I learned about this book from reading the Collected Letters of Ralph Ellison in which he reads and reviews this book and finds it to be excellent. It is excellent. It’s easily one of the best histories of the Civil War I’ve ever read in part because of the narrow focus, but also because of the narrative drive. This is among the most interesting parts of the war for me, and I think in part it’s because it’s so little talked about in the minutiae […]

The first book in this series seemed like a more straight-forward history of the Army of the Potomac, especially its formation and early movements. Perhaps this book takes on a much different tack, or more possibly the history just got a little weirder, because this book is much more in the vein of the weirdness of the stories being told here. Highlights from this part of the series: ~~How bad at his job, in general, Ambrose Burnside was as a general. But also he was […]

One thing that really frames my reading of Civil War history when I was younger was how much perspective and deference was paid to the Confederate side of the story. I grew up in Virginia so this was not necessarily excusable, but understandable and of course not shocking. It was not balanced remotely. This history comes from Bruce Catton. These three books, this being the first, specifically tell the story of the formation, the command, and the battles of the “Army of the Potomac” the […]

The public is dying to know: if you were to write a comprehensive history of the US civil war, where would you begin. Shelby Foote begins his 3000 page history with Davis and Lincoln thinking about their relative positions at the start of things. Bruce Catton begins this trilogy of history written and published around the same time as Foote’s with the dueling conventions leading up to the 1860 presidential race. I like this approach because it more squarely deal with the question of what […]