new recruits were of such fantastic greenness that they did not know the left foot from the right and hence could not be taught to keep time properly or to step off on the left foot as all soldiers should. The drill sergeants, in desperation, had finally realized that these green country lads did at least know hay from straw and so had tied wisps of hay to the left foot and st..
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Bruce Catton |
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47947a3
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And a wild, primitive madness seemed to descend on the men who fought in the cornfield: they went beyond the limits of sanity and endurance at times, Northerners and Southerners alike, until it seems that they tore at each other for the sheer sake of fighting. The
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Bruce Catton |
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72442b0
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himself came along the slope to rally
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Bruce Catton |
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ec4a24d
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What it really means is that the general must understand that he is not a free agent and cannot hope to become one. He has to work within the limitations imposed by the fact that he is working for a democracy, which means that at times he must modify or abandon the soundest military plan and make do with a second-best.
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civil-war
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Bruce Catton |
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dadc573
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And so that 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.
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dysfunctional-society
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Bruce Catton |